If the common school is not sufficient for the secular education of the child, certainly the Sunday School is not sufficient for his religious education. In the common schools the teachers are more or less trained for their work. It is a life occupation with them; by means of it they earn their living, and their daily success with their pupils marks their rate of progress toward higher fields of endeavor. Nothing of this sort is true in the Sunday School. While occasionally it happens that a day school teacher becomes a Sunday School teacher, this is seldom true, for most teachers who teach during the week feel that they need the Sunday for rest; and while some Sunday School teachers betray a commendable earnestness and zeal for their work, and associations and conventions have latterly added somewhat to the joint effort to better the conditions, still it remains true that the teaching in the Sunday Schools is far below the pedagogic level of the common schools. Yet the subject which is dealt with in the Sunday Schools, instead of being of less importance than that dealt with in the common schools, is of pre-eminently greater importance. Because of its subtlety, its intimacy with the hidden springs of conduct, it calls for the exercise of the very highest teaching skill. Some sort of recognition of these two facts--that Sunday School teachers are in most cases very inadequately trained for their work, and that the work itself is of great importance, and of equally great difficulty--has led to the issuing of many quarterlies, International Lesson Leaflets, and other Sunday School aids. Necessary as such help may be under present conditions, they cannot possibly meet the many difficulties of the case. If the central committees, who issue these leaflets, were composed wholly of the wisest men and women on earth, it would still be impossible for them to give lessons to the millions of children in their various denominations which should meet the personal needs, and daily interests of these young people. [Sidenote: Sunday School Training] As a consequence, Sunday School teaching is and must be largely theoretical and still more largely exegetical, and with neither theory nor exegesis is the young mind of the developing child very much concerned. What he needs is not the historical side of religion or of that great body of religious literature which we call the Bible, but a living faith which links all that was taught by the prophets and apostles, centuries ago, with what is happening in the child's own town and family at that very moment. It is a wide gap to bridge, and it cannot be bridged by a semi-historical review backed by picture cards, golden texts, and stars for good behavior. These things are merely the marks of an endeavor to fitly accomplish a great task, an endeavor almost absurdly out of proportion to this aim, rendered significant, however, because it is the earnest of a great faith and a great hope.