448 WHY DOES SUNDAY SCHOOL TEACHING WIN

arm; behind you is some approaching vehicle. Your iron nerves do not even prompt you to turn round, but by the sudden twitch upon your arm you are made aware that that which moves you not impresses and even alarms your companion.

A similar sensitiveness obtains in the domain of moral impressions, and from two distinct causes. First, the indwelling gentleness and purity, furnished in higher degree by an All Wise Providence to enable the ruder shocks of the world to be withstood, which makes evil appear more repugnant, and virtue more estimable. The ancients embodied innocence passive virtue and charity-active virtue, in female form. Second, this greater moral sensitiveness is owing to the fact that girls, for the most part staying at home, are not subjected to that dulling of conscience and feeling which boys more or less experience as they go out into the world and become familiar with the observance and knowledge, if not the practice, of evil.

But it is in matters more strictly religious that this readier impressibility of girl nature concerns us most as Sunday-school teachers. Here it is no less manifest than elsewhere. As a womanly heart to-day is first touched and most deeply touched by suffering, so it was the women of Galilee who, entering into the trials of Christ, "ministered unto Him of their substance," and gave a kindly attention, dictated by feelings of charity, which was but the first evidence of an impressibility peculiar to themselves. Continuing this illustration, we observe in these women the early perception of the worth there is in Christ, the sharp impressibility to receive the evidences of His divine purpose. Mary "pondered His words in her heart," and before He had yet performed a miracle she bade the joyous wedding guests, "Whatsoever He saith unto you, do it."

Further, whatever the cause that has introduced them to Christ,— charitable ministry in the case of the sisters of Lazarus, or personal need in the case of Mary of Magdala-the first impression soon deepens into reverent adoration and most devoted love. Some two years or more of direct teaching on the part of Christ to the apostles did not eradicate the idea of an earthly kingdom and of personal advancement; the women, with far less instruction, and not anticipating any personal advantage in the new kingdom that was generally expected would be shortly established, these were faithful to Christ in the darkest hour of His life, when Peter denied and John fled. And why? Because of the impressions of His worth their comparatively slight contact with Him had awakened.

(b.) Girl nature is characterized by a readier trust than boy nature. It seems to be natural for woman to depend, and for man to stand without support. This natural dependance of woman is a preparation for the reception of the saving truth of Christ; for having it, it must be easier to learn the lesson that self is not a sufficient saviour. Further, it ensures a readier assent, and a simpler, truer trust when truth is set forth. The girl naturally inclines to confide in the teachings of authority; the boy who stays not at home, but goes forth into the world of conflicting truth and error, assimilates truth more slowly, and exercises trust in whatever he hears more measuredly. The two will reach the truth along different paths. Speaking generally, the boy

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CHRIST

MORE GIRLS THAN BOYS FOR CHRIST?

449

hears, thinks, questions, doubts, reasons, and at last believes; the girl hears, and from her natural dependance assents and trusts with less delay.

(c.) Girl nature is more responsive in grateful love than boy nature.

This is the sequence to be expected from a readier trust. In the girl the streams of love are more gushing, the springs of affection, though deeper, are more uprising. She will give love where he only admires. When the beauty of Christ's life, the power of His death, the victory of His resurrection, are being taught, the truth finds a more affectionate and grateful reception here than it does there.

The girl seems more responsive to the claims of that life of deep, calm, compassionate sympathy, that delighted in enduring hardship whilst scattering blessing. It was a woman whose grateful love prompted her to cast her all into the treasury. It was a Mary who spent the savings of her lifetime in one act of affectionate ministry unto her Lord. It was another Mary whose wealth of love prompted the statement-weak woman though she was-"Tell me where you have laid Him, and I will bear Him away."

It appears, then, that the disposition of woman more readily responds in grateful love than that of man.

Now love is a gateway of knowledge-the principal gateway in childhood. We have it on the highest authority that obedience follows love, and knowledge obedience. Christ also gave the first revelation of Himself after His resurrection to the Mary who, having been most blessed, loved most, and thus was most fitted to first verify the truth, "He is risen."

Passing on now to notice,

II. The circumstances incident to the life of boys and girls respectively, we observe that these are such as to render it more difficult for a boy to become and be a Christian than for a girl.

What may be called the thoughtful age, which I take to be the middle of the teens, is much more eventful to the former than to the latter. The boy or youth is then entering upon his business career. Often he then leaves home for the first time to find a new abode in a strange place. His attention is thus much distracted from the things of highest moment. He is strongly tempted to temporize, and often yields. It is when he settles down for life that he is going to think of God's claims; meanwhile he must give himself to business. This is no new argument, no fresh difficulty teachers of boys have to face.

