As a Missionary Training School
By W. A. Spicer
We must never forget that the Sabbath-school is the greatest missionary training-school agency that we have. Growing out of the primary aim in all Sabbath-school work, the personal conversion of the individual pupil, there is the equally important matter of training the convert and the believer in active service. Too often the Sabbath-school does not stand for definite incentive to service. No lesson in Bible study is ever appropriated as the blessing that it is in truth, unless along with the personal profit comes the divine impulse to pass the blessing on to others. Every Sabbath-school class ought to be a missionary band, planning how to work for others. This will give zest to Bible study. Our schools need the vitalizing force of the missionary idea, which is the inspiration of all Christian living. If we but fill the children and youth with enthusiasm to do the definite work God has committed to us in this interesting and needy world of His, it will be a power to hold them from the grasp of merely worldly ambitions. Let the youth know that there is work for them that calls for the most earnest efforts, and for a consecrated ambition to be, in Christ Jesus, positive factors for good in the most stirring period in all the history of God's work in the earth. It has been a narrow horizon, and a failure to understand how to take hold of the work to do it, that has caused many to relapse into indifference and worldliness just at the time when they should be recruiting our forces in the world-wide field. The Sabbath-school is to supply the needed direction and training. This lays upon our teachers a heavy responsibility. They must plan work for their classes, and lead them in it. I have noticed that a large proportion of missionaries who have spoken of their first incentives to service in the mission fields abroad have said that the missionary impulse came to them in Sunday-school or Bible-class work. The life of Eliza Agnew, who died a few years ago in Ceylon, shows how even little children may receive the definite call to missionary service. At the age of eight, she heard of the needs of India and Ceylon. She determined that when she grew up, she would do something for the women of the East. Home duties held her until she was thirty, when she went to Ceylon, and for thirty-five years, until her death, gave her life uninterruptedly to the training of Cingalese girls. Over a thousand girls were taken in from heathen homes, and of these, it is said, over five hundred left the school as Christians. For their own, as well as for the work's sake, we must not overlook the little ones in teaching the missionary idea. But no teacher can really teach it who is not personally surrendered to God for service, wherever He may call. This is the essential qualification of the missionary Sabbath-school teacher. With this qualification, however, among teachers and officers, our schools will be very fountains of missionary interest and activity. And the training thus received in helping their classes will fit the teachers themselves for service in the field, either at home or abroad. The Sabbath-school organization should henceforth be, more decidedly than ever before, one vast training school for missionary workers.