and assume its own responsibilities, and he regards it as his duty
to hasten the time when this can safely be done.

We are coming also to understand that education is a social
process. No human being can be educated alone. In the life of
the mind as in every other phase of our human activity we are
members one of another. We not only experiment; we experiment
together. When we study, we exchange ideas and experiences and
form our convictions as groups as well as individuals. ¹

These new insights are paralleled in the field of religious educa-
tion. Bushnell's conception of religious education as nurture of
the growing personality has been reinterpreted by modern scholars
who have drawn new material for educational theory from the study
of the psychology of the religious experience. ² We now understand
that the Christian teacher is not simply responsible for telling his
pupils what they ought to believe about Christianity. He must
try with all possible tact and patience to present the Christian
view of life in a way that will command their voluntary assent.
This is a different and a far harder matter.

The influence of these ideals of education appears in the organ-
ization and curriculum of the Sunday school. They affect the meth-
ods of recruiting and training teachers, the planning and construc-
tion of the school building, the underlying conception of the rela-
tion of the school to the church as a whole. Instead of putting
every one through a single uniform curriculum, advocates of the
newer methods adapt their teaching to the age of the child. For
children of four to five they have kindergarten classes, and after-
ward group the ages in grades that correspond to the groupings of
secular education. They not only tell stories; they set the children
thinking about what the stories mean. They not only teach the
Bible; they try to make their pupils relate what they learn in
Sunday school to what they are doing at home or at school or at
their play. They think of the world as a laboratory in which the
teaching of the school is to be tested, and try to form in their pupils
habits of independent thought in the field of religion.

It is, of course, true that in comparison with the total number
of Sunday schools, the schools in which modern methods are being

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