broadened by the fellowship and ministry of the Free Churches, and of all of us who have come to know all that their ministry means to the cause of the Kingdom, to do all in our power to promote this blessed return to a simpler and profounder conception of the ministry of Christ.

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YOUTH AND THE BIBLE

BY WINIFRED MERCIER

Lecturer in Education at the University of Manchester.

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SYNOPSIS

The prevalent interest in Religion-"Christianity at the Cross Roads "-The contribution of the School Scripture Lesson, its importance and its limitations-The Bible as the Book of Life and the meaning of life to youth-The rediscovery of the "Bible World" and its implications for Scripture teaching Inspiration and its significance for Adolescents-The Concurrent Treatment of the Two Testaments-The Orientation of Religious Teaching.

YOUTH AND THE BIBLE

TO-DAY we question life. A whole people reflects in varying degree upon the structure of society and the ends of life. Thus many turn to Religion and demand from it some contribution to the solution of their problems, some answer to their insistent questions. Awakening interest in Religion has been stimulated by the War, but it was a characteristic of our thought before 1914. The dawn of a fresh age in theological learning, the rise of new cults, the growth of the science of Comparative Religion, were indications of this revival; but with the War has come a more insistent and a more individual strain. Those things we most value in life we find are costly beyond our calculations. They can only be achieved or retained through sacrifice or death. Is it Beauty and variety of development, is it Love and Fellowship, or is it Truth and Freedom that we ultimately prize and pursue? For if the cost of the pursuit be overwhelming, must we not ask "Whence spring the roots of this Beauty, Love, and Truth? How can we be assured that we follow not phantoms but realities?" The sacrifices of war have challenged our values, and thus thrown us back

Cf. "The Ultimate Belief." Clutton-Brock.

on the search for some ultimate sanction for them. Now it is an essential of religion that it gives an objective to the highest objects of human pursuit, that it sets forth as a pledge of their essential sanity, and their final victory, the existence of a God of Beauty, Love, and Truth. Men and women are reflecting upon religion, and the future is bound up with the current which their reflections will take. Will the movement bear any relation to the life of the organised Churches, and being concentrated and focussed in fellowship gain impetus and directive force? Or will it lose itself in bogs and shallows, expending its energy in isolated speculation, weakened at the heart by those seducers of human purpose, magic and formalism?

It is a pregnant alternative. We have inherited a wealth of religious experience and wisdom from the past. Part we have assimilated, and thus given to it new direction and new form, but part we have kept lying by untouched. Of our five talents, some-how many ? is it four or one ?-we have invested in the broad fields of industrial and social life, and there we may trace their harvest rather than in developments within the Churches themselves. But some of them

is it one or four ?-we have hidden in the earth and allowed them to remain inert, even decaying. Much now depends on whether we can use all the talents we possess, for, as it has been truly said, we are in a "state of spiritual poverty." Can we then bring the religious wisdom and experience which we have inherited within the range of the ideas of masses of men? The Christian Gospel needs to be taken, as St. Paul took it in his day, straight into the busy