Even beyond all this, our newspapers afford the teacher a vast supply of illustrative material. There are the carefully prepared biographies of the great men and women that pass away, printed with their portraits. There are sketches of the lives of living celebrities, with pictures of their faces and their homes. There are lectures and sermons, sometimes admirably reported, giving in a few bright paragraphs the gist of an hour's discourse. There are thousands of poems by the best modern authors. There are appropriate editorial comments on all the holidays, Christmas and New Year's, Easter and Memorial Day, Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July. There are accounts of the latest wonderful inventions, each a pointed parable to one with eyes and a brain. And, with all its pictorial enormities, the newspaper often contains a portrait or a sketch worth using in our lesson half-hour.
In all this I am taking for granted, of course, that you subscribe to no sensational abomination, but to the best of our standard sheets, even if you must get it from some other city than your own. It must be a paper so clean that you can occasionally hand a copy to your scholars, and fearlessly set them to "reading up" on some theme helpful to the lesson. Besides, it must not be forgotten that our best religious weeklies are now genuine newspapers as well, and furnish admirable comments upon all important current events.
To use the newspaper to the best advantage in your teaching, you must have well in mind all the lesson themes for months in advance, since a striking event of to-day might not illustrate this week's lesson, but the lesson of five weeks ahead. Your best plan is to cut out each day the paragraphs and articles that seem likely to be of use, and preserve them in a series of envelopes. Mark one set of envelopes with the topics and dates of a year's lessons. Let another set contain the clippings arranged by subjects, as: "Love," "Faith," "Temperance," "Missions," "Theater," "Heroism," "Inventions." These will contain poems as well as prose. Some, rather than classify the bits of biography under the characteristics especially prominent in each case, will prefer to arrange them alphabetically, in a separate set of twenty-six envelopes. As the envelope for each week's lesson is used, distribute its contents through your permanent file. Frequently glance over your clippings to refresh your memory concerning them; otherwise they will become so much dead wood.
Not an unimportant result of all this is that it will teach your scholars to read the newspaper as a Christian should. In this great American university our scholars should be taught to skip the courses in evil and elect those in goodness.
And a final word,—which, indeed, no teacher is likely to need, though it must be said: keep the whole matter subordinate. It is not proposed to turn our Sunday-schools into classes for the study of current events. We have to do with one Life, and with that alone. We are teaching not all kinds of truth, but him who is the Truth. Whatever we admit into our teaching that does not exalt him and throw light on his life and doctrine is a harmful impertinence. We are not to study the lamp, but the Book that lies beneath it.
Chapter XXIII
On Taking Things for Granted
The cliff-scaler, who lowers his comrade down the precipice, does not take for granted the fastening around the tree or the stoutness of the rope; but the Sunday-school teacher too often throws his young people into the treacherous depths of thought and life with little care for their life-rope's integrity or moorings. More than once or twice or thrice in my own experience, after weeks and months of supposedly thorough intercourse with my scholars, an awkward question, better aimed by Heaven than by myself, has disclosed some fatal doubt, some fundamental misconception. I had been taking for granted that my boy really believed Christ to be divine, or that he had at least the beginnings of a conception of the Saviour's mission to the earth, or that he knew by experience the meaning of prayer, or that he actually had confidence in a future life.