ble from being so many dead words,
without appeal to the child.

Imagination required in the study of religion.--In the teaching of
religion we are especially dependent on the child's use of his
imagination. With younger children the instruction largely takes the
form of stories, which must be appropriated and understood through the
imagination or not at all. The whole Bible account deals with people,
places, and events distant in time and strange to the child in manner of
life and customs. The Bible itself abounds in pictorial descriptions.
The missionary enterprises of the church lead into strange lands and
introduce strange people. The study of the lives and characters of great
men and women and their deeds of service in our own land takes the child
out of the range of his own immediate observation and experience. The
understanding of God and of Jesus--all of these things lose in
significance or are in large degree incomprehensible unless approached
with a vivid and glowing imagination.

Many older persons confess that the Bible times, places, and people were
all very unreal to them while in the Sunday school, and that it hardly
occurred to them that these descriptions and narratives were truly about
men and women like ourselves. Hence the most valuable part of their
instruction was lost.

Limitations of imagination.--Since childhood is the age of
imagination, we might naturally expect that it would be no trouble to
secure ready response from the child's imagination. But we must not
assume too much about the early power of imagination. It is true that
the child's imagination is _ready and active_; but it is not yet ready
for the more difficult and complex picturing we sometimes require of it,
for imagination depends for its material on the store of _images_
accumulated from former experience; and images are the result of past
observation, of percepts, and sensory experiences. The imagination can
build no mental structures without the stuff with which to build; it is
limited to the material on hand. The Indians never dreamed of a heaven
with streets of gold and a great white throne; for their experiences had
given them no knowledge of such things. They therefore made their heaven
out of the "Happy Hunting Grounds," of which they had many images.

Many Chicago school children who were asked to compare the height of a
mountain with that of a tall factory chimney said that the chimney was
higher, because the mountain