324 PROFESSIONAL RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 



the layman's needs. In an ideal relationship the two types of 

 trained religious educators will be always coordinated. The min- 

 istry must in the main be responsible for high and true standards 

 of scholarship and for their bearing upon sound religious inter- 

 pretation; the laity will find its constructive opportunity in the 

 direct application of the principles thus made clear to the problems 

 of every-day life, and in the efficient organization of the forces 

 which make for righteousness and in their promotion. Each share 

 is coming to be essentially important. 



I have already remarked that these are the days when the place 

 of the religiously minded and well-equipped laymen is realized. 

 He is a factor of steadily growing significance because the legiti- 

 mate objects of his educational effort are constantly on the increase, 

 while the scope of his service never ceases to broaden. Yet with the 

 rapid growth of lay responsibility the larger function of the educated 

 ministry will keep pace. The soundest and most satisfying ends 

 can alone be reached by the cooperation of educators of each type. 

 This assures, in time, the thorough working out of every important 

 religious problem. A case in point is the history of the Sunday- 

 school. For more than a century it has aimed to promote the in- 

 struction of the young for religious ends by becoming a place for the 

 gathering together of the young for direct, religious impression, and 

 for incidental study of the Bible. In consequence of the conviction 

 that the results of such a work were too vague and temporary and 

 that a mastery of the Bible was the more fundamental object of 

 the two, many Sunday-schools Jiave become Bible schools, with the 

 avowed purpose of making a careful and thorough study of the 

 Bible, with the formation of sound character as the logical and 

 assured accompaniment. Our recent investigations, however, into 

 child nature and its proper nurture causes the thoughtful student 

 to place the subject of the wise instruction of the young religiously 

 in a still larger synthesis. The Sunday-school will not fulfill its 

 proper function until it becomes in fact the medium through which 

 the church seeks to promote scientifically the religious education 

 of its whole membership, old and young, in ways closely adapted to 

 the religious habits of each class. 



The outlook for the rapid and salutary development of organized 

 religious education is very bright, because we have at last obtained 

 the factors which will promote it in their proper balance, have 

 achieved for them great freedom of expression and of investigation, 

 and have assigned to each its most effective lines of independent 

 activity. It is not extravagant to say that never in history were 

 being drawn into working harmony as large a body of earnest, well- 

 equipped, broad-minded, varied, yet essentially unified investiga- 

 tors of religious problems and active promoters of religious activity 



