their moral-religious nature; they are poverty-stricken spiritually as well as physically. But the children of intelligent, educated parents, who are supplied with the modern educational resources, need better rather than more training. And better training may in some instances mean even a less amount. The child does not need and cannot well stand a persistent besieging with moralreligious instruction, advice, warning, and exhortation. All this may be given with the best of intentions, but in disregard of the psychology and pedagogy of child-life.

If the home conditions are right, the child will quite surely come to have right impulses, right habits, and right ideas. An anxious and strenuous surveillance and prodding are not required from parents, teachers, neighbors, or friends. Much may be said for the training of parents as well as for the training of children. Imitation is a primary law of growth. Example is more fundamental and certain in its effect than precept. The best help that parents can give their children toward their moral-religious development is to live before them every day the kind of life that is ideal. The children will learn to be kind, thoughtful, considerate, honest, reverent, helpful, obedient, industrious, and altruistic, less because these qualities are inculcated by word of mouth, more because those closest about them possess and exhibit these qualities.

It seems to be sometimes assumed that people are bad because they want to be bad, that children do wrong for the love of it, that human nature is "utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil." The facts of experience indicate, on the contrary, that human nature is aspiring; it has high ideals and it strives to realize them. The normal person, even the normal child, aspires, purposes, and strives to be good and to do good. Individuals who do not manifest this upward tendency in thought and conduct are to be classified as subnormal or abnormal, are to be looked upon as lacking in some essential element of human personality. There are, of course, in any given generation many subnormal or abnormal individuals, whose misfortune it may have been to be born with perverse or flabby wills, with degraded tastes and impulses, with moral blindness and incompetency. These individuals are the imperfect offshoots of

the race.

from them.

But human nature is not to be judged or characterized

We

Is it not in accordance with the facts of experience to say that normal human nature chooses perfection as its goal and looks forward to perfection as its destiny? The present inability to attain perfection is due to conditions over which the present generation has but limited control. We are members of a race and the race characteristics inhere in us. Although this human race aspires to and strives for perfection, it has so far been imperfect. Each individual is involved in this race-imperfection. We are a complex product of the generations that have preceded us. Our impulses, motives, abilities, peculiarities are inherited from our ancestors. We are not de novo creations, having ideal characteristics to start with; nor can we at one leap break away from our hereditary entanglements to reach the goal and destiny of perfection. The individual may ascend, but only with the race. are inextricably bound together with those who have gone before and those who are to follow after. Why then expect that our boys and girls, of whom we imperfect people are the parents, will be perfect? It is not only wisdom but justice to the children when patience and appreciation are shown them rather than criticism and denunciation. Are we too ready to attribute to the child a bad will, bad impulses, bad nature? Do we take too little account of all the child has to contend with, of how difficult it is for him to achieve goodness? We understand and sympathize with him as he gradually acquires control over his physical self. Do we show equal understanding and sympathy with him as he gradually acquires control over his moral self? It is generally safe to assume that the child means well, even if he fails to act so. His fundamental desire and tendency will be toward love, right, and helpfulness. Even grown people wish to be judged and estimated by their inner choice and purpose rather than by their words and deeds. How much more will this be true of the young, who have not yet gone through long years of educative experience and struggle for self-mastery.

The needs of the child during the period of his immaturity are to indicate the way in which others can help him. Along with the

patience and appreciation to which he is entitled from all, there are many things that can be done for him by parents, teachers, and friends. Within limits there is value in teaching the boy and girl the general truths and principles of life, in storing his mind with poetry and proverbs that furnish a kind of general aid to right thinking and right living, and in enjoining him "to be good," "to do right," "to tell the truth," "to act justly," and the like. The choice, purpose, and impulse of the normal child will be in this direction, but it is helpful to confirm him in this attitude.

