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THE KING’S BUSINESS deny at every point that our course is a B ible course ; our course is a child teaching course Now The Sunday School Times recognizes that it has no right to speak for the entire Sunday-school constituency. But it believes that it does speak for the great majority of the Sunday-school constituency when it says that the historic Church of Christ does not accept the suggestion that other literature shall be placed upon a par with the Bible as the material for study in the Sunday-school session. If the church succeeds in working out plans whereby the larger religious education of the child and of the community can be provided for under Sun day-school auspices, extending through week-days as well as on Sunday, then of course missionary biography and other uninspired literature would have a perfectly proper place as material for study. But that is not the issue in the present situation. As we speak of “the Sunday-school” today, we refer to the very limited opportunity for Bible study offered in the session of an hour or so on Sunday, where the actual Bible-studying, Bible-teaching, period is about 30 minutes. This is the church’s chief and only Bible-teaching ser vice, at present, in the vast majority of churches. To give any other form of material than the Bible the right of way in this restricted period is a perilous thing. The church must have a service of Bible study and Bible teaching. Its very life, and the life of the home and the community, depend upon this. Nothing that is “extra-Biblical” can be permitted to encroach upon that vital part of the church’s work. It will be a sad day indeed when this question is considered even debatable by the majority of'the members of the church of Christ on earth. It is important to recognize also that there is no real dilemma between the Bible and child-teaching. We do not have to choose between the two. We must have them both, and we can. The Bible is God’s best provision for child teaching. The Limitations of Nature Study. There is a real danger, also, in using nature as the chief material for Sun day-school teaching, even with the youngest Beginners. Nature study has its valued place as material to illustrate the Bible’s truths. Our Lord used it in that way. But there is no such revelation of God in nature as there is in the Holy Scriptures. Nature is natural; the Bible is supernatural. The two are in no sense equal revelations of the heart of God and of the Gospel of Christ. Indeed, nature is a sin-distorted, sin-cursed thing. God made this very plain when He said in the Garden of Eden, “Cursed is the ground for thy sake;. . . . thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee,” as He told Adam and Eve how they had degraded even the earth beneath their feet through their sin. It may not be 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. It puts sharp limitations upon our use of nature material, and it suggests that such nature material, in and of itself, should not be the leading material in any lessons.for Sunday-school study. Do We Believe in the Supernatural? 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
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