XIII
THE TEACHER'S QUALIFICATIONS AND NEED OF TRAINING
While the superintendent in the school is the moving and guiding intelligence, the pulse of the machine, the teacher in the class is the worker at the anvil, or the loom, or the lathe, for whom all the plans are made, and upon whom all the success depends. In the warfare for souls he is on the picket line and at close range, fighting face to face and hand to hand. The sphere of his effort is small, that group gathered around him for an hour on Sunday, but in that little field his is the work that counts for the final victory. His task requires peculiar adaptedness, supplemented by special training.
1. His Qualifications. There are on the American continent not less than a million and a half Sunday-school teachers, who give to the gospel their free-will offering of time, and toil, and thought. They are not like civil engineers or the majority of public-school teachers, graduates of schools that have given them training for a special vocation. In every respect they are laymen, engaged for six days in secular work, and on one day finding an avocation in the Sunday school. Yet there are certain traits, partly natural and partly acquired, which they must possess, if they are to find success in their Sabbath-day service.
(1) A Sincere Disciple. The Sunday-school teacher must be a follower of Christ, not merely in profession but in spirit. He is one who has met his Lord, has heard and has obeyed the call, "Follow me." He enlisted in the grand army of which Christ is the Commander, before he received his assignment to the army corps of the Sunday school, and his fidelity to the department is inspired by his deeper loyalty to his Lord. It is eminently desirable that the Sunday-school teacher should be a member of the church; but it is imperative that he should be a disciple of Christ.
(2) A Lover of Youth. By far the largest proportion of scholars in the Sunday school, perhaps nine tenths, are under twenty-five years of age. Therefore, with few exceptions, the teachers must deal with young people; and youth at all its stages is not easy to understand and to manage. Moreover, the fact that not only the teachers, but to a large extent the scholars, are volunteers enters into the problem. Pupils attend the week-day school and submit to a teacher's rule because they must, whether their teachers are acceptable or are disliked. But the rule in the Sunday school is not the law of authority; it is the law of persuasion. The teacher who cannot draw his scholars, but repels them, soon finds himself without a class. In all teaching sympathy, or the coördination between the interest of the teacher in the pupil and of the pupil in the teacher, is a strong factor in success; but in the Sunday school it is an absolute necessity by reason of the voluntary element in the constitution of the Sunday school. That mystic power which will combine uncongenial spirits, and fuse the hearts of teacher and scholar into one, is love. Let the teacher love his scholars, let him see in each pupil some quality to inspire love, and the battle is half won. Love will quicken tact, and love and tact together will win the complete victory.
(3) A Lover of the Scriptures. Whatever the Sunday school of to-morrow may become, the Sunday school of to-day is preëminently a Bible school. There are tendencies in our time which may in another generation render the Bible less prominent, and introduce into the Sunday school studies in church history, in social science, in moral reform, in missions, perhaps in comparative religion, or in some other departments of knowledge. But as yet the great text-book of the school is the Holy Scriptures. The volume should be in the hand of every teacher and of every scholar during the school session; and the teacher, especially, must study it during the week. If all of the Bible that he knows is contained in the paragraphs assigned for the coming lesson, and the rest of the book is sealed to his eyes, he will be a very poor teacher. He needs to have his mind stored with a thousand facts, and to have these facts systematized, in order to teach ten; and the nine hundred and ninety which he knows will add all their weight to the ten which he tells.
(4) A Willing Worker. The teacher's love for Christ, for his scholars, and for his Bible is not to expend itself in emotion or even in study; it is to find expression in efficient service. A task is laid upon him which will demand much of his time and his power of body, mind, and spirit. He must be ready to meet his class fifty-two Sundays in the year: on days of sunshine and days of storm; when he is eager for the work, and when he is weary in it; when his scholars are responsive, and when they are careless; when his fellow workers are congenial, and when they are anti-pathetic; when his lesson is easy to teach, and when it is hard. He must be regular in his service, not turned aside by opportunities of enjoyment elsewhere; and he must give to it all his powers and all his skill. Work such as this can be sustained only by an enduring enthusiasm, a devotion to the cause; and therefore the teacher must have his heart enlisted as well as his will.
As a Sunday-school teacher, then, four harmonious objects will claim a share in his love: his Lord, his scholars, his Bible, and his work.
2. His Need of Training. For two generations it was supposed that any person fairly intelligent, without special equipment, was fitted to be a Sunday-school teacher. There are found no records of training classes in Sunday-school work earlier than 1855, when the Rev. John H. Vincent began to gather young people and train them for service in his Sunday school at Irvington, New Jersey. The seed of his "Palestine Class" grew into the "Normal Class"; and by 1869 there were in a few places classes for the teaching of teachers in the Bible and Sunday-school work. It is not remarkable that Sunday-school teacher-training should be delayed so long after the organization of the first Sunday school, when it is remembered that in America the first Normal School for secular teachers was not founded until 1839. The Chautauqua movement, begun in 1874, gave a strong impetus to Sunday-school teacher-training; the state associations and denominational organizations took up the work; and now teacher-training classes are to be found in every state and province on the American continent. The thoroughly graded school includes in its system a class for the training of young people who are to be teachers.