The Unfolding Life: A Study of Development with Reference to Religious TrainingLamoreaux, Antoinette Abernethy
Religion
The Unfolding Life: A Study of Development with Reference to Religious Training
Lamoreaux, Antoinette Abernethy
Child development; Child psychology; Religious education
With like patience and infinite tenderness, the Spirit deals with the
troubled heart today. He makes the past days with God live again in
memory, if the life has known Him, and the soul can not deny in its
reason the reality of what it has lived through in its experience. He
uses every Christian life that can bear the search light as an
irrefutable argument of the verity of the unseen. He brings the peace of
God that passeth understanding, yet fills and thrills the soul as every
service for Him is rendered even in the darkness. He calls through hard
experience where reason can bring no comfort and the will is palsied,
through the abiding unrest and longing of a heart that is feeling after
God in its own way, instead of His, and through the drawing of childhood
habits of love and trust. When at last, spent out with struggle and
longing, the soul is willing to come back to the Heavenly Father as the
little child who used to be, asking only to walk hand in His, in dark or
light, a new consciousness dawns, clear, sure and absolute that, "Thus
saith the Lord," is more than reason, and the triumphant song rings
out, "I know whom I have believed, My Lord and My God!"
APPLICATION TO SUNDAY SCHOOL WORK
The Sunday School touches a life just entering maturity at the focal
point toward which all nurture has been tending. Enriched by years of
absorption, with ideals defined and channels of expression traced, the
soul faces an open door, bearing the inscript "Service." It is that each
soul may enter the door and give back to a waiting world its best, that
nurture has brooded and guarded through the years.
The great work of the Sunday School is to impel the soul to take this
step, and taking it, say, "I am debtor." This can not be done through
any system of methods, neither are narrow interests or unexacting tasks
sufficient to arouse all that the soul has now to give. The great sweep
and mighty force of world movements are alone adequate for a soul in
touch with God and infinities.
There has never been a time in the history of Sunday School work when
there were such far reaching, thrilling movements through which to
appeal to manhood and womanhood as at the present time, and God's Hand
is not hidden in the matter.
The Adult Bible Class movement, enlisting the greatest company of
thinking men and women ever gathered for the study of the Word, is a
call to open loyalty to the Book and to the church, that is winning
recruits by the thousands.
The great Teacher Training movement, with its exacting standards and
high ideals of preparation, is leading the choicest young people to seek
the holy service of teaching.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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