Unity.

One of the greatest of American preachers never goes beyond "firstly." He makes but one point in each sermon. But he makes that point, drives it home, burns it in, wears a crease in the brain that nothing can ever iron out. Every picture—and those sermons are full of pictures—bears upon that one point, and every argument and lesson, for which the pictures have been laying the foundation, is a part of the same unity. You never hear him say, "And we learn further," but always, "The same truth comes out in another way." One is never more than two bases away from the home plate. It is not a cross-country run, but a game of score and tally.

At the opposite pole from this intensive method is the typical Sunday-school lesson. The typical Sunday-school lesson is—is it not?—hodge-podge. Does the last lesson always bear upon the lesson of to-day? Is to-day's aim single? Do you hold before your mind the one point, the one picture, that your pupils shall carry away with them as an everlasting possession, or do you have in mind to display so many pictures, so many points, that some must needs take effect?

It is easier—at least it is lazier—to provide many things than to prepare much. One can rake over an acre more easily than dig one post-hole. And the deeper you go the harder grows the digging. But it's the last six inches of hole that makes firm the top two feet of post.

Now pictures help toward unity of aim in a lesson in two ways: they help to elaborate the one main point—twenty illustrations of one point, not twenty points from one illustration; they help to teach us the law of unity, for a true picture has but one theme, is always simple.

Reality.

"The great trouble with the stuff taught in our schools is that so much of it always remains stuff, and never gets worked up into boy." So said Dr. Parkhurst, in a sermon from the text, "Taste and see that the Lord is good." The only way to work up the raw materials of a boy into real boy is to bring him into touch with them, to have him taste, see, handle. But in order to be tasted these materials must be real. And to make them real is the first duty of the teacher. It is also his hardest task. For consider what it costs to make a thing so real to yourself that it can't help being real to some one else! Ah! there's the rub. It costs to do that—costs time, pains, life.

How long did the Lord make Ezekiel lie on his left side, and how long on his right side, without the relief of turning over from one side to the other, before he judged him ready to deliver his message with a due sense of the reality of its import? Three hundred and ninety days "for the iniquity of the house of Israel," forty days more "for the iniquity of the house of Judah"; each day for a year. After that there was no lack of a "realizing sense" in Ezekiel. He had "been there" himself. And was it by way of mere luxury or was it from pedagogical necessity that the Lord showed himself last of all to Paul also, and sent him into the desert, for a year or more, to think it over and get a real grip on the experience? It was a true instinct that made Thomas, the doubting one, want to reinforce a sight-picture by a touch-picture. A dose of the same "doubt" would be a tonic to much of the pale "faith" in the world.

When I was a boy I wrote, after the fashion of the day, an "essay" on a subject about which I had the slenderest knowledge. A tannery lay on my way to school, and the tanner would have been friendly and communicative, but the encyclopedia article, "Leather," was my sole authority. You may imagine the result: a cold, dead thing, not in the least savoring of real leather. On the other hand, when I became a man, I traveled a thousand miles merely to see, and hear the voice of, a master whom I admired and whose picture I wished to have hanging in my mind. Who has not, when freed from the dead atmosphere of the schools, done a like thing? And with what gain to the precious sense of reality!

The whole country, not long since, was touched—many people were shocked—by the news that a Christian minister had dared to see with his own eyes the evils he was fighting, the existence of which he had been challenged to prove. Many good people at that time thought he had made a mistake. He said, "It is necessary that some one see these things. Do you think that I would be so base as to ask another to do what I would not do myself?" The result has proved the soundness of this position. No one now doubts that Dr. Parkhurst was in the right. For not only were the facts shown to exist as alleged, but (and this is the point) the man himself who had seen them was so filled with a burning sense of their terrible reality, that he clung to his point with an everlasting grip, carried it triumphantly, and laid the foundations of our "civic renaissance."

The vast audience who heard Bishop Thoburn, missionary to India for thirty years, at Chautauqua, was stirred to its depths by the simple power of the man. What was the secret of his power? It did not lie in his bodily presence; it grew out of what the man had done. He was a man of action. He had given his life, and had lived. His speech was of that which he had lived. You felt that he had a right to speak—for every sentence had behind it weeks of real life.

Who has not felt the same when listening to one who speaks of that which he does know? And who has not felt the difference when trying to listen to one who talks, but whose words are not loaded with life?

You must have seen, acted, felt, if you would make your hearers see and feel and act. Talk is cheap, especially borrowed talk. It is not the story in the lesson quarterly that you can build into the lives of your class; it is the story in you. It is the picture that has become a part of your life, that will be most likely to be built into the fabric of theirs.

Order.

The way in which a subject lies in the mind of an ordinary, unregenerate adult, one may be safe in saying, is just the wrong way—the way in which it should not be presented to a child. The order of exposition is in general the reverse of the order of acquisition. The natural man who has forgotten how things look to the eyes of a child has a tendency to put things wrong end to; word first, thing last; precept first, example last; to plunge in medias res without introduction—in short, to put the mental or spiritual cart before the horse. And it requires self-sacrifice to reverse the order, enter into the limitations of a little child's mind, see with his eyes, think his thoughts.

