The Bible is a picture-book. It is history, literature, logic, philosophy; but, more than all these, for children and all who have the heart of childhood, it is a store-house of pictures.

The first thing needful for a teacher, if he would touch his pupils, is to see these pictures himself. This, we must admit, is seldom done. For it is one of the sad things about the human mind that it possesses the power to read the words that set the picture forth without seeing the picture, and without being touched by the emotion which only the picture can arouse. We can seem to pray the Lord's Prayer, for example, while in reality we are merely making articulate—sometimes inarticulate—sounds.

"I believe it would startle and move any one," said Robert Louis Stevenson, referring to the gospel of St. Matthew, "if he could make a certain effort of imagination and read it freshly like a book, not droningly and dully like a portion of the Bible."

Who of us has not been thus startled and moved? It may have been on hearing a story read by one who read as though he had seen the men and the events face to face. It may have been by being helped to realize and see by pictures or by being ourselves on the ground made sacred by the story, or, perchance, by being in the same case as those described. It may have been on reading the old stories "freshly, like a book," perhaps after many years, when the old-time droning and the dulness are forgotten, and the simple beauty and power of the old stories come home to us. At such times we say, This is the very Word of God. Were ever pictures painted like these?

Thomas Hardy says of one of his characters that, like every healthy youth, he had an aversion to the reading of the Bible. Some of us know what that means, though we did not know it was healthy. Better, we might almost say, that the child spent his time in some other way than to read the Bible or be taught it, only to conceive a dislike for its stories. Better a child never went to Sunday-school than that he should go to have interest deadened. He may wait many a year before the freshness returns.

"Two grand qualifications are equally necessary in the education of children," said Horace Mann, "love and knowledge." The teacher of the Bible must indeed know—not know about, merely, but be personally acquainted with—the old patriarchs, their dress, occupation, country, way of life, and character; the judges, likewise, the prophets and kings, the children of Israel as a people, the apostles and their friends, and, above all, Christ himself. Does it make little difference whether we think of Christ as an oriental or as an Italian; whether as clad in the turban and flowing white robes of the East or in more conventionalized attire; whether as he is pictured for us in the vivid and startling colors of the artist Tissot, or in the cold conventional steel of our grandmother's best parlor; or the base wood-cuts of some modern lesson leaves?

To us as well as to our Lord himself it makes a vital difference whether his youth was spent amid arid wastes—as many of us picture Palestine—or in the peaceful beauty of such a retreat as that described for us in Archdeacon Farrar's picture.

We must indeed have knowledge, as full, as exact, as personal as it can be made for us or as we can make it for ourselves. And from this will come love. The more full, exact, and personal our vision, the more deep-seated will be our love. We should therefore seek our knowledge at first hand. We should look upon "helps" as we regard crutches—good until we can walk alone; bad the instant they keep us from using our own powers, seeing with our own eyes.

In picture-work, as in everything else, love is the principal thing. A teacher of little children, whose privilege it is to help them to enter into loving appreciation of buds and leaves, soil and roots, winter and how everything prepares for it, spring and how it wakes everything to new life, must herself love nature. No "science" falsely so called will suffice. "Do you really love nature?" as President G. Stanley Hall has said with an indescribable emphasis on every word, is the question of questions to ask such a teacher. "Do you really love the pictures of the Bible?" is likewise the question of questions for the parent and teacher whose high privilege it is to lead children from the first of their acquaintance to love the great Picture-Book.