question of his commercial reliability. He succeeds in gathering together these facts so that he comes to know a great deal about the man, but the man himself he has never seen. He would not know him if he were to meet him in the street; the men's lives have never touched each other. He simply knows about the proposed customer.

Upon the other hand I find myself seated in a railroad coach beside a stranger. We fall into conversation; we soon discover that we have a great deal in common; we are interested in the same questions; we have been reading the same books; we have been drawing intellectual stimulus from the same sources; we share in our hopes and fears for our country, and for our common humanity; we are strangely drawn toward each other; I have felt the quality of his life, and he has felt the quality of my life; one has answered the touch of the other; I feel when we separate that I know the man; and yet I do not know anything about him; I do not know where he lives; I do not know what family he has; I do not know what business he is engaged in-in fact, I do not know anything about the man. Knowing the man. is not the same as knowing about the man. Jesus Christ declared this is life eternal: to know Thee the only true God and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.

This, then, is religion, to know God, but that is not the same thing as knowing about God. Knowing about God is theology, knowing God is religion. Which of these is it proposed to be taught in the public school, theology or religion? The proposition is that there shall be a systematic course of instruction given in religion. That must mean discoursing about God, which is only another way of saying that it means theology. Suppose the proposition that the teacher must be absolutely prohibited from teaching theology should be insisted upon, and yet the teacher required to give religious instruction systematically; how is it to be done? It is claimed there must be no discoursing about God; there must be no discussion concerning the Bible as to its authority or its origin; that would be theology.

Suppose the teacher points out to the pupil that back of all things is God. But the pupil asks, "Who is God; what is His relation to the universe, to my life?" The teacher answers, "I must not discuss that with you; that would be theology, and that I am not allowed to teach." Suppose the teacher reads from the New Testament the sayings of Christ. But the pupil asks, "Why read the sayings of Christ instead of Epictetus, or Seneca, or Marcus Aurelius?" The teacher replies, "That is forbidden ground. I must not discuss it. That would be theology." How much instruction is the child really getting from what the teacher would be permitted to say? Do you not see that the vital link connecting these great facts with human life and experience is ruled out? It is not enough for the teacher to simply say "God" to the child. The child must be made to understand who God is and what God's relations are to the universe and to His children; but that, you see, is theology; it is discoursing about God. The fact is, the only thing that can be formally taught is theology. Religion is not taught; it is imparted.

Let me see if I can not make this plain. The deaf man may master thoroughly the theories of sound. He may be perfectly familiar with all the philosophy that has been produced concerning sound; he knows about it; he knows about music, the laws of harmony; but he has lived all his life in unbroken silence. Suppose the deaf ears are unstopped and the charm of music enters and touches his soul. Then he knows what music is; before he only knew about it; now he knows the thing itself. That which he knew through actual experience was something that could not be conveyed to him through intellectual instruction. That is equally true. of religion. Theology may be taught, morals may be inculcated, but religion is begotten. It is a vital experience that results from the touch of one life upon another. I insist, therefore, that the only thing that can be formulated and systematically taught in the public school is theology.

Is it impossible, then, to introduce the religious element into the public school?

Not at all. It must enter, however, and assert itself, not through the medium of instruction, but through the personality of the teacher. Religion is life, and only life begets life. Religion is not a thing that can be done up in a parcel and assigned to a particular part of the curriculum; it is not a thing that can be mastered like a problem in mathematics; it is not a fringe that can be tacked on and taken off; it is the dye that impregnates the very thread of the garment. Religion is the vital atmosphere of the school; it is the power that is brought to bear upon. the pupil by the quality of the life that touches and molds and directs the pupil. I believe most thoroughly that only persons of this quality of life are fit to occupy the place of teacher. But that, you will see, is a very different proposition from the preparation of a course of theological instruction to be outlined by the state and to be taught by persons selected by the state and paid out of the state treasury. Under that proposition I would expect to get very serious evils and very little, if any, compensative good. Besides, if religion is to be taught systematically, the teacher must be examined as to her fitness to give this kind of instruction. That is to say, she must pass a theological examination as a condition of re

ceiving license. We must then have an examining board in theology and some standard by which qualifications are to be tested. I do not believe the American people will ever consent to that or that they ever should.

Chas. S. Royce, Superintendent Ripley County Schools: That as we recognize the church, the state and the school as separate institutions, and as each has its particular work to do, we should not confuse them by requiring one to do the work of the other. The school should not attempt to give religious training. The popular demand is not for religious training, but for better teachers. He said that as teachers are not infallible, religious training would most likely prove to be sectarian, and hence undesirable. In his judgment, the school should do its work and the church should do likewise.

