Speech-Making Superintendents.
It is not every Sabbath-school superintendent who seems to understand the essential nature and work of the school, nor, as a consequence, recognizes his own peculiar duties at the head of the school. Many a superintendent is not entirely clear in his mind as to the vital difference between a school and every other sort of religious meeting. This confusion of mind it is that causes such undue prominence to be given in many Sabbath-schools to preaching from the superintendent's desk. A superintendent's best work is superintending; and if he gives his full time and strength to that work, he has neither time nor strength for the work of a preacher or an evangelist—important as preaching and evangelizing are in their way. On many of the inland or ocean steamers, you will see posted conspicuously on the outside of the pilot-house the notice: "Do not talk with the man at the wheel." And if you could hear the directions which are given to the man at the wheel by those who set him at his post, you would hear it said to him: "Do not talk with the passengers." Yet the regular trips of that steamer are about the only times when the man at the wheel meets those passengers; and it might seem that a few loving words, a few earnest thoughts, on his part, might bring his heart in contact with theirs, and tend to warm and quicken their hearts. It does not seem that steering a vessel is everything. Yet, on the other hand, steering is the real business of the man at the wheel, and warming and quickening the hearts of the passengers is not his mission; and for him to attempt the warming and quickening business is to endanger the steering of the vessel—to which he is set. And so it is with the man at the Sabbath-school wheel; steering is his business and demands his whole attention. The superintendent is set to oversee and guide the school in its peculiar work. He is to see that teachers and scholars are wisely classified, that the teachers are trained to, and are faithful in, their several duties, and that the separate classes are brought into such harmonious co-operation as to carry the school along as an organized whole. He is to give unity to the general exercises of the school, and to lead in the service of common worship. An examination of the school on its lesson for the day, and an emphasis on the main point of its teaching, is properly within the sphere of his mission. But this is very different from talking, or exhorting, or haranguing, from the desk. The writer of this note has had occasion, for a series of years, to compare the methods of many schools, in city and in country, at this point of speech-making in the superintendent's desk, and his present convictions are based upon the result of these observations. A dozen years ago, while even more than now in the general field of Sabbath-school method, he expressed his views on this subject, as follows: "Nothing else fritters away so much time as speech-making. Nothing else so hinders or retards the work of teaching there. Some men are excellent superintendents in everything else save in the habit of long-winded addresses—addresses on which they pride themselves. They have good schools in spite of their speeches. They could have better schools without them. Other superintendents have poor schools because of their lectures. They might have good schools if they would talk less. While it is admitted that a moderate indulgence in closing addresses would not necessarily ruin a superintendent for his appropriate and legitimate work, the tendency of the habit is so largely toward intemperance that cautious and conservative men are urging total abstinence from Sabbath-school speech-making as the only safeguard against disastrous excesses in this line."—S. S. Times.