OUR MODEL SUPERINTENDENT.
Our superintendent believes in the training of the children and youth of his school in habits of intelligent, practical, next-door, and world wide benevolence. He believes that love is helpful. One may sing songs about charity and cling tenaciously to his money, as one may chant about the heavenly life, and live the life of a brute. He knows that the ideal is one thing and that real life is another. He therefore thinks much over the problem, How can I inspire my pupils to resolve dreams into deeds, songs into service, love into life? Scholars may become apt in all branches of Biblical knowledge, and teachers may have tact in communicating and eliciting such knowledge, and be able on “state occasions” to make brilliant display of their pupils’ powers and attainments. Our superintendent remembers that the knowledge of the Bible is valuable only when it distills its genial and potent influences from the head into the heart and exerts them in every-day life. He is, therefore, famous for his missionary zeal. Believing that charity begins at home, he centers the education of his pupils upon this world rather than upon the New Jerusalem above. He teaches them by every lesson, where the thought can be introduced, that love must work itself out in the kitchen, dining-room, parlor, school-room, on the play-ground, on the street, and all this three hundred and sixty-five days and six hours every year. He tells his pupils that the love of the gospel makes little people sympathetic and useful; leads them to bear another’s burdens, to remove father and mother’s anxiety; to help stand by the abused and the poor and weak on the play-ground; to sympathize with the unfortunate rather than to ridicule them; to visit sick people, young and old; to offer their services in homely practical ways, and in order to do all this, to deny themselves ease, luxury, self-indulgence, in many little things; for, he says, if little people accustom themselves, out of sympathy for other people, to self-denial in trifles, when they become, older and larger they will meet and resist the more dangerous temptations of life. In this way our superintendent cultivates the home seed, and thus prepares the seed-corn for the world-wide fields of the foreign missionary work.—National S. S. Teacher.