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Page 60
The youth who went to his pastor with certain questionings and doubts,
and who was told that these were "the promptings of Satan," and that
they "must not be dwelt upon, but resolutely be put out of the mind,"
was not fairly nor honestly treated by one from whom he had a right to
expect wiser guidance. He returned from the interview rebellious and
bitter, and it was with much spiritual agony and sweating of blood that
he fought his own way through to a solution which ought to have been
made easy for him by wise enlightenment and sympathetic counsel.
Reverent seekers after truth.--Religion requires the mind at its best.
There is nothing about religion that will not bear full thought and
investigation. We are not asked to lay aside any part of our powers, can
not lay any part of them aside, if we would attain to full religious
growth and stature. Let us therefore train our children to _think_ as
they study religion. Let us lead them to ask and inquire. Let us train
them to investigate and test. Let us teach them that they never need be
afraid of truth, since no bit of truth ever conflicts with, or
contradicts any other truth; let us rather encourage them reverently and
with open hearts and minds diligently to seek the truth, and then _dare
to follow where it leads_.
THE APPEAL TO IMAGINATION
Imagination, the power of the mind that pictures and makes real, is a
key to vivid and lasting impressions. Unless the imagination recreates
the scenes described in the story, or vivifies the events of the lesson,
they will have little meaning to the child and appeal but little to his
interest.
It is imagination that enables its possessor to take the images
suggested in the account of a battle and build them together into the
mass of struggling soldiers, roaring cannon, whistling bullets, and
bursting shells. It is imagination that makes it possible while reading
the words of the poem to construct the picture which was in the mind of
the author as he wrote "The Village Blacksmith," the twenty-third
psalm, or "Snowbound," and thereby enables the reader himself to take
part in the throbbing scenes of life and action. Without imagination one
may repeat the words which describe an act or an event, may even commit
them to memory or pass an examination upon them, but the living reality
will forever escape him. It is imagination that will save the beautiful
stories and narratives of the Bible from being so many dead words,
without appeal to the child.
Imagination required in the study of religion.--In the teaching of
religion we are especially dependent on the child's use of his
imagination. With younger children the instruction largely takes the
form of stories, which must be appropriated and understood through the
imagination or not at all. The whole Bible account deals with people,
places, and events distant in time and strange to the child in manner of
life and customs. The Bible itself abounds in pictorial descriptions.
The missionary enterprises of the church lead into strange lands and
introduce strange people. The study of the lives and characters of great
men and women and their deeds of service in our own land takes the child
out of the range of his own immediate observation and experience. The
understanding of God and of Jesus--all of these things lose in
significance or are in large degree incomprehensible unless approached
with a vivid and glowing imagination.
Many older persons confess that the Bible times, places, and people were
all very unreal to them while in the Sunday school, and that it hardly
occurred to them that these descriptions and narratives were truly about
men and women like ourselves. Hence the most valuable part of their
instruction was lost.
Limitations of imagination.--Since childhood is the age of
imagination, we might naturally expect that it would be no trouble to
secure ready response from the child's imagination. But we must not
assume too much about the early power of imagination. It is true that
the child's imagination is _ready and active_; but it is not yet ready
for the more difficult and complex picturing we sometimes require of it,
for imagination depends for its material on the store of _images_
accumulated from former experience; and images are the result of past
observation, of percepts, and sensory experiences. The imagination can
build no mental structures without the stuff with which to build; it is
limited to the material on hand. The Indians never dreamed of a heaven
with streets of gold and a great white throne; for their experiences had
given them no knowledge of such things. They therefore made their heaven
out of the "Happy Hunting Grounds," of which they had many images.
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