Mr. Parsons, in a one-minute reply, declared that the overwhelming need is a higher standard of manly character. He insisted that certain religious principles must be wrought into every fibre of the pupil, and that the one hour in the week in which the boy was taught in the Sunday school was not enough in which to instill these principles.

In the editorial department of the last number of one of the great monthly magazines, the art movement in the schools is spoken of as showing "a growing understanding that the love and the perception of beauty do not come to any one by merely willing that they shall. Reading, study, observation, a sincere desire for communion with the beautiful may deepen, intensify, and illuminate such love and perception. But the essence, the germ, of them, to be truly vital, must have been built into the constitution before there was any conscious exercise whatever of the will with regard to them." I quote that here because it represents

the

thoughtful, unbiased, non-professional point of view, which we who are teachers need so often to take into our account. I think, unless I have misread some books for teachers about picture-study, that the professional tendency is quite the other way, towards an over-conscious exercise of the will in just such things. One book there is, for instance, whose main contention is the superlative importance of the question "Why," addressed to children after every expression of their liking for a picture. Unfortunately, the victims of such catechising are not apt to know their Shylock, or the answer, with full reference to context, might come readily

enough: "So I can give no reason, nor I will not." The teacher, doubtless, would rule Shylock out of court, but in that case Psychology might have a word to say. At least there is one psychologist who speaks with no uncertain sound. "In ethical, psychological and aesthetic matters, to give a clear reason for one's judgment is universally recognized"-Professor James has evidently not read recent books on how to study pictures in the schools-"as a mark of rare genius Ask the first Irish girl why she likes this country better or worse than her home, and see how much she can tell you. But if you ask your most educated friend why he prefers Titian to Paul Veronese, you will hardly get more of a reply; and you will probably get absolutely none if you inquire why Beethoven reminds him of Michael Angelo."* With

*

*

James Psychology, vol. II, p. 365. See, too. Walt Whitman's Specimen Days, p. 191: "Common teachers or critics are always asking, 'What does it mean?' Symphony of fine musicians, or sunset, or sea-waves rolling up the beach--what do they mean? Undoubted y in the most subtle-illusive sense they mean something--as love does, and religion does. and the best poem; but who shall fathom and define those meanings? (I do not intend this as a warrant for wildness and frantic escapades, but to justify the soul's frequent joy in what can not be defined to the intellectual part, or to calculation.)"

all deference to diverging views, is it not worth while suggesting that the place of "Why," in picture-study in our schools, deserves at least most careful pondering?

The suggestion may stand, at any rate, as helping to make clear the purpose in choosing Troyon's "Oxen going to their Work" as one picture of this series. If you will turn to George Sand's little idyll of The Devil's Pool-whose opening chapters, with their great russet fields, the strong sweet rhythm of their plowman's chant, and ruddy-coated oxen at their work are so in the spirit not of Troyon's only, but of Millet's work-you will find these words: "The best the artist can hope for, is to persuade those who have eyes to see for themselves. Look at what is simple; look at the sky, the fields, the trees, and at what is good and true in the peasants; you will catch a glimpse of them in my book, but you will see them much better in Nature." That seems to me to be a perfect statement of the office of a picture such as this of Troyon's, as we hang it in our schools. It is itself as simple and direct as is a passage from the Odyssey; and more than that, like Wordsworth's poems, Mozart's music, it creates in us

the love for what it represents. The highest praise, I think, that Wordsworth ever had was when Matthew Arnold wrote:

"But he was a priest to us all

Of the wonder and bloom of the world, Which we saw with his eyes and were glad."

And in their own way, Troyon and Jules Breton, and Corot are that, no less than Wordsworth; and through their pictures, for hundreds of children, it may come about that the misty freshness of the morning, rough moorland barred with shadows in the level light, the quiet, tireless, elemental strength of oxen going to their labor in the fields, will have a beauty that they never had before. Corot's work belongs with Millet's, toothough it broadens in its scope to sympathy with even animal life-in that it helps to turn the search for beauty from what is rare, to what is common as the light; from what is complex, to the large and simple; from what is far, to what is close at hand.

And yet since the beauty of simple things is entered into much as we are told the Kingdom of Heaven is to beperhaps the children will feel all this sooner even than we who teach. May I tell you, then, how it seems to me that we, who have not the great pictures save at second-hand, but have great books, may catch from them at first-hand something of the mood, the inspiration, that the paintings give; how we may bring to such a picture as Troyon's "Oxen Going to their Work" that initial sympathy, by which alone their beauty is divined, their new stamp set upon the old things that we know?

