I hope on successive Thursdays to transcribe and post chapters of this book.
These lessons also open a window into a clergyman writing in the 1920s and 1930s - what they believed, how they saw the world, sometimes through the lens of Empire, and showing the cultural assumptions of the day.
Some of those we have rightly set aside, but others can challenge us today.
Christianity in Action: 52 Lessons in Christian Ethics
By G.R. Balleine
Let us learn to live according to Christianity.
St. Ignatius.
The soul of religion is the practick part.
Christian in the Pilgrim's Progress.
A handful of good life is worth a bushel of learning.
George Herbert.
Faith without works is dead.
St. James.
Ye shall know them by their fruits.
Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Introduction.
Note:
THE Lessons in this course are arranged for a year with three Sundays after Epiphany and twenty-six Sundays after Trinity. It can easily be adapted to other years, if it is remembered that, when there are fewer Sundays after Epiphany, there will be more after Trinity, and when there are more after Epiphany, there will be fewer after Trinity. Thus, if there are six Sundays after Epiphany, three of the Trinity Lessons (e.g., L., LI., and LII.) must be used after Lesson VIII. ; If there are twenty-seven Sundays after Trinity, Lesson VIII must be kept till the last half of the year. But Lessons assigned to a definite Sunday should always be used on that Sunday.
How to use This Book
THERE are three subjects which must be taught in every Sunday School: (1) Christian History, for our. Religion is one that is based on historical facts, the life of Our Lord upon earth, the work of the Apostles; (2) Christian Doctrine, for our Religion exists to teach the great truths enshrined in the Creed, the Catechism and the Prayer Book, and (3) Christian Ethics, for our Religion professes to be able to teach us the art of right living, what we ought to do and be, the kind of character and the kind of conduct that our Master requires from us. In actual teaching these three are generally intermingled.
We show how Creed must express itself in Conduct, and how Conduct must be based on Creed, and we illustrate both by stories from Christian History ; or else we begin with a story from Christian History, and draw from it doctrinal and ethical lessons.
But we must start somewhere. In previous volumes in this series we have started either with the History (e.g. Boys and Girls of the Bible, Lessons on the Acts of the Apostles, Lessons on the Church Calendar) or with the Doctrine (e.g. Lessons on the Catechism, Lessons on the Prayer Book).
This year we will start with the Ethics, with the child's simple thought “I must be good." We will try to expand and enrich this idea, and to show what the Christian ideal of goodness involves. And surely this is the primary task of Sunday Schools, not to train learned theologians or even profound Bible students, but boys and girls who are learning to live as good Christians should.
It ought hardly to be necessary to say that no one who is not mentally deficient will attempt to give these lessons exactly as they are printed. Yet it is scandalously reported that teachers have been discovered reading the book aloud to their classes.
Rumour even dares to assert that one ingenious person managed to escape this slight effort by passing the book round the class, and making the children read it aloud to one another. No one has any right to undertake the tremendously responsible task of training the Church's children, unless he is willing to spend at least two hours in preparing the lesson beforehand. During those two hours he will ask himself the following questions:—
(1) What is the subject for next Sunday? He will look first at the Title, then at the Aim: then he will let the message of the Text soak thoroughly into his mind. He will say to himself, “My immediate objective is to teach the children to be truthful (or honest, or unselfish, as the case may be)."
(2) What is the Bible story? He will turn up the passage, and read it slowly and thoughtfully. If he has a Commentary or Bible Dictionary, he will glean all the information that he can about the story that will help to make it interesting to the children. He will lean back, and create in his own mind a vivid picture of the scene, so that he can tell the story exactly as if he had seen it happen. Probably he will tell other stories also in the course of his lesson, but he will try to make the one from the Bible the most fascinating of them all.
(3) What suggestions does this Book make for tackling this subject? He will first glance at the headings of the sections. Then he will read the notes through in a critical spirit, treating them not as an official syllabus to be reproduced at all hazards, but as mere suggestions made by one teacher to another, which may or may not be adaptable.
