Or, if it is missionary Sunday, let the teacher utilize the most absorbing topics of foreign news. It may be the Spanish seizure of the Caroline Islands, the French capture of Madagascar, the Japanese campaign in Formosa or that of the English in Matabeleland or the Soudan, the Italian war with Abyssinia, the Indian famine, the troubles in Crete, the massacres in Armenia. What scholar, after a lesson shrewdly introduced by such recitals, will fail to see that missions are a topic very much alive?
6. A Map Lesson.—Few things condense, combine, and clarify bits of information like a map, provided you can put your information upon it. A map may be utilized in a temperance lesson in two good ways. If you are in a city, draw the streets of some section, or of the entire city, if possible. Send your scholars out along all streets, dividing them up, and have them count the saloons in each block, locating also the churches and schoolhouses. I suppose, of course, that your scholars are of suitable age for this work. Next Sunday, as they report, put a black spot on the map for every saloon, and a blue spot for every church and schoolhouse. Your map will point its own moral.
At another time draw a map of the United States, and give a graphic view of the temperance laws of the land, coloring the prohibition States one color, using a different color to designate the Massachusetts plan, the South Carolina plan, and so on.
More can be done with a map in a missionary lesson. For instance, you may select a single country, say India. Provide "stickers" of bright-colored paper. Let some be large and circular. As you talk about the four or five great languages of that many-tongued empire, get the scholars to fasten these "stickers" in the centers of the various language areas. Let other "stickers" be cut into small stars. Three of these, of one color, fastened in the neighborhoods of Bombay, Madura, and Ceylon, will represent the Congregational missions. In the same way you will show the location of the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian missions and those of other denominations. Population "stickers" may also be used, and "stickers" with the names of great missionaries may show where they labored.
On another day you may take a map of the entire world, and thus indicate the location of all the mission fields of your denomination. If this map is kept before the class from that time, every item of missionary information will have fresh interest and point.
7. A Statistics Lesson.—At this lesson distribute, for the scholars to read aloud, slips of paper containing temperance or missionary statistics,—the numbers of saloons or missionaries, of drunkards dying or converts made each day, the cost of missions or of strong drink compared with other expenditures, and the like. Get the class to cut strips of paper of various lengths to represent graphically the comparative costs. Drill the scholars in temperance or missionary arithmetic. Telling them the number of heathen in China, ask how long a procession they would make, marching in single file one foot apart. Giving them the liquor expenditure for a year, have them measure a pile of silver dollars and calculate how tall a pile would equal the annual cost of drink. Such books as "The Missionary Pastor," published by the Fleming H. Revell Company, and "Weapons for Temperance Warfare" and "Fuel for Missionary Fires," published by the United Society of Christian Endeavor, will suggest many similar exercises.
8. A Quotations Lesson.—The teacher holds in his hand a bunch of papers, on each of which is written an interesting quotation bearing on missions or temperance. The collection will include longer anecdotes as well as brisk sentences. Many will bear famous names. Each scholar will choose a quotation at random and read it aloud. The teacher will draw out its meaning by questions, will add illustrations and practical comments, will tell something about the author of the quotation, or will show the connection of the thought or anecdote with the day's lesson. In some classes the scholars themselves may be trusted to bring their own quotations or anecdotes.
Let me mention briefly a few more devices out of the many that may add interest to these lessons. Get a trained worker along temperance or missionary lines to come in and address the class. Carry out a series of simple experiments showing the physiological effects of alcohol. Make a study of the best missionary hymns, their authors, and the events that prompted them. Try a fifteen-minute debate on some missionary or temperance topic. Get the scholars now and then to write five-minute essays or give five-minute talks on appropriate themes. Let one edit a temperance or missionary paper,—in manuscript, of course,—collecting contributions from each scholar, and reading the result before the class as a sample number of the "Cold Water Herald" or the "Missionary Monitor." Some Sunday, call on every member of the class to sign the pledge. On a mission Sabbath make an appeal for tithe-giving and present a tithe-givers' pledge. Give the wonderful history of the Student Volunteer movement, and urge the scholars to consider the mission field as a possibility for each one of them. Enliven some missionary lesson with entertaining accounts of the strange customs of the country under discussion, and get together all the illustrative material you and your scholars can find. The Sunday-school and the Christian Endeavor society will do well to make a collection of curios for such purposes.
It is an admirable plan to set each of your scholars to doing some steady work in preparation for these lessons. One may watch the newspapers and collect temperance facts and illustrations of the evils of strong drink. The various missionary societies of the denomination may be divided among the scholars, each to gather interesting bits concerning the work of the board assigned to him. In the same way the mission lands may be apportioned out, and "the gentleman from India" or "our representative in China" be called upon to report the latest news from his field. In this plan the children will coöperate very zealously.