"Can you apply a parable?" says one of Robert Louis Stevenson's characters. "It is not the same thing as a reason, but usually vastly more convincing."

The spiritual truth which we would have enter the child's mind—how is it to gain admittance? Not by a surgical operation; much less by the use of a foreign language or—what is quite the same thing—of abstract language. Not by any direct means, but indirectly, by objects, scaffolding, types, the story, and the illustration.

"Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact, and no spiritual fact can be understood except by first knowing the natural fact, which is, as it were, its double." It is so with the child, it is no less true of grown folk. If it were not for the world of nature—of boundless horizon, ceaselessly flowing rivers, of deaths and resurrections, of parasites—we should be powerless to grasp the truths of the world of spirit. The circle in the water, for example, the apples on the plate, one specked, then all rotten, these all are but letters of the alphabet by which we spell out Influence.

There must first be in the thing-world—to give one more example—the "rolling-stone," "the last straw," "the bird in the hand," "the leaven," the ore, worth seventy-five cents as ore, worth four dollars as bar-iron, worth $400,000 when worked up into hair-spring, before we can understand, or explain, or talk about the corresponding things in the realm of the unseen. Which is only another way of saying that he whose mind is not filled with the truths of nature is but ill furnished for understanding the truth of God.

How may we gain this power to enrich our teaching with side-lights?

1. By studying the great masters of the art of illustration. Beecher, Spurgeon, Dr. Parkhurst, are all worthy of emulation. Beecher testifies that in his early preaching the power to illustrate was only latent. He found that he was not reaching his hearers and he began to search for "likes." He went about his farm, upon the streets, among mechanics, in fact everywhere, with the thought of the next Sunday's sermon in his mind, saying, "What is this like? what will that illustrate?" A glance at his sermons shows them full of side-lights from business, life at sea, from the farm and the home, from mechanical processes, as the cutting and polishing of precious stones, and very often from nature.

In a recent sermon Dr. Parkhurst illustrated his single point from botany, physics, physiology, a ship, and from the actual experience of two men engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the same appetite.

But the power of these great preachers is only the reflex of the method of Christ himself. No man had greater power in picture-work. In range, fertility, aptness, and result, the word-pictures of Jesus stand alone in the history of teaching, just as in respect of beauty and power they stand alone in literature.

2. The power of picturesque speech is acquired through earnestness and love of truth, as well as through rich experience of nature and of common life. This is hinted at by Emerson: "A man's power to think and to speak depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth…. Picturesque language means that he who employs it is a man in alliance with truth and God. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a picture arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence good writings and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous, provided one have lived sufficiently to fill his mind with the raw materials of such pictures. One bred in the woods shall not lose his lesson in the roar of cities…. At the call of a noble sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his infancy. And with these forms, the spells of persuasion, the keys of power are put into his hands." And as it is with contact with nature, so it is with first hand experience of life in any form.

3. Practice. The effects of practice have already been cited in the case of Beecher. It is one of the mournful facts of human life that so many powers that might have been brought out by practice always remain in the latent state. Practice story-telling, practice finding "likes," and you will find before long that there is growing up in you a new power, just as if you were to discover in your organism a stop, by pulling which you could jump ten feet in the air. "Practice is nine tenths. A course of mobs is good practice for orators. All the great speakers were bad speakers at first." And a course of nephews and nieces is the best of practice for story-tellers, and for those who would be adepts in the use of side-lights.

A word of caution. Great care must be used not to make the stories and illustrations more prominent than the truth we wish to illustrate. Dr. William M. Taylor tells of a conversation with a carpenter in which he advised him to use certain decorations. "That," said the carpenter, "would violate the first rule of architecture. We must never construct ornament but only ornament construction." So it is in story-telling. Never tell a story for its own sake, merely, but for the sake of the truth that lies embedded in it. A story or an illustration must grow as naturally out of the subject as a flower grows out of a plant.