More helpful still will it be if we can show him how to interpret goodness, right, truth, and justice for the specific life-situations which he must negotiate. A clear and adequate idea of what it means to be good, right, true, and just is not easily or quickly attained. Life is so various, so complex, so difficult. Experience is the teacher of the meaning of these fundamental ethical terms, these fundamental virtues. Abstract definitions are not the chief way of instructing children regarding them, abstract exhortations are not the chief way of bringing them to realization in children. Really, ideals cannot be handed over to children; they must grow up by a biological process in the will and mind of the child. Through the long years of childhood and adolescence the boy's or girl's individual ideal takes shape, under the influences around him and in accordance with the impulses inside him.

The best that can be done for him, toward the development of his ideal, is to live before him and with him an ideal life in one's own character, conduct, and relationships.

The next best thing is to bring before him, in a multitude of concrete and attractive ways, the ideal living of other persons past and present. For this purpose story-telling is the main method. The Bible stories of Hebrew-Jewish and primitiveChristian heroes have for centuries been eminently helpful in giving clearness and power to these concrete instances of the higher virtues exemplified in actual lives. Jesus becomes the supreme hero of moral and religious living when presented in a way that appeals to the adolescent mind. Other nations and peoples had also their collections of stories, which are also highly useful. Provided, of course, that these stories deal in an ethically satisfactory

way with conditions, problems, and principles that find real parallel in the lives of present-day children and youth. Much use is also to be made of modern persons as exemplifying the fundamental virtues, for modern instances will be more likely to meet the child's need because he belongs to the modern time and must live in a modern environment. Specifically how he ought to feel, think, speak, and act in the life-situations which he daily meets is the precise problem which the boy or girl is all the time at work upon. Religious education seeks to understand and to assist him in this daily endeavor, for in it are the issues of manhood and womanhood.

The four principles of religious education here presented seem to me to be cardinal: (1) that religion is the primary element in life; (2) that all education is to be primarily moral-religious in aim; (3) that the materials of religious education are discriminatingly inclusive; (4) that the need of the child determines what is educationally to be done for him. Along these lines we are at present moving, in the home, in the school, and in the church.

CRITICAL NOTE

MANUSCRIPTS OF THE VULGATE IN THE BRITISH

MUSEUM

The papal commission to revise the text of Jerome's Vulgate has reawakened interest in the Latin translations of the Bible. An organized search for and systematic examination of manuscripts have been undertaken throughout the libraries of western Europe such as could not have been possible before. The labors of scholars have indeed marked out the lines of classification, and indicated the direction in which the purest text is to be found. The article by Dr. Westcott on the Vulgate in Smith's Dictionary of the Bible (1863) was for a long time the best authority for the Latin translation, and is still very valuable. M. Berger's works are a mine of information, especially on French and Spanish manuscripts. Indeed we know very little about the latter except what he has told us. The Oxford edition of the Vulgate by the Bishop of Salisbury and Rev. H. J. White gives a full collation of the most important manuscripts ranging from the sixth to the thirteenth centuries, besides the materials for a comparison of the Vulgate with previous translations, and the quotations from the Latin Fathers.

It may be of interest to our readers to have the means at hand of estimating the value of the manuscripts in the British Museum. We have, therefore, collated one chapter (Luke, chap. 11) in all the Latin manuscripts of the gospels in that library up to the close of the twelfth century. We have thought that a continuous collation of some fifty verses is a better test of the character of a manuscript than the tabulation of readings in select passages.

The following is a list and short description of the manuscripts:

I. Harl. 1775. Gospels cir. 670. Italian. 'Harleian Gospels' (harl) Wordsworth's Z. small 4to one col. uncials stichoi Eus. can., S. Luke xi, foll. 2956302b; cf. Berger's Vulgate, p. 387.

2. Reg. IE VI. Gospels (imperf.) cir. 700. S. Augustine's Canterbury. Part of a Bible ('Biblia Gregoriana') broad folio two coll. semiuncials, pictures, and initials on purple vellum, foll. 55b-56b; cf. Berger's Vulgate, p. 35.

3. Add. 5463. Gospels cir. 700. S. Peter's Benevento, Wordsworth, large 4to, two coll. uncials, stichoi, Eus. can., rubricated headings to chapters, foll. 151b-155a; cf. Berger's Vulgate, pp. 91, 92.