(4) How can I adapt this lesson to the needs of my own class? Classes differ immensely. A class of boys and a class of girls, a class of eleven-year-olds and a class of fourteen-year-olds, a class of village children and a class of slum children and a class of keen scholarship children from a secondary school, need entirely different types of lesson. The writer of Notes like these can only try to put in something for all, leaving individual teachers to sort out what is suitable, to simplify or amplify at discretion.
(5) How shall I illustrate this lesson? All over the world simple people love the story-teller. Of our Lord's method we are told: " Without a parable spake He not unto them." A dull lesson never did any good to any child. But the art of illustration is a real difficulty to many Sunday School teachers. Their own reading is not wide enough nor their memories retentive enough to be able to produce on demand suitable stories illustrating any given subject. Hence the number of illustrations given in the following pages. The writer is not so crazy as to imagine that every story is suitable for every class. An illustration from a nursery rhyme might be greeted with derision by a class of big boys, while an illustration from Dickens would be sheer lunacy in a class that had never heard of him. But it is hoped that teachers will find some of these stories helpful, and that they will be ableto supplement them with others from their own experience and reading. Topical illustrations are the most effective of all, something that happened last week, or something connected with your particular church or parish. The stories in the notes will need considerable expansion before they are effective. In their printed form they are boiled down to their bare bones in order to save space. Imagination must reclothe them with flesh and colour, before they can become attractive.
(6) Have I anything that I can take to show my class? Children love looking at things, and learn far more quickly through the eye than through the ear. The teacher who can produce about half-way through the lesson an appropriate Bible picture, a post card of some famous painting, a map, a diagram, a model or a curio, will at once recover the attention of the most inattentive. The keen teacher keeps a large brown paper envelope into which he slips every picture that he comes across in paper or magazine which may possibly be useful some day, and, like the wise householder in the Gospel, is always bringing out of his treasure things new and old.
By the time he has answered these six questions the lesson has begun to shape itself in his mind, probably quite a different lesson from the one in the book, but' an infinitely better one, because it has all the force of the teacher's personality behind it, and is addressed to the real needs of the real Billy Brown and Bobby Binks whom he knows so well. He then takes a small slip of paper—nothing larger than a quarter of a sheet of notepaper is ever permissible—and jots down the headings of the lesson as he has decided to give it, with just a keyword to suggest each illustration. This he will slip inside the Bible that he takes to school with him. The lesson book will of course always be left at home, for a competent Superintendent inexorably confiscates all lesson books that appear on the school premises.
One thing remains to be done. The text for the Sunday after next must be copied out on little slips of paper, one for each child. These will be given out next Sunday for the children to take home with them. Make sure that every child learns his text each week. If everything else should prove a failure, your work will not have been wholly in vain, if by the end of the year you have fixed fifty-two texts from Scripture firmly in your children's minds. But listen carefully as the texts are repeated. Do not pass “Let him seek pieces of suet" as a satisfactory rendering of 1 Peter iii, 11
A final caution. Important as it is to prepare our lessons, it is even more important to prepare ourselves. The living example of the teacher is far more impressive than the lesson. Words and exhortations are worthless unless they are backed by the life. You yourself stand before the child as the embodied illustration of the truth you speak. Seeing is believing. If your pupils see you possessed by an idea, and struggling to put it into action, they will not be unmoved. But children's eyes are very quick to detect an inconsistency. Two well-known sayings are worth repeating again and again: “Teaching is really a matter of contagion rather than of instruction”; “Religion is caught not taught." The old name for teaching was pedagogy, and that means child-leading. We cannot lead anyone, unless we first ourselves tread the path.
Live Thou within us, Lord,
Thy mind and will be ours. Be Thou beloved, adored,
And served with all our powers; That so our lives may teach
Thy children what Thou art, And plead by more than speech
For Thee with every heart.
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