p. 221 | THE CHEERY TEACHER by M. E. Sangster

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · May 19, 1881

THE CHEERY TEACHER.

By M. E. Sangster

YEARS ago I knew a class in which a disintegrating process was going on. It could not be kept together. Persistently the superintendent filled it up, bringing new recruits to make up the gaps which were always occurring in its ranks, but it was in vain. The boys could not stand the chill of its atmosphere, nor be natural under the influence of the good but dismal elder who taught it, and away they went to find brighter and more congenial places. It was in vain that the excellent man haunted his pastor's study, laboriously read this great book and the other, in desire to make the lesson interesting, and devoted, yes, spent himself, in efforts to keep the young men's Bible class, where he felt it should be, in the front of the school, a sort of shining light and example. In his hands it was a little more than a name, a tradition of a good thing that had been, and he at last resigned his task in absolute despair.

There followed him very quickly a gentleman not nearly so well educated, not nearly so thorough, not, at a casual glance, half so well fitted for the position. But before many Sundays had passed, everybody was talking about the change. The class rallied around the new leader. One young man brought another. Their blithe, eager faces, their cheery voices, their interested manner, showed that they enjoyed coming, and the good people who had been lamenting over the fact that the boys of this period so soon grew too large to go to Sunday-school, had reason to felicitate themselves on having been greatly mistaken.

Where was the secret? Both were good men. Both were anxious to teach well. The first was a failure, and the second a success.

It was no secret to any one who could read human nature. One had the magnetism of a happy, joyous, enthusiastic, temperament. He bore his light aloft on a candlestick, to be seen of all; the other, by reason of a naturally moody and melancholy disposition, which had grown morose through much brooding over trouble and loss, hid his light under a bushel. Young people were repelled from the one as certainly as they were attracted by the other characteristic.

You will have no difficulty in holding your growing-up boys, and your young ladies, if you bear in mind two facts; they must have good teaching, and they must have cheery teachers. The air around us is full of stimulus.

Information abounds. Wide awake girls and boys of this day have been, in the secular schools, under the influence of the most advanced minds, and the best text-books, and the most thorough preceptors. They will not rest contented with inefficient, half-digested, and second-hand instruction in the Sunday-school. They are willing to be students, and they want some one able to guide them. Then they will not—and who can blame them?—submit to sitting down among the tombs when all the world is full of sunshine and gladness. Let us have cheery teachers, for their sakes.—M. E. Sangster, in Sunday-school World.