The departure from home removes the boy from the good influence of his old teacher when it should be most helpful to him. It also renders any tables of success in Sunday-school work inaccurate, unless they can be universal, and deal with the unseen as well as the seen.

Again, whether a boy leaves home and native place or not, he is exposed to greater adverse influences than is a girl.

The home influences are not always healthily Christian; sometimes they are decidedly and strongly anti-Christ; yet should a boy go from a Christian or from a worldly home, he has to meet in the world outside those who sneer at goodness and scoff at religion, and seem to him to prosper notwithstanding, just when he is trying his best to get on.

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S. S. TEACHER AND THE TEACHING.

Mr. Bembridge, of Ripley, writes:

"I find boys slower to perceive and appreciate, and harder in their nature; they yield more to reason and argument than feeling; but when once convinced and set right, are not so easily moved away from goodness until the anxieties, care, and worry of life lays hold upon them. So that a young man once enlisted is, as a rule, more reliable than a young woman for future work and future service for Christ."

III. The Teacher and the Teaching.

It seems to be a fact that, other things being equal, woman makes the best children's teacher. Men are more anxious to teach scientifically. Not that science enters in larger degree as illustration into the subject teaching, but that their lessons are, as a rule, more stiffly formal, elaborate, cut and dried, in their setting forth. They are more inclined to degenerate into or not to rise above the merely enunciatory style of teaching. While the science of teaching may not be despised, it should ever be subservient to the truth to be taught, and never usurp the first place in the teacher's mind as he teaches. There is greater danger of this amongst men, who, as modestly as it may be expressed, feel more keenly the mental and intellectual competition and strain of the present age than do women, and in response are tempted to pay more attention to the science of teaching than to the soil and the seed. A woman teaches first by the heart, and second by the head; but is this always the order amongst men? Is it to the emotions or to the intellect that

our first appeals are made?

The Rev. R. H. Lovell writes:

"To merely prepare a lesson is utterly to miss the mark. We must study each scholar, bait our net for each one, wait the proper and best season (often in the dark night of sorrow), our one aim being not the display of self, but to win souls for Christ."

What so ineffaceable as the lessons of early childhood? Who a teacher like a mother? A woman is the ministering angel who can best bring home lessons to children.

How is it, my brother teacher, you are not welcomed into your class like your sister teacher across the room? A voice from the form answers, "Because you are either late in arriving, or would be if you were a minute later." Another voice from the same quarter adds, "Because you have forgotten to make yourself the friend of your class." Another replies, "Your conduct of the class wants sympathy with boyish nature in its exuberance of animal spirit." A fourth one states, "Your teaching wants heart and freshness; we boys can talk; we call you, not talker, but teacher." While a last one replies, "I am the master in the class. You have so mismanaged me that I disregard your authority. If I am to love my teacher, he must rule, but take care how." As our subject affords opportunity for a hint or two, I will conclude with such as have occurred to me whilst preparing this paper.

in

First, one which is not fresh, but old, even in its abuse. Be always your class ten minutes before school commences, or should commence. I have observed that our sister teachers are much nearer the ideal in this respect than we men are.

This odd ten minutes may be crammed full of work for Christ. As your scholars arrive they are glad to see you there to welcome them. You can then prove yourself the friend of your boy. He will be glad

A CHRISTMAS GREETING.

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to confide in you. He will be constrained to punctuality; and I know of no better way of taming an over-turbulent spirit than a few minutes' talk before school about his rabbits, his cricket-bat, his week-day circumstances, a book he has been reading, and such like topics, somewhat removed from the immediate design of your teaching.

The secret of

To point a second hint I will use an illustration. success in Parliamentary contests is the electoral register. The secret of success in the contest waged between the attractions of worldliness and the forces of godliness is the Sunday-school register. Take care that your scholars are regular in attendance. If absent twice together, look them up. They will like to feel they are missed.

In a dale in Derbyshire there is a plantation of young oaks. About every square yard contains a dwarfed straggling thing that can neither grow straight nor allow its neighbours to become sturdy of limb nor deep in root. The present system of Sunday school preparation attempts to teach too much. By overcrowding the young mind we get vagueness of perception and comparative barrenness. To teach one truth well in an afternoon is good work; to scatter half-a-dozen is waste.

