The hard-working Sunday-school teacher picks up his cartridge, proudly carries it to the desired destination, and there explodes it. The shrewd Sunday-school teacher uses the scholar as a rifle, and simply pulls the trigger. Some teachers, that is, consider themselves as big guns. Other and better teachers seek to make practical working guns of their scholars. Between the two styles of teaching there is this difference, that the trigger-teaching usually hits the mark, while the big-gun teacher finds that the mark, if it is a live one, has taken itself out of the way by the time he has carried the cartridge to it.

In big-gun teaching the teacher does everything for the scholar; in trigger-teaching the teacher does nothing for the scholar that he can help. In big-gun teaching the teacher thinks; in trigger-teaching the teacher thinks how to get his scholars to think. Big-gun teaching parades; trigger-teaching stays in the tent and issues orders. Big-gun teaching is amusing; trigger-teaching is suggestive. Big-gun teaching develops the teacher; trigger-teaching develops the scholar. The teacher's true work is to educate, and "educate" means "to draw out," and not "to carry to."

"Oh! our scholars are not loaded," I hear many teachers object. "If we should pull the trigger, there would follow only a ridiculous click."

But your scholars are loaded, objectors. Though they may not be loaded with precisely the information you have been seeking from them, they are loaded with experiences,—all their short lives will hold. They are loaded with temptations and troubles and needs. They are loaded with questions and curiosity. They have information, too, any amount of it, that may be brought into suggestive connection with the lesson, if you know how to make shrewd use of their public-school history and geography and science.

To be sure, they probably know nothing definite about the time of the lesson's events, or the place, or the persons, or the circumstances. Well, make them load themselves. As you rehearse these facts concisely, make your scholars write them on slips of paper. Send one to the board, to set down what you dictate. Get one of their number to read aloud some brief and comprehensive summary of the lesson details. In one or all of these ways make them load themselves, and then—nothing is accomplished if you stop here—pull the trigger!

More than on any other thing save the help of the Holy Spirit, a teacher's success depends on the use he makes of the fact that his scholars are already loaded to some effective purpose; and the wise teacher will always ask himself, in the course of his preparation for the lesson, "What experiences of the members of my class will help them understand this lesson and its truths?" One has been sick lately. One is studying geology. One has a father who is a banker. One has just seen the Mammoth Cave.

If these things are to be likened to the bullets and shot, what is the powder? Must the teacher depend for that, too, largely on the pupil? Yes.

To be sure, much of the powder of successful teaching is the zeal and eagerness of the teacher himself. But his interest is a smokeless powder like the fulminating powder of the cap, whose value is solely to set fire to the powder of the scholar when the trigger is pulled. The scholar's interest, the scholar's powder, it is that must be relied upon to do the work, to carry the ball.

And so in trigger-teaching, much depends on the teacher's ability to excite curiosity and arouse interest. He will study his scholars' likings, and appeal to them in his illustrations; their needs, and refer to them in his applications. Sometimes he will state the matter too strongly, sometimes too feebly; in each case, with the express intention to draw out their protest. He will know how to use paradox so as to arouse, but not confuse. He will study different methods of emphasis, and will not use one alone. From each lesson he will select one truth, and one only, which he will treat with all the ardor of a lawyer arguing a matter of life or death. Above all, he will remember that the Spirit alone quickeneth, and will earnestly pray that fire from heaven may be added to his own little fulminating cap.

But many a teacher, conscious of all that I have been saying, does not know how to pull the trigger. It is not so simple in the Sunday-school as in the school of the battalion. The artful teacher will find many ways of trigger-pulling, suited to the diverse and changing needs of his class and of his topic. Sometimes he will put in the scholars' hands paper and pencil, and set them to writing or drawing. Sometimes he will send them in turn to his blackboard. Sometimes he will elicit the entire story from one, sometimes from ten. Sometimes he will introduce pictures for them to talk about, or maps for them to travel over, or objects for them to group their words and thoughts around. Always, however, he will remember that his best trigger is the little trigger-shaped interrogation-point. He will ask questions himself with the effectiveness born of careful preparation. Better than that, he will get his scholars to ask questions. In all these ways, and as many more as there are Sundays in the year, the wise teacher will pull the trigger.

Let no one pass from big-gun teaching to trigger-teaching with the idea that the latter will prove the easier. It is far more difficult to make the cartridge than to pick up and carry the ball which the cartridge would propel; but, for effective and profitable teaching, better ten minutes' work done by the class than an hour's work done by you in the presence of the class, even though to do the latter is far easier than to elicit the former.

If—as those who have been doing it all themselves will doubtless find it—this trigger-teaching comes especially hard at first, let them begin with getting their scholars to do something at first hand, though only a little, and let them work their way slowly to the pedagogical perfection of getting their scholars to do everything.

And does any one fear that this will destroy the personality and personal influence of the teacher? On the contrary, the trigger-teacher has to put ten times more of himself into every lesson than the big-gun teacher. The scholars get more of his personality, at the same time that they are gloriously, though unconsciously, developing their own.