would limit religious education in the home to the formal teaching of
the Bible and religious dogma by parents. The memorizing of scriptural
passages and of the different catechisms once constituted a regular duty
in almost all well-ordered homes. Today it is rarely attempted. Does
that mean that religious education has ceased in the home?

But education means much more than instruction. Education is the whole
process, of which instruction is only a part. Education is the orderly
development of lives, according to scientific principles, into the
fulness of their powers, the realization of all their possibilities, the
joy of their world, the utmost rendering in efficiency of their service.
It includes the training of powers of thought, feeling, willing, and
doing; it includes the development of abilities to discern,
discriminate, choose, determine, feel, and do. It prepares the life for
living with other lives; it prepares the whole of the life, developing
the higher nature, the life of the spirit, for living in a spiritual
universe.

Religious education, then, means much more than instruction in the
literature, history, and philosophy of religion. It means the kind of
directed development which regards the one who is developing as a
religious person, which seeks to develop that one to fulness of
religious powers and personality, and which uses, as means to that end,
material of religious inspiration and significance and, indeed, regards
all material in that light. Religious education seeks to direct a
religious process of growth with a religious purpose for religious
persons. Religious education is the spirit which characterizes the work
of every educator who looks on the child as a spiritual nature, a
religious person; it is the work of every educator who sees his aim as
that of training this spiritual person to fulness of living in a society