Take Nothing for Granted.
A MASSACHUSETTS Sunday-school teacher was talking with her scholars about one of our Lord's miracles of healing, and she said that Jesus was now just as ready to make our souls whole and sound, as he was in olden time to make men's bodies whole. After pressing this point, she asked that any who thought that their souls were in no need of cure would raise their hands. Up went several hands. At this she asked what they understood by having their souls cured. Promptly there came back the answer from a bright little boy: "You mean when the bottom of our feet don't ache." An odd conception that, but one which, while it remained, was a hopeless barrier to making the truth clear concerning spiritual wholeness. A gentleman told me that, when he was a lad, he went to his Christian employer and sought counsel under his burden of conscious sin. "Your only hope," was the reply, "is in accepting Jesus Christ as the propitiation for your sins." What "propitiation" meant, that teacher did not make clear; nor did the scholar know for himself; and so, for a time, it barred the way of salvation, instead of pointing it out. In view of one's constant liability to use words which his hearers do not understand, or which for the time being they misapprehend, a teacher has the responsibility and the duty of being always careful to make clear to his scholars the truths he would teach them. And in this effort a teacher may not rest satisfied with the mere declaration of the truth, in words that seem to himself explicit and plain; nor can he be sure that he has made the truth clear, just because his scholars re-state to him in the same words the truth he has declared to them. Telling a thing is not in itself teaching that thing; nor is hearing a recitation, teaching the thing recited. The words which the teacher employs in the telling, may be words which the scholar does not understand; or, again, the scholar may misapprehend the point and the purport of the teacher's statements, even while he knows the meaning of the several words employed. If this be the case as the scholar hears the words, it is in no way changed by the scholar's repeating the words back again just as he heard them. You send a message in cipher, by telegraph. The operator at the other end of the line "repeats" back that message just as he received it, in order to show that it was sent correctly. But neither the receiving of these words nor the repeating them, by that operator, gives him any idea of their true meaning; for they are in cipher. A great deal of the ordinary class-teaching in Sunday-school is in cipher; a cipher of which the key has never been given to the scholars.—Teaching and Teachers.