dead and finally ascended into heaven.” The child, now grown a woman, still keeps the tattered “Jesus book” among her cherished treasures. What the child’s mother thought of the book may also be of interest. It came at a moment when she most needed it longing as she was to have her little girl know and love the Christ story, but feeling shy and incompetent to tell it in her own words. The pictures gave her confidence, and literally furnished her vocabulary. The same sort of testimony came to me some years later when I published the Life of Our Lord in Art. A woman who was almost a stranger stopped me in the street one day to tell me how she used the book as a means of telling the Christ story to her children. “I didn’t know just how to begin,” she said, “and the pictures solved the problem for me.”
A picture story program for Christmas-time can be arranged as a very acceptable entertainment either in the home or school. In the larger gatherings a stereopticon or radiopticon is more effective, but the mother talking in her own home circle can use any sort of prints. The Nativity story can be made up in a series of pictures from the Old Masters, each one interpreted by verses or old carols. Good Christmas poetry is as abundant as good Christmas art, and it is pleasant to match the subjects, making the poet tell the story of the picture. From my own collection I have arranged a list something like this:—
