Sunday-School Success / A Book of Practical Methods for Sunday-School Teachers and Officers

In these pages I have described the methods of the most successful teachers and Sunday-schools I have known. While a large part of the book is the direct fruit of my own experience in Sabbath and secular schools, it sets forth, as every teacher will understand, what I have learned from my failures rather than from my successes.
Though the volume has something to say on all the great Sunday-school problems, it does not pretend to be a complete manual; indeed, who could prepare one on so stupendous a theme? If it justifies its appearance among the admirable treatises already published for Sunday-school workers, it will be because it presents with frankness the methods found helpful by an average teacher, who never had charge of a large school or a large class, but in district school, small college, and small Sunday-school has struggled with the practical problems of a teacher, and in some of them at least, like Sentimental Tommy, has found a way.
A large number of these chapters have appeared in the Sunday-school Times, and others in the Sunday-school Journal of the Methodists, the Pilgrim Teacher of the Congregationalists, the Westminster Teacher of the Presbyterians, the Baptist Teacher, and the Golden Rule. I am grateful to these periodicals for permission to include this material in my book.
Amos R. Wells.
Boston, September, 1897.


In one of those dreams which are truer than waking there passed before me a long line of the Sunday-school teachers I have known. One after the other they appeared—those that had taught my childish lips to repeat the Bible words, those that had led my youth into the opening glories of the International Lessons, those that had put to rest the rising doubts of the young man and clinched his faith to the Rock of ages; those, also, of less blessed memory, whom I knew in early or later years, that had done none of these things, but other good things not so good.
And I noted in astonishment, as each came into view, that all were decked with diverse crowns. I had not looked long before I saw that these crowns were not arbitrary and artificial, but sprung from the very substance of the character of each. They had all received their reward, but according to their deeds.