Here we begin to be at issue with our author. We should not present Bible stories as carrying only the same moral sanction as the myths of ancient Greece; neither should we defer their introduction until the child has gone through a moral course of fairy tales and a moral course of fables. He should not be able to recall a time before the sweet stories of old filled his imagination; he should have heard the voice of the Lord God in the garden in the cool of the evening; should have been an awed spectator where the angels ascended and descended upon Jacob’s stony pillow; should have followed Christ through the cornfield on the Sabbath-day, and sat in the rows of the hungry multitudes--so long ago that the sacred scenes form the unconscious background of his thoughts. All things are possible to the little child, and the touch of the spiritual upon our material world, the difficult problems, the hard sayings, which are an offence--in the Bible sense of the word--to his elders, present no difficulties to the child’s all-embracing faith. We would not say--far otherwise--that every Bible story is fit for children, because it is a Bible story; neither would we analyse too carefully, nor draw hard and fast lines to distinguish what we would call history from that of which it may be said, “Without a parable spake He not unto them.” The child is not an exegetical student. The moral teaching, the spiritual revelations, the lovely imagery of the Bible, are the things with which he is concerned, and of these he cannot have too much. As Mr. Adler says, “The narrative of the Bible is saturated with the moral spirit, the moral issues are everywhere to the forefront. Duty, guilt and its punishment, the conflict of conscience with inclination, are the leading themes. The Hebrew people seem to have been endowed with what may be called a moral genius, and especially did they emphasise the filial and fraternal duties. Now, it is precisely these duties that must be impressed on young children.” Let us see how Mr. Adler would use the Bible narratives. We have only space for a fragmentary sentence here and there: “Once upon a time there were two children, Adam and Eve. Adam was a fine and noble-looking lad.”... “It was so warm that the children never needed to go indoors.”... “And the snake kept on whispering, ‘Just take one bite of it; nobody sees you.’”... “You, Adam, must learn to labour, and you, Eve, to be patient and self-denying for others,” &c. We leave it to our readers to decide whether “treatment” improves the Bible narrative, or whether this is the sort of thing to lay hold of a child’s imagination.