asked to believe what plainly contradicts
common sense and so puts too great a strain on credulity. In a certain
Sunday school class the lesson was about Peter going up on the housetop
to pray, and the vision that befell him there. This class of boys,
living in a small village, had had no experience with any kind of
housetop except that formed of a sharply sloping roof. Therefore the
story looked improbable to them, and one boy asked how Peter could sleep
up on the roof and keep from falling off. The teacher, also uninformed
concerning the flat roofs of Oriental houses, answered, "John, you must
remember that with God all things are possible." And John had that day
had the seeds of skepticism planted in his inquiring mind. Another
teacher, thinking to allay any tendency on the part of his class to
question the literal accuracy of the story of Jonah and the whale, said,
"This story is in the Bible, and we must believe it, for whatever is in
the Bible is true; and if the Bible were to say that Jonah swallowed the
whale that would be true, and we would have to believe that also." But
who can doubt that, with boys and girls trained in the schools and by
their contact with life itself to think, such an invitation to lay aside
all reason and common sense can do other in the long run than to weaken
confidence in the Bible, and so lessen the significance of many of its
beautiful lessons?

True thinking about Bible truths.--What, then, shall we teach the
child about the literalness of the Bible? Nothing. This is not a
question for childhood. The Bible should be brought to the child in the
same spirit as any other book, except with a deep spirit of reverence
and appreciation not due other books. Parts of the Bible are plainly
history, and as accurate as history of other kinds is. Other parts are
accounts of the lives of people, and the descriptions are wonderfully
vivid and true to life. Other parts are plainly poetry, and should be
read and interpreted as poetry. Other parts are clearly the stories and
legends current in the days when the accounts were written, and should
be read as other stories and legends are read. The great question is not
the problem of the literal or the figurative nature of the truth, but
the problem of discovering for the child the _rich nugget of spiritual
wisdom which is always there_.

When the young child first hears the entrancing Bible stories he does
not think anything about their literalness; he