The Sabbath School by John S. Hart

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jul 21, 1881

The Sabbath School.

By John S. Hart

THE FAITHFUL TEACHER.

I HOLD it to be the interest and the duty of individual Sabbath-school workers, while not neglecting solitary work, to add their personal quota of service to every wise and prudent measure of concerted effort. I think that many teachers, most excellent and exemplary and faithful in other respects, come short in this. They rarely attend a meeting of the teachers of their school. Such persons not only fail in duty, but they miss a great privilege. The solitary worker is very apt to acquire contracted and imperfect notions on many subjects. The very best way to improve one's own methods is to mingle with others. This interchange of thought always suggests to the wide-awake teacher something new and better. Besides, by this friendly contact of differing minds, new energy and life are caught. The heart is warmed. Impulses are given and received that never would have been experienced in mere solitary work.

In order to the universal spread and diffusion of the Sabbath-school cause through any community, the individual workers in it should feel bound, not merely to do their own work diligently and well, in the teaching of their particular class and school, but to extend a helping hand to others, by friendly co-operation and counsel, by collecting and diffusing Sabbath-school intelligence, by going themselves or sending others into destitute neighborhoods for the purpose of collecting the children who are out of school, and of conversing freely and kindly with their parents on the subject.—J. S. Hart.