BETTER CHARACTER NECESSARY TO BETTER TEACHING.
No one can teach well who does not live well. If words are as bullets, the character back of the words is as the powder which makes them effective. In small communities the teacher is well known to all his scholars. Does he keep a store, or work a farm, or run a mill, and cheat a little on weight or measure on the plea that “they all do it”? The sharp boys and girls will not forget that fact when he is talking to them about the sin of worldliness. Is he passionate, vindictive, impatient, puffed up, envious, given to small tattling? His exposition of sweet “charity,” as given in the thirteenth chapter of first Corinthians, will have small power to draw his young pupils. Their reasoning, though half unconscious, is conclusive to their own minds. It amounts to about this: If our teacher is so little affected by these truths which he attempts to teach, how can he expect them to affect us who are only taught? Some older people are sure they see the logical and practical fallacy of this reasoning. Long experience has taught them that consistency is so rare a jewel that not one in a thousand will possess it. They know something of the astonishing blindness of all people to their own faults, while they are so sharp-eyed to see the faults of others. They have ceased to expect perfection or rounded symmetry in Christian character, knowing the weakness of “poor human nature.” They are rather glad to hear anybody talk better than they act, so be it they are not hypocritical or conceited; for it seems to show that the ideal within them is not wholly dead. Such talkers are not quite satisfied with themselves, and they are still less satisfied with the low attainments of their neighbors. When a man is content with himself as he is he ceases to advance. Paul never seems to have settled into the comfortable indolence which is a prevalent fashion among modern Christians. “I count not myself to have apprehended,” he says, but I press towards the perfect standard of Christian character given us in Christ Jesus. O, for a little of Paul’s noble discontent with ourselves as we are! When we are better Christians we shall be better teachers.—Sunday-School World.