Teachers differ greatly in their ability to bring a class forward in intellectual acquisition and growth. With one teacher pupils are all life and energy, they take hold of difficulties with courage, their ideas become clear, their very power of comprehension seems to gather strength. With another teacher, those same pupils, studying the same subject, are dull, heavy, easily discouraged, and make almost no progress. The ability thus to stimulate the intellectual activity of others, to give it at once momentum and progress, is the true measure of one's teaching power. It may be well to consider for a moment some of the conditions necessary to the existence and the exercise of this power.

In the first place, we can exert no great, commanding influence over others, whether pupils or not, unless we have in a high degree their confidence. Pupils must have faith in their teacher. I never knew an instance yet, where there was great intellectual ferment going on in a class, that the pupils did not believe the teacher infallible, or very nearly so. This principle of confidence in leadership is one of the great moving powers of the world. In teaching, it is specially important. This feeling may indeed be in excess. It may exist to such an extent as to extinguish all independence of thought, to induce a blind, unquestioning receptivity. Such an extreme is of course opposed to true mental progress. But short of this extreme point, there is almost no amount of faith that children can have in their teacher, that, if well founded, is not of the highest advantage. Seeing the firm, assured tread of father or mother, or of an older brother or sister, is a great aid to the tottering little one in putting forth its own steps while learning to walk. So the child is emboldened to send out its young, unpractised thoughts, by the confidence it has in the guidance and protection of its teacher. To acquire and retain the proper ascendancy over the mind of a child, two things are essential, ample knowledge and entire honesty. Shallowness and pretension may mislead for a while. But to hold a child firmly and permanently, the teacher must abound in knowledge, and must have thoroughly honest convictions.

The next condition to great teaching power is confidence in one's self. A timid, irresolute, hesitating utterance of one's own convictions fails to produce conviction in the minds of others. I do not recommend self-conceit. It is not necessary to be dogmatic. Yet a certain style of self-assertion, bordering very closely upon these qualities, is needed in the teacher. In the higher regions of science and opinion, there are of course many points about which no one, at least no one well informed, would undertake to speak with authority. Such subjects it becomes us all to approach with reverent humility, as at the best only inquirers after truth. But the case is very different with teachers of the common branches concerned in our present remarks. On these points the teacher ought to have a certainty and a readiness of knowledge, so as to be thoroughly self-reliant before the class. Teaching is like fighting. Self-reliance is half the battle.

Equally important with the former is it to have the affection of one's pupils. Writers on metaphysics now-a-days dwell much, and very properly, on the influence of the body upon the mind, and the necessity of a healthy condition of the former in order to the full clearness and strength of our intellectual apprehensions. There is a still more intimate connection between our moral emotions and our mental action. The wish is father to the thought, in more senses than that intended by Shakspeare. If the intellect is the seeing power of the soul, the affections are the atmosphere through which we look. The same object may appear to us very differently, as it is seen through the colorless medium of pure intellectual perception, or as it is enlarged and glorified by the mellowing haze of fond affection, or as it is distorted and obscured by the mists of prejudice and hate. When a child has a thorough dislike for a subject or for his teacher, the difficulty of learning is very greatly increased. Not only is the willingness to study weak or wanting, but the very power of mental perception seems to be obstructed. The power of attention, the power of apprehension, the power of memory, the power of reasoning, are all paralyzed by dislike, and are equally vitalized by love and desire. Mental action, in short, is influenced by the state of the heart as much as by the state of the body. If you do not expect great mental efforts from a child that is sickly, burning with fever, or racked with pain, neither may you expect the best and highest results from one whose heart is diseased and alienated, who approaches a subject with feelings of aversion and dislike, whose conceptions are clouded with prejudice.

A teacher of great intellectual force, and with an overbearing will, may push forward even a reluctant and a rebellious class with a certain degree of speed. On the other hand, a teacher who enjoys the unbounded love of his scholars, may accomplish comparatively little, on account of lacking the other qualities needed for success. The highest measure of success in teaching is attained only where these several conditions meet,—where the teacher has and deserves the full confidence of the scholars, where he has full confidence in himself, is self-reliant and self-asserting, and where at the same time he has the warm affection of his pupils. Love, after all, is the governing power of the human soul, as it is the crowning grace in the Christian scheme. Love is, in teaching, what sunshine and showers are in vegetation. By a system of forcing and artificial culture, the gardener may indeed produce a few hot-house plants, but for all great or general results, he must look to the genial operations of nature.