As an example of the error of talking figuratively to those who do not appreciate, and who are apt to take everything literally, a story is worth telling. The respected superintendent of a Sunday school had told his boys that they should endeavour to bring their neighbours to the school, saying that they should be like a train—the scholar being the engine, and his converts the carriages. Judge of his surprise when, next Sunday, the door opened during lessons, and a little boy, making a noise like an engine, ran in, followed by half-a-dozen others in single file at his back! He came to a halt before the superintendent, who asked the meaning of it all. The naive answer was—"Please, sir, I'm the engine, and them's the carriages."
A Sabbath school teacher, at the finish of a lesson on "The Fall," asked—"Now, children, what lesson can we learn from the story of Adam and Eve? Well, Johnnie?" Johnnie—"Never believe what your wife says."
A lady asked one of the children in her class, "What was the sin of the Pharisees?" "Eating camels, ma'am," was the reply. The little girl who answered had read that the Pharisees "strained at gnats and swallowed camels." "In what condition was the patriarch Job at the end of his life?" questioned a teacher of a stolid-looking boy. "Dead," was the quiet response.
"What is the outward and visible sign in baptism?" asked a lady. There was silence for some seconds, and then a girl broke in triumphantly with, "The baby, please, mem."
The Rev. David Macrae tells that in a Brooklyn Sunday school a small boy was asked the question, "Who was the first man?" and, with characteristic American cocksureness, he immediately replied, "General Washington." The teacher smiled, then asked—"Did you never hear of Adam?" "Why, yes," responded the child, "I've heard of Adam; but I didn't know you were counting foreigners."
Recently, in a Sunday school in Scotland, a little boy, who had been transferred to a new class, was asked on arrival if he had had the Shorter Catechism. For a moment he looked puzzled, and then replied—"I'm no sure, mem, until I ask my mither; but I ken I've had the measles."
Elsewhere, a teacher had been carefully explaining the parable of the Prodigal Son, and that done, she proceeded to put questions. All went well until near the close, when she asked, "Now, tell me who was not pleased to see the prodigal son when he came home," and to her consternation got the reply, "Please, ma'am, the fatted calf."
In a Sunday school in Ayrshire, attended chiefly by miners' children, the lesson for the day had been the parable of the ten wise and ten foolish virgins, and the teacher asked—"Can any one of you tell me why the virgins' lamps went out?" "I ken," immediately responded the dullest boy in the class; "it was the wicks that was needin' pykin'."
And the story is hoary with age of how a teacher, when the lesson had been read which bore on Jacob's dream, invited questions from the class, and how one little fellow asked—"Why did the angels need a ladder for ascending and descending when they had wings and could flee?" The teacher was nonplussed, but got out of the difficulty by saying—"Perhaps some of the other boys can answer." "I think I ken," ventured a little fellow, whose father was a bird fancier, "maybe they wad be moultin' at the time."
His solutions may be extraordinary, but nothing, you see, can baffle the young wit. It was again in a Sunday school that a teacher had been instructing a class in the relative positions of man and the lower animals in the scale of intelligence, and wishing to test how the lesson had been imbibed, she asked—"Now, what is next to man?" and got the answer promptly—"His shirt."