Personal Work With Scholars.
WE hope that every Sabbath-school teacher will read the following item from the Christian at Work. The object of the Sabbath-school is not to amuse the children for an hour a week, but to teach them the Bible, and lead them to Christ. The teacher may not be able in every case to accomplish all that is desired, but if no effort is made in that direction, of what value is the teaching? And the teacher must remember that he is not merely to teach about the Bible, but to teach the Bible itself; not to teach about Christ, but to teach Christ. A Sunday-school scholar was recently heard to make this confession: She had attended Sunday-school for six years, and in all that time no personal appeal of any kind had been addressed to her by her teacher to become a Christian. Finally one summer her teacher was away, and for six weeks another teacher occupied the teacher's chair. This teacher's method was as different as it well could be; there was a practical application of the lesson, followed by what some would call "leading questions." But the result was that before the old teacher had returned two scholars in the class had determined to confess their Saviour, which they did, and shortly afterwards united with the church. This incident fairly illustrates the worthlessness of much of the Sunday-school instruction of the day, which consists wholly in teaching the naked facts of the lesson, utterly ignoring their practical bearing upon the daily life. Now it goes without saying that Sunday-school teaching of this kind is not worth all the trouble it costs. The paraphernalia and appointments of the Sunday-schools, the responsive readings and waltzing tunes, the blackboard and the mottoes, picture cards, papers and books, plus the services of the teachers—all these and more, instituted that the scholar may receive a half-hour's instruction once a week on the bare facts of the lesson—well positively it does not pay. The Sunday-school is called the nursery of the church; there is sarcasm in the phrase, for it is to be feared that many Sunday-school chapels are little else than religious play-rooms for the children. A teacher who teaches the Sunday-school lesson, and yet who fails to say one word to the scholar as to the duty of right living, and the solemn obligation of discharging his duty to God—utterly fails in his first and most imperative duty. The highest power is not in the realm of the purely natural, but inheres in the domain of the spiritual, and the trend of the teaching must be in that direction to rightly be "teaching" at all. You might as well expect to make flesh for your children by feeding them with naked bone, as to build up the spiritual nature or bring a boy or girl to better living by drawing a picture of a fortress of Machærus or speculating as to whether the soul of Lazarus was in the same place during his first funeral as at his second.