understood all he read and was told, or not. It would prepare him for
some future crisis and enable him some time to better meet a possible
temptation. It was to be a sort of preventive application, very much as
vaccination now is administered to ward off dreaded disease. And, to
tell the exact truth, it often did, and the treatment proved more
efficacious than some of the present-day Bible study methods, where mere
knowledge is attempted. The mistake was the misunderstanding (for
misunderstanding it was, and not a desire to merely plague the boy) of
the fact that boys were developing creatures, spiritually as well as
physically, and that Bible study could be made pleasant as well as
profitable. It was a mistake due to a purely mature point of view and a
failure to know that the boy mind needed different treatment from that
of the adult. Lately we have discovered, thanks to general education,
that a boy's Bible study can be adapted to a specific purpose, and to a
present, clear, distinct and practical need of boy life.

A recent writer has said, "We have come to a fairly definite
understanding that we must take the boy as he is; we must inquire into
his needs; we must consider the conditions of his religious development.
We must ask, then, of the Bible, how far it can be effective to meet
these needs and this development. The fixed factor is the boy, not the
Book. At the same time, we are not obliged to begin always as if the
Bible were a new thing in the world, and its claim to value as religious
material were to be considered afresh. We know that the Bible has proved
itself good. We know that it has been effective in the life of boys. The
question, then, really before us is, What parts of the Bible are really
desirable for the boy, and how are they to be presented so as to be most
useful?"

This, in other words, is Graded Bible Study, and, possibly, were we to