In the lesson story as given last week how much was taken directly from the biblical narrative? How far do you think it legitimate to expand the Bible story? Was the part not given in the Bible narrative true to your conception of the times in which the story has its setting? Bible stories sometimes need expansion to make them complete and interesting to the children. It was not a necessity in last Sunday’s lesson, but was chosen simply as a way of introducing the lesson story. In all our story work it is not important that the story shall always be something that has actually happened, but it must be something that, given certain conditions, could and would be likely to happen. In expanding Bible stories we must keep the facts not only true to life, but true to what we know of the age to which they relate. There are many fictitious stories that are true, that is, true to life and to the principles that underlie all action. There are others that are both fictitious and false. Take, for example, the so-called Sunday school stories of fifty years ago in which the good boy was so abnormal and impossible that every normal boy who read the book revolted from the type with a natural and healthy hatred. All our illustrative stories must be true to life, and must not present a moral so apparent as to cause the child to react from it because of the sheer force of the impact. The lesson for this week is intensely interesting both to us who are older and to the children, but the points of deepest interest in each case will be different. For us the mysterious Melchizedek, “who passes over the stage a living king and priest,” and then is seen no more, possesses much of charm and fascination. The difference between the Abram who was enriched without protest in Egypt by a heathen king (Genesis 12:16), and the Abram who disdains to take so much as a shoe lace from the king of Sodom (Genesis 14:23), is also of interest to us. But, of course, in studying the lesson to present it to the children we must put these things far in the background and get the story with its vivid action and rapid movement so thoroughly into the mind and heart that it can be told with as much feeling as would characterize the narration of an event that happened yesterday. LESSON PRESENTATION Introduction