may stand side by side, each seeing truth according to
their capacity, and if the child should grow into a historian it would
be with an unbroken development--there would not be anything to unlearn.
The method of "concentric" teaching against which there is so much to be
said when applied to national history or to other branches of teaching
is entirely appropriate here, because no wider vision of the world can
be attained than from the point whence the Church views it, in her
warfare to make the kingdoms of the world become the kingdom of God and
His Christ that He may reign for ever and ever. The Church beholds the
_rational_ not the _sensible_ horizon of history, and standing at her
point of view, the great ones and the little ones of the earth,
historians and children, can look at the same heavens, one with the
scientific instruments of his observatory, the other with the naked eye
of a child's faith and understanding.

But the teaching of history as it has been carried on for some years,
would have to travel a long way to arrive at this central point of view.
As an educational subject a great deal has been done to destroy its
value, by what was intended to give it assistance and stimulus. The
history syllabus and requirements for University Local and other
examinations have produced specially adapted text-books, in which facts
and summaries have been arranged in order with wonderful care and
forethought, to "meet all requirements"; but the kind intention with
which every possible need has been foreseen between the covers of one
text-book has defeated its own purpose, the living thing is no longer
there--its skeleton remains, and after handling the dry bones and putting
them in order and giving an account of them to the examining body, the
children escape with relief to something more real, to the people of
fiction who, however impossible to believe in, are at least flesh and
blood, and have some points of contact with their own lives. "Of course
as we go up for examinations here," wrote a child from a new school, "we
only learn the summaries and genealogies of history and other subjects."
A sidelight on the fruit of such a plan is often cast in the
appreciations of its pupils. "Did you like history?" "No I hated it, I
can't bear names and dates." "What did you think of so and so?" "He
wasn't in my period." So history has become names and dates, genealogies
and summaries, hard pebbles instead of bread. It is unfair t