The Fundamentals - 1910: Vol.12

The Sunday School’s True Evangelism 59 necessary or wise that the little child should be taught this; but it is very necessary that the teacher should have this in mind in using nature material to illustrate the ways and the love and the protection of the Heavenly Father. I t puts sharp limitations upon our use of nature materials, and it suggests that such nature material, in and of itself, should not be the leading material in any lessons for Sunday School study. “Apart from the question of nature studies as such, there is present in the International Graded Lessons the modern steadily encroaching atmosphere of the ‘natural’ as over against the ‘supernatural.’ The atmosphere in many colleges today is an atmosphere that denies the supernatural. There are evidences, here and there throughout this scheme of les­ sons, of such a handling of the Bible as one would give to any other book. Such lesson titles, for example, as ‘Gideon, the Man Whom Responsibility Made Great’ (First Year Inter­ mediate), ‘Abraham—The Challenge of an Ideal’ (Second Year Senior), ‘The Development of Religious Ideas in Early Israel’ (Second Year Senior), are hints of this; as is also the note on Lessons 17 to 22 of the First Year Intermediate, ‘David, the Man Who Showed Himself Friendly’ : ‘the aim is to show that David’s power to make and retain friends ex­ plains his career and his character.’ This ignoring of God’s sovereign grace as the secret of David’s career is not suf­ ficiently offset by the close of the note, that David’s ‘intimate, constant, and childlike fellowship with God was the supreme friendship of his life, exalting and directing his actions.’ “And there is a certain inadequacy in some lesson topics, a failure to reveal the stupendous riches of the Scripture truth that is to be taught. An example of this is to be seen in the Third Year Senior topics for the study of the Epistle to the Galatians: ‘Paul’s Assertion,of Independence,’ ‘The Bondage of Tradition,’ ‘The Christian Idea of Freedom.’ The word­ ing of these topics does not do justice to the great eternal spiritual truths of bondage to sin under the law versus the

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