ood
gifts in this realm of our lives. There are also available the stories
of history, and of the real men and women whose lives have blessed our
own or other times, and whose deeds and achievements will appeal to the
imagination and stir the ideals of youth.

The teacher as a story teller.--The successful teacher of religion
must therefore possess the art which will enable him to use the story as
one of the chief forms of material in his instruction. He must _know_
the stories. He must be able to tell them interestingly. The story loses
half of its effectiveness if it must be _read_ to the child, but it may
lose in similar proportion if it is haltingly or ineffectively told. It
is not necessary, at least for the younger children, to use a large
number of stories. In fact, there is positive disadvantage in attempting
to employ so many stories that the child does not become wholly familiar
with each separate one. Children do not tire of the stories they like;
indeed, their love for a story increases as they come to know it well,
and they will demand to have the same story told over and over in
preference to a new one.

The use of the story with older children.--A mistake has been made in
not a few of the Sunday school lesson series in sharply reducing the
story material for all ages above the primary grades. It must be
remembered that while the older child has more power to grasp and
understand abstract lessons than the younger child, there is no age or
stage of development at which the story and the concrete illustration
are not an attractive and effective mode of teaching. Surely, all
through the junior and intermediate grades the story should be one of
the chief forms of material for religious instruction, while for
adolescents stories will still be far from negligible.

The principles of story-using, then, are clear in the teaching of
religion: _Make the story one of the chief instruments of instruction;
see that it is charged with religious and moral value; make sure it is
adapted to the age of the learner, and that it is well told; for younger
children use few stories frequently repeated until they are well known;
do not insist that the child shall at first grasp the deeper meanings of
the story, make sure of interest and enjoyment, and the meaning will
come later._

MATERIAL FROM NATURE

The child's spontaneous love of nature and ready response to the world
of objects about him open up rich sources of mate