FULL ANSWERS | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Mar 25, 1880

FULL ANSWERS.

Commenting on the prevalent form of question and answer in catechetical instruction for little children, a recent critic pronounces it wrong, and says it should proceed thus:—

Question. Who built the ark? Answer. Noah. Not,—Who built the ark? Noah built the ark.

Just here the critic needs criticism, and those who do as he says need correction. "Noah" is as good an answer to forty other questions as to the one he cites. Every answer which is committed to memory should contain within itself a complete proposition. By the accumulation of such answers facts are stored in the mind, and whole histories are built up. A class of children had once been packed for an examination. Their answers were on the principle the critic commends. The first boy, when asked by the examiner, "Who made you?" confidently replied, "Adam." To this answer he stuck, until told he ought to answer, "God made me;" when he explained that "the little boy God made got sick and went home."

—Baptist Teacher.