Take down a book like Dorothy Wordsworth's "Journals Written at Grasmere," and read, aloud if possible, page after page of that record of a life to which the loveliness of simple things-of sky, and air, and birds, and trees-made such appeal that the very reading of it sends one out of doors to see the things she saw-the birch tree glancing in the wind like a flying, sunshiny shower; the daffodils, tossing and reeling and dancing in the breeze; the crows becoming white as

silver in the sunshine, till they looked like shapes of water passing over the green fields; the soft, grave purple on the water; the solemn evening light. All the world loves a lover, and her love is so contagious that I can think of nothing, written or painted, more apt to quicken our dull senses to the quiet, simple, restful beauty of our common earth and sky. Then come back to your Troyon, your Jules Breton, your Corot!

Or take another book (a man's book this time, to the core American), made up of fragments jotted down in the woods and fields, on logs and stumps and fencerails, that carry with them, as their writer hoped they might, "ray of sun, or smell of grass and corn, or call of bird, or gleam of stars by night, or snowflakes falling fast and mystic”—Walt Whitman's Specimen Days, that have perhaps quite as much poetry as his poems. And read-at random, if you will-bit after bit whose headings are like these: Quail-Notes; Sundown, Perfumes; The Lesson of a Tree; The Common Earth, the Soil; Birds and Birds and Birds; FullStarred Nights; The Oaks and I; Sundown Sights; Clover and Hay Perfume; Hours for the Soul. Back to the "sane, slow-growing, perennial, real" things it will take us "the quiver of leaf-shades over the paper as I write the sky aloft, with white clouds, and the sun well declining to the West-the swift darting of many sand-swallows, coming and going— the odor of the cedar and oak, so palpable, as evening approaches - perfume, color, the bronze-and-gold of nearly ripened wheat-clover fields, with honey scent the well-up maize, with long and rustling leaves-the great patches of thriving potatoes, dusky green, flecked all over with white blossoms-the old, warty, venerable oak above me-and ever, mix'd with the dual notes of the quail, the soughing of the wind through some nearby pines." And when you have steeped yourself in that-with the quiver of the leaf shades over your page as you read, if mav be-pick up your Troyon or your Millet-and the leaf-shades will not hurt them, either and see if there are not touches that you never saw before! And

then, before you know it, you will be seeing all around you things that they have showed you, in the sky, the fall of light, the play of shadow, in the wonder and bloom of the world. The painters and the poets (no matter whether what the latter wrote was rhyme or prose) seen and read together out among the things they loved in common-given such a school as that, and the teacher trained in it will well know what to do, and even better what not to do, with Troyon's "Oxen Going to their Work."

All this, of course, may reach out further into the hundred endlessly interesting things that group themselves about a picture such as this the far cry from Troyon's early work as a painter of porcelain at Sèvres to the sweep of sky and moorland here; the great suggestive contrast between this background and that of Rosa Bonheur's "Ploughing in Nivernais;" oxen as other painters-Paul Potter, Dupre, Rosa Bonheur-have represented and interpreted them; the development in painting, as in poetry, of sym

pathy with animal life in general; the marvellous changes, reaching over centuries, in the attitude of painters and poets toward the landscape (think of this, for instance, in contrast with that in Botticelli's "Coronation"); the steady growth of interest-in art, in literature, in the treatment of history itself—in the lowlier aspects of life. But it is on the one thing alone that I want this time to lay the stress. For this picture of Troyon's is suggested for the schools, not to be made a subject for examinations, not to be done to death in compositions, not to afford an exercise in correlation, but by its quiet beauty and its unadorned directness of effect to do its part-returning to the point from which we started out -to build unconsciously into the children's lives a sense of what is beautiful in art, as in the world about them; to make continual appeal to their innate love of what is strong and simple, until that love begins to find expression even in word and deed. Hanover, Indiana.

PROFESSIONAL WORK.

To be successful in the instruction and management of a school, the teacher must take advantage of all the agencies that tend toward his improvement.

To keep abreast of the times is a characteristic of the professional teacher. This involves much labor and implies that the teacher himself must be a student.

There is no completeness in the preparation for teaching. The task is never finished. There is not even a resting place in the educational work. He who does not advance is fossilizing or going backward. Rearrangement of data, constant change of view and varying method accompany the progress of the times. In so far as acquisition is concerned, advancement is made upon two lines, viz., scholastic and professional. Professional

growth is slower than scholastic, or rather the products of professional work do not stand out so prominently as those of scholastic work. Professional work is for the most part abstract. Scholastic work partakes largely of the concrete. The effect of professional work is not therefore so apparent as that of scholastic, yet with the mastery of every new principle, with the solution of every educational problem, with the thoughtful experience, the professional growth is strengthened.

Scholarship from a scholastic standpoint may be attained in a comparatively short time, but professional scholarship means years of patient labor. The best possible foundation for a professional training is to take the full course in some good normal school. This opens up the problems, arouses the progressive spirit and makes future acquisition along these