This is particularly true in the use of much Biblical material in Sunday School and in the unexplained classic references to the great and good.

One wonders what children are thinking about, children who read in the daily papers long and spectacular accounts of trials for bigamy or adultery, when the worthies of the Old Testament are spoken of and their two or several wives taken as a matter of course in the lesson! One wonders what is the meaning of justness or kindness to the "servant" conveyed to the child in commandments which link together a man's ox and his ass, his laborer and his wife! The fact is that education has a narrow and perilous path to travel in moral lessons of every sort, a path between a dull and critical analysis of differences in moral standards and moral practice in the ages from which we have come and a wholesale commendation of people who would be haled before our modern courts for disobedience to laws were they to reappear upon our streets.

The need for stimulation of the ethical imagination is so great, however, that we must dare this perilous path and master its difficulties.

Perhaps no one has been able to do this more effectively than Mr.Gould, of the Moral Education Committee of England, who has used the story method with consummate tact in building up from the lower motive and the more ancient condition a series of pictures of human greatness, which end always on some summit of personal devotion in universal conditions to universal laws of right.[18] His method leaves the pupil in a glow of admiration of excellence without dulling his perception of realities of every-day life in his own time and place.
However difficult, we must try by some method to make youth realize what is excellent in those who have lived far enough in the past to inspire reverence and yet keep some connection between those heroes and sages of the older times and the march of human life upward and onward.

Especially is this the case in all treatment of the family relation.