Premiums and Rewards by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 28, 1883

Premiums and Rewards.

By Editor

In answer to a question on the subject of prizes, the Sunday-school Times makes the following remarks:—

"Rewards are allowable and proper, where prizes or premiums are to be condemned. A reward is a return for something rendered. A premium is an award for success in competition with others. A reward may be received without the discomfiture of another. A premium cannot be taken except at a competitor's cost or loss. A proffered reward is sure to be won, when a certain work is performed or a certain attainment is reached. The winning of a premium depends not so much on one's own well-doing, as upon the poorer doing of others. A wise system of rewards opens the possibility of success to all who will strive under its rules; and it forbids the claim of success to those who have not come up to a well-defined mark. The best devised plan of premiums may exclude from the award those who have done well, and who have done their very best; while it may give the first place to one who has neither done well, nor done his best, but who wins only through the lack of others. Prizes are always out of place in a Sunday-school. Rewards may be employed there within due bounds, and in the exercise of a sound discretion. It is not right to distinguish the scholar who does most. It may be well to give a particular recognition to every scholar who does well. Yet material rewards should never be a prominent element in the working methods of a Sunday-school. The reward of a gratified look and of a kindly word of approval from a loving teacher may be such a stimulus to a scholar's well-doing—in attendance and in Bible study—as no reward of books or pictures could become. After all, the truest power in the Sunday-school is spiritual power."