11. Biographical Stories

“God writes his greatest thoughts in noble men and heroic women.” The Bible is a book of biographies. The Gospels are the four biographies of its preeminent character, Jesus. This is one reason for the great charm of the Bible stories and for the great value of the Bible as a never-failing source from whence to gather material for the unfolding mind of childhood and youth.

History too is largely the story of great lives in their setting. The stories of individuals, and of events in which they are concerned, furnish the best historical material for boys and girls from nine to twelve. Indeed, biography should be central in the study of history at least to the sixteenth year. Suitable stories of the lives of great men and women are interesting at all stages of life, but particularly during the years of later childhood and early adolescence, when environment is widening and social and world interests are expanding. Biography is full of religious nourishment, spiritual contagion, ethical uplift, and humanitarian values. That which makes the strongest appeal is found in the Old and New Testaments, the life of Christ, the Acts of the Apostles, the great lives in national and general history, lives of discoverers, pioneers, missionaries, adventurers, inventors, warriors, seamen, and characters full of deeds of daring and difficulty, but at the same time manly and moral. Biography has too often, in the past, been limited to a record of the heroic deeds of generals and statesmen in war and political upheavals. We now see more clearly the value, in the earlier period of education, of biographies of leaders in other fields besides war and statesmanship, and we realize the necessity of inspiring youth with lofty ideals, by examples of both men and women in all possible forms of human service and moral and social heroism. This truer interpretation of the ethical and spiritual value of biography and history is illustrated by the biographical stories in Chapter X, “Heroes of Peace,” and Chapter XI, “Modern Boys and Girls Who Became Useful.”