It is a favorite simile among writers on education that the mind is not unlike a field, and that the steps of instruction answer to the successive stages of the farmer's work. First there is the preparation of the soil, then come the planting, the cultivating, and in due time the harvest, the mill, and the market. Two of these steps, the preparing and the applying, concern us here; the work of presenting and elaborating is a theme by itself, and has been treated in a separate chapter.

1. Preparing the ground: Approach.

The art of "getting a good ready" is an art worth mastering. In sermon or Sunday-school lesson alike the beginning is the main concern. It is a good plan to seem to waste time at the start. Nine tenths plowing, harrowing, marking out, one tenth sowing, and (as we shall see) no looking for a crop at all, is a just proportion for the most of our lessons. We shall be always safe in counting upon a sufficient number of stony-ground hearers to justify us in clearing the ground, and making it mellow with interest and expectation. And even those who would receive the word with gladness cannot take it in unless they have something to grasp it with, cannot hear without something to hear with. And this must be given them by the teacher.

We are here at the very heart of the science of teaching. A little two-year-old child will serve us as an example. He is to be put in bed in a strange room, and is to go to sleep alone. Spring the idea upon him and he will reject it. Prepare him for it, by telling him a story of a little boy who went to bed in a new room, a new bed, and all alone, and he is eager for the hour of bed-time. When the time comes, the picture already in his mind, of a little boy, a new room, a peaceful going to bed, welcomes the actual experience, point for point. The wise mother has made a nest for the experience.

So might a teacher prepare the minds of his pupils to receive the idea of ninety millions of miles.

"If any one there in the sun fired off a cannon straight at you, what should you do?"

"Get out of the way," would be the answer.

"No need of that," the teacher might reply. "You may quietly go to sleep in your room, and get up again; you may learn a trade, and grow as old as I am—then only will the cannon-ball be getting near, then you may jump to one side! See, so great as that is the sun's distance!"

So writes a German teacher—explaining the law of apperception, of making a nest for the idea.

We cannot understand—cannot even see or hear—the absolutely new. Every new plan or way of looking at things, or doctrine, is received into the mind on one condition only—that it be introduced by a comrade already there. Then when the new idea calls from without, its fellow answers from within, and an entrance is effected.

The bearing of this upon our theme is illustrated by the plan of a school principal, recently described to me, to eradicate the plague of stealing that had broken out in the school. He talked to the pupils of giants, drew out the children's ideas, and by effective picture-work made the creatures out to be an ugly, uncanny crew. He then was ready to declare to the children that he had discovered a giant in the school, and in due time told them his name—Selfishness, I think it was—and then described his evil works. The moral of this story is that the plan worked, and stealing disappeared from the school from that day.

Who of us teachers might not be emulous of becoming thus skilful in mellowing the soil and making it warm in the genial sunshine of true picture-work?

2. Gathering the crop: Taste.

If deliberation is a virtue at the start, brevity and patience are a necessity at the finish. When the teacher has planted an interest-awakening picture in the minds of the children, his main work is done. He may safely leave them to make the application. He has supplied the cause; the effect will take care of itself. It is often convenient and suggestive to remember that children are not fools. "A child knows a thing or two," 'tis said, "before he knows much of anything." And one of the very first things he knows is how to put his finger on the moral in a story; and he can feel it long before he knows it. But that is when he is left to himself. If you take the helm, ten to one he'll know without feeling, which is the curse of us all. Better, if we must choose, that he feel without knowing in terms, than indulge in mere intellectual casuistry.

In your childish haste to have a crop or to see what was going on under ground, did you ever unearth the newly-planted row of peas? And was that row ever so green and straight and thick-standing as those that had been let alone? But the plants of love to God and moral taste are tenderer than these. They must be shined upon, warmed, and watered many days before they are ready to give an account of themselves. Love is a silent thing before it is outspoken. True feeling has few words, is not self-conscious, likes not to be asked questions. In its own good time it wells up and finds vent in deeds, and even in words.

The deepest thing a teacher does is to form taste. But all taste grows slowly, by unconscious accretion. The Chinese money-changer sets his apprentice at work handling good money only. For ten Years he touches nothing else. He can then detect a counterfeit coin. How? Perhaps he cannot tell how. His way is surer, deeper. He feels it. He has taste. So with the building of the taste for good books, for pictures, for nature. It is a slow process—many a book to be absorbed, picture seen and loved, and mountain and flower and sunset gazed upon, before taste is formed.

And the taste for godliness, for religion, is no exception. It is the finest and rarest of all tastes, and hence is the slowest and quietest of all in its development.

But did you ever see, in the hot house, shall we say, of the Sunday-school, seed sown, harvest reaped, yes, and cakes taken from the oven, within the limits of a single half hour? Does the figure halt, or was it a miraculous quickening of the processes of nature, or was it in truth a great mistake and a sin against natural spiritual growth?

There need be no fear, then, that the children will not feel, and in time know, the meaning, for them, of their stories and pictures. And a wise teacher well knows the ways of helping them: by questioning, not directly, and by hiding the moral so near the surface that it will come forth of itself.