task at present.

[Sidenote: Theory Not Practice]

There is one great danger in the teaching of any Sunday School--one
which the best of them cannot wholly escape--and that is, that, in the
very nature of things, they teach theory and not practice. Harmful as
this may be, indeed as it surely is in adult life, it does not begin
to be so harmful as it does in youth, for the young child, as we have
seen, is and should remain a unit in consciousness. His life, his
intellect, and his will are one--an undivided trinity. The divorce of
these three is at any time a regrettable occurrence; the divorce of
them in early life is an almost irreparable disaster.

[Sidenote: Useless Truths]

The current theory is that children will learn many truths in the
Sunday School which they will not put into practice then, perhaps, but
which they will find useful in later life. This fallacy underlies, of
course, almost all conventional education and has only been overthrown
by the dictum of modern psychology, that there is but small storage
accommodation in the brain for facts which have no immediate relation
to life. What may be termed the saturating power of the brain is
limited, and after it has soaked up a rather small number of truths,
it can contain no more until it has in some way disposed of those that
it still has--either by making them part of its own living structure,
which is done only by making immediate application of them; or by
dropping them below the threshold of consciousness, that is, in common
language, forgetting them. Moreover, the brain may form the habit of
easily dropping all that relates to a given subject into the limbo
where unused things lie disregarded, and when this becomes the
habitual method of disposing of religious instruction, the results are
particularly deplorable.

[Sidenote: The Mother as Teacher]

Feeble as her own knowledge may be, a mother has certain advantages as
a teacher of her children over any but the exceptional Sunday school
teacher. For, first, she knows the children, and, knowing them, knows
their needs. Secondly, she knows their daily lives and continually
during the week can point out wherein they fail to live up to
their Sunday's lesson. And again and most important, she loves them
tenderly, and from love flows wisdom. Usually the mother gives her own
children a love far beyond that given by anyone else, and this deeper
love sharpens her intellectual faculties and makes her both a