THOUGHTS FOR YOUNG TEACHERS.

I.

About your Work.

SOU have all heard of Michael Angelo, the great Italian sculptor and painter;

but perhaps you have not all heard the

following story respecting him.

One day at the beginning of his career he was walking with a friend, when he came upon some blocks of rough marble. Probably it was in the neighbourhood of Carrara, whose marble hills furnished from their thirty quarries the choicest material for the sculptor's work. One block especially attracted his attention. It was lying,

dirty and rough hewn, heaped around with rubbish and refuse and green with moss. Doubtless many eyes had glanced over it carelessly, without detecting in it any especial adaptability or excellence. But his eye rested on it, his hand touched it. Then turning to his friend he said, "In this rough block there lies concealed an angel, and I mean to set it free." The block was ordered to be sent at once to his studio to be worked upon by his skilful hands, and ere long Michael Angelo's kneeling angel went forth to the world, winning all hearts by its wondrous beauty.

Now it seems to me that this story may be looked upon as a beautiful parable, setting forth the subject of this present little paper-a teacher's work. Every uncultivated, undeveloped nature, is like a block of unhewn stone. It needs the skilled and loving hands of those who train and teach, to set the angel that is within free from all that keeps it a prisoner, and send it forth a thing of purity and beauty to fill its

place in the world. Literally, then, a teacher's work is to remove everything that fetters or disfigures, and to aid in the development of all that is good and lovely in a child's nature.

Does every teacher in the vast army who lay claim to the name realise the truth of this? Is this the feeling with which they meet their classes day after day? Dare we hope it is so?

I said a vast army. It is difficult indeed to form a just notion of the number. In Colleges and High Schools, in Board Schools and Voluntary Schools, in Sunday Schools and Night Schools, thousands of persons are employed in the work of teaching. Thousands! yea, rather hundreds of thousands!

Look at our elementary schools alone. There are employed in them, throughout the length and breadth of the land, over thirty thousand head teachers. These have under them a large number of assistant teachers and pupil teachers.

Then there are the Sunday schools. Wherever

a church or chapel exists, there a band of earnest workers from among its worshippers join together in this work of teaching the young.

Teaching them what?

Perhaps there is no question of the present day which occupies a larger share of attention than this the question of education. There are systems, and plans, and codes, which often prove a puzzle even to the initiated. Teachers and their necessary qualifications; teaching and its extent, its success, or its failure, are great matters now, about which great minds occupy themselves. To keep a school, or instruct a class, is no longer a simple thing which everybody, or as was once the opinion, which anybody can do. The infirmities of the flesh no longer constitute a special recommendation for it. Those who are halt, or deaf, or maimed, those who are too sickly or too old for other employment, have not now, as once, the privilege of turning to this as a last resource. Teaching is an art-a science requiring method