Be more earnest in tone. Many a good lesson is spoilt in the teaching. From meditation and from prayer go to your class, your heart all aglow with the truth, and having obtained a right estimate of the needs and capacity of each scholar, drive it home in a personal manner. Do not generalize and leave him to apply, but get hold of your hammer.

Lastly, form the habit of taking one or another of your boys aside after the school is over, and while impression is yet vivid, clench the truth by a few loving, earnest, solemn words, remembering that salvation means a personal apprehension of a revealed Saviour. Special thought and tact will be required for this, but "he that winneth souls is wise." FRED. J. Cox.

A Christmas Greeting.

WE welcome thee, O Christmas time!

To this our waiting earth;

Thou tellest us the old glad tale

Of our Redeemer's birth;

And we will ring the joy-bells forth,
And sing our songs of mirth.

We needed thee, O Christmas time!
For the world had lack of gold,
And fierce strife stirred the hearts of men,
And love was growing cold;
But there is magic in thy touch,-

Exert it, as of old!

Open our eyes, O Christmas time!

Teach us that we may see
What good is in our brothers yet,
How kind their faces be,
And make us warm within the glow
That shines on all from thee.
Bid us go forth, O Christmas time!
To homes all dark and sad,
Until we see the hungry fed

And shivering bodies clad;

Nor let us dare to take thy hand

If we make not some heart glad.

Take us again, O Christmas time!
To far-off Bethlehem,

Where the star shines in the night sky
As in a diadem;

And while the shepherds worship Christ,
Let us bow down with them.

Take us to Him, O Christmas time!
We need the Holy Child;
For care lies heavy on our hearts
And we are sin-defiled;
But we shall all be comforted
By His compassion mild.

We give thee greeting, Time of Love,
With sweetest carol-hymn;

We deck our homes to welcome thee;
For though the skies are dim,
The Christ-Child comes to light the earth,
And we are glad in Him.

MARIANNE FARNINGHAM.

Papers for Young Men.

XI. MANLY THINKING.*

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CHRISTIANITY accepts and endorses this inward and broad basis of manhood, and employs its facts and revelation, impulse and inspiration to secure a thorough regeneration of man's inmost life. It seeks to re-create him as a thinker, refuses to look on the mere scholar" as the full man, and works on the Hebrew idea, lately re-announced by Emerson, that the true notion of manhood is "man thinking; not man the victim of society and a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking "—but man, thinking "in his heart," with all his inward forces, conscience and will, fancy and emotion, hope and experiencethinking in the whole of him, and with the whole of him, and for the whole of him and his race, and so making speech the clear, full, and indivisible echo of his thought, and deed the visible garment of his inward life.

Nothing, therefore, is more absurd than to speak of Christianity as hostile to the most daring and intrepid thought. Hostile to thinking! It lives upon it, thrives by it, compels it, pushes itself into every section of our manifold existence by it, and revolutionises the world by breaking the dull continuity of man's mechanical movements with its spiritual goads to freshness and venture of thought. Its greatest men have been strong, capable, and heroic thinkers. As Peter, baptized into the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, saw new worlds of truth, felt new forces, so he preached new duties, and was a new power. What we call the conversion" of Paul was a total revolution in his methods of thinking concerning God and His revelations. Luther had "faith" long before he had peace and power; but he needed "light to break forth from God's Holy Word," so that his faith might rest on a true basis. It was not ritual or worship, earnestness or fervour he lacked in the convent, but a new direction for his thinking. He got it: and it was the regeneration of Europe; led to the insurrection of its intelligence, conscience, and whole thinking heart against the tyranny of Rome, and supplied in its inestimably valuable issues another illustration that the manhood of the world has been prodigiously advanced by the mighty impulse Christ has given to fresh, courageous, and manly thinking.

Jesus set in the front of His teaching the comprehensive law, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind." God would have us understand Him, study His works and ways, apprehend the essence and the features of His character; and love Him "with all the heart and soul and strength" because we intelligently recognise His nature, see the meaning of His messages, and the significance of our relations to Him. Puzzling facts are put before us to rouse our sluggish thought. Enemies of truth and righteousness wake us from the sleep forced on us by the opiates of the world. The fierce scorn and bitter gibe of the sceptic compel us to weigh our phrases, recast our opinions, fling aside our mechanical unrealities, and betake ourselves with cleansed sight and holier resolve to Him who is Himself, the life of our inmost being.

I reject, therefore, with ineffable scorn, the notion that I live by a faith which does not rest on a reasoned basis, accept a Christianity From the fifth of a series of sermons appearing in the Christian Commonwealth.-See Nov. 15, 1883.