The average girl in her teens uses it more or less in the preparation
of her Sunday-school lesson. She hears certain portions of it read
without comment in opening exercises in school; in a comparatively few
instances it is read in the morning or evening at home. That is
practically all that most girls have to do with the Book whose
teachings have so largely made possible the wealth of happiness of the
girlhood of to-day.
How to bring the girl in her teens into touch with this Book of books
so that it shall exert upon her individual life its wonderful power of
transforming, purifying, and strengthening character is a problem.
But those who have been trying hard to meet it have learned some
things. They have found out that the girl in her teens knows little of
the history of the Book, and that when she is told the story of how we
got our Bible she is intensely interested. Its wonderful history, from
the time before it lay in parchment rolls on monastery shelves and on
through the centuries until it reached the hands of ordinary men and
women, and the period of their struggle to learn to read that they
might know what it said, stirs the imagination and awakens a host of
questions that lead to knowledge.
When she begins to understand what it has cost to preserve the book,
how not only men and women, but boys and girls, have loved it and died
rather than betray it or disobey its commands, it becomes to her a new
book, worthy of her study.
But the history of the Book, although it is necessary and does deeply
interest the girl and increase her respect for it, is by no means all
we want her to have.
The fragmentary knowledge of Abraham and David, Esther, Ruth and Paul
which she has gained in her childhood must be supplemented now by the
knowledge of great periods and what the world learned through them.
She needs to be shown what the Psalms and some of the chapters of
Isaiah and the other prophets have meant to the literature, music and
art of the world.
I remember with pleasure the class of girls sixteen and seventeen
years old who studied the books of Job and Jonah with me one year. The
dramatic element held us, and Job and his friends, Jonah and his
struggle, became very real to us. Two years afterward one of the
girls, in talking about references to the Bible in literature, said to
me, “Well, when they refer to Jonah or Job I’m safe, for those two
books I shall never forget.” She can grasp a book as a whole, remember
it and enjoy it.
But the study of the Bible under guidance and with every means used to
make it interesting and helpful is not all that we want for our girl.
She must be led to find in the Bible personal inspiration and help.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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