and Religion "Ie is positively unhealthy to tell 'a boy that he is a miserable zinner,'
Mr, Maurice L. Jacks, the recently appointed headmaster of Mill Hill School, made this declaration in an address at the annual meeting of the Sunday School Association.
"With the possible exception of English," he said, "there is no sub-Ject harder to teach than Scripture. He was speaking on "The teaching' of religion in public schools."
The primary necessity was the study of the Bible itself—as literature, as secular history, as religious history, and as an account of the progressive revelation of God to a particular people.
School editions of the Bible, badly, printed and hideously bound, were repellent to the sense of beauty which every boy possessed.
'A boy had no conception of himself as a miserable sinner, and it was positively unhealthy to'tell him that he was.
Most hymns, particularly those! which described the world as a place of sin and woe, must be ruled out because they were packed with insincerity.
Mr. Jacks also warned his hearers cast in the form of] which conveyed to God information which one must suppose Him already to possess, and made mountains out of "mole-hill_ part They appealed to a boy's sense of humour in the wrong way and bred a spirit of irreverence.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.