  EVERY Sabbath-school teacher should regularly visit his scholars once a month, and every Sabbath-school superintendent should visit his teachers regularly once in three months. These are very important and yet too often neglected duties. A superintendent can hardly discharge his duties to the teachers without frequently visiting them. This should be no mere formal visit. It should be a Christian conference about all the details, particularly of their classes and their duties. The superintendent is the regular counsellor and guide of the teachers. He should talk about their teaching, about each and all their scholars, their difficulties, their trials and successes, and aid and encourage them by every means. These visits should be made so cheerful and pleasant, so free from fault-finding and complaint, that the teachers will hail them with great joy. The Sabbath-school teacher also, from his own necessities and from duty, must needs visit his scholars often. He has a real errand to the home of every child. He can snatch intervals of time going to or returning Sabbath-school teachers should never neglect this privilege, neither should they make careless or indifferent visits. Arouse up and think your visit all out beforehand. Think what in substance you are going to talk about, what you ought to say, so as to make your visit as welcome and as profitable as possible both to parents and scholars. Have an errand to every house. Carry some little book or tract or paper, if convenient. Give them some interesting and valuable information, or make earnest inquiries and give good wishes and prayers for rich blessings, temporal and spiritual. Choose the right time and seek favorable opportunities. Absentees must, of course, be visited without delay, for it may be sickness has detained them. "The sickness of a child We add a single illustrative example from "The Teacher Teaching:" A decently-dressed woman calls at your house and begs for a shawl to protect a neighbor of hers from the cold when she goes out to her daily work. You have a shawl. You have laid it aside for this very purpose. Why not give it to her and have done with it? If you do not know the person who calls, it would be very injudicious to entrust to a stranger what you intended for a third person. It may be pawned for strong drink, or retained by one who is not in want. Better go or send and satisfy yourself that the need exists, and see that it is supplied. You wisely conclude to look for yourself. You find the object of your charity, and ascertain that she is a superior needle-woman, capable of earning her living, but not able to find work where there is none. If she could hire a room in some part of the city nearer the demand for work, she might succeed. You give her the shawl, and with it a few words of encouragement. In a day or two you are at a meeting of the directors of the Industrial Home or Orphans' Society, and allude to the case of this woman. A young lady present immediately recollects a poor woman, whom she has seen during the week, who has a room to rent, and perhaps it would exactly suit. The parties are brought together and the room is taken. Two Thus is exemplified, by a single real and comparatively unimportant incident in humble life, the power of the Sunday-school machinery, in its legitimate movements, to improve and elevate social condition and character. It was all the work of that little wheel in our machinery called Visiting. |
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