01.08. CHAPTER VIII - THE TEACHER’S PASSION

CHAPTER VIII - THE TEACHER’S PASSION

There is one miracle of grace by which a wandering soul comes back to God. There is another by which a soul itself touched with infinite love feels an absorbing passion to go after another who, like itself, had gone astray. There is no place where one who has felt this high commission can hope to win greater trophies than in the Sunday School. Birrell says of John Wesley that “he was out of breath pursuing souls.” If only the same panting desire might be born in the heart of every Sunday School teacher!

Thompson pictures, in “The Hound of Heaven,” God out after the soul; pursuing it up and down the universe. The hunted one flees, as men so constantly flee, from the highest and seeks refuge in every human thing that could be called at all good, but the point of the poem is that the good must never hide men from the best. So the soul is never allowed to rest in lower things; just as the soul would nestle in some new covert, she is turned from it by the imperious best of all that claims her for its own.

Now in the teacher’s life there are many opportrinities to advance the good, to develop intellectual taste, to encourage the scholar’s thirst for learning, but none of these must stand in the way of the one thing for which the teacher is called to his high eminence. Nor literature, nor ideals of any sort can take the place of the one ideal the perfect life in Christ Jesus. So the Sunday School of itself is not an end; teaching of itself is not an end. The result of the Sunday School is the production of life and character, and the end of teaching is that Christ may ]be formed in each scholar, the hope of glory. In order to teach such lessons, it goes without saying that one must have experience in the thing he teaches, so that no one may turn upon him and say, “Sayest thou this thing of thyself or did another tell it thee of me!” Has he first hand information? Does he speak out of a rich and full experience, which has been wrought in him by holy ventures and has entered through the travail of his soul into the substance of his life? To a heart which has such an experience, what a challenge presents itself! Twenty-seven millions of young people in this country who are not in the Sunday School and almost as many millions more already within its reach! Of old one crusade followed another. That the sepulchre of Jesus might be won from the Saracen, Peter the Hermit cried “God wills it,” and hundreds of thousands of men marched on the first crusade. Fifty years later a million and a quarter set out for Jerusalem, no one of whom saw the Holy Land. So one crusade followed another, and little enough resulted from them.

Perhaps the saddest of all crusades was the Children’s Crusade in 1212. An army of thirty thousand French children, unarmed, led by a boy named Stephen, set out for the Holy Land by way of Marseilles, and a similar army of German children marched over the Alps and came to the Mediterranean. They thought the sea would divide for them and they would pass over to the Holy Land in safety. Most of them perished on the march, or were lost at sea, or were sold into slavery.

Now the time has come for a crusade for the children. A challenge of unspeakable importance rests upon the heart of the church. Shall we be able to win these millions to the service of the Master? You may rear buildings, but the torch of the incendiary may consume them or the tempest may overthrow them, but when we put our touch upon the plastic soul of youth, it will remain there when the wax has changed to adamant. We must not bungle our work. We see men and women who were the subject of malpractice in their youth by careless or ignorant servant or physician. They will walk the path of life to the grave and every step they will go with pain. Life’s functions instead of being a joy have become an agony. Sad as is that picture, it is not for a moment to be compared with the work of one who bungles in the forming and transforming of the soul, who brings only human diagnosis and remedy in the place of the wisdom and power of God.

Every teacher must realize that her students are looking not simply into her face but into her. soul, that the thing she is is greater than the science she teaches. Garfield said if he could sit on one end of a log and have Mark Hopkins, president of “Williams College, on the other, it would be all the college he required.

Here as nowhere else comes the gospel of the personal touch. I cannot bear to think that the soul of a child should be either mishandled or neglected. That thrilling story of human experience, “Twice Born Men,” was called in England “Broken Earthenware.” I do not want the fair vase of life broken. Thank God it sometimes happens that a broken vase may be mended by His grace so that it can hold the water of life, but let me protect and surround the vase so that it may not be shattered. It is a sad comment on the passion and the efficiency of our teaching force that one out of every five who come to the Sunday School is won to Christ in the School, one after they leave the School, and three are not won at all. It is time we taught our children that they are never too young to surrender their hearts to Jesus Christ. It is time our teachers felt that their work has been in the most important part failure, unless by personal experience their members are coming to know Him whom to know aright is life eternal.