XXV SOME ASPECTS OF RELIGIOUS TEACHING I AM a believer in personal interviews. I think Personal a Sunday-school teacher should in some way plan to have a brief talk with each member of his class, at irregular intervals, as occasion opens the way. In these talks there should be no attempt to criticize or to scold or to find fault, but a very honest attempt, and a frank one, to point out to the child certain things which, in years that are to come, he will find to be of some use to him. I recall some such interviews as that between good men who were my teachers and myself, and the power of those interviews has rested upon me in all the years that have followed. It is a well-known fact that a child is more impressed in a personal interview than by any amount of class instruction. It is this personal concern for the child, this willingness to act as friend and adviser, this deep-seated concern which reveals itself in the personal quality of interest and help, that sobers the child's thought, steadies his conduct, and stimulates his regard for the things that are sweet and clean. and right. There is much warrant for this in the example of Jesus. How often he had personal interviews that are recorded in the Gospels, and how many more he probably did have that are not recorded! The burden of the whole world was upon him, and yet he had time to turn aside from the multitude and give to one soul personal help and comfort and guidance. How to Use In a preceding chapter I called attention to the fact that scholarship was not an end with Jesus. I wish now to say that this is no evidence that he himself was not a scholar. He was not only familiar with the law of his own people, but he knew the law of the Roman conquerors, and he knew the customs, habits, and modes of life of all the different peoples that thronged the great cosmopolitan city of Jerusalem. With his scholarship, therefore, he was able to command respect, but he did not obtrude this quality of his equipment as a teacher upon his hearers. It was simply used to answer those who came to him to confuse him, and to instruct those who came. to him to be guided of him. This seems to me to be an ideal use of knowledge. When a teacher is more anxious to impress a pupil with what he knows than he is to incite his pupil to right living, when, in other words, the emphasis of his thought and effort is directed to himself in stead of his pupils, he is not only a vain man, but a poor teacher. Another matter impresses itself upon my mind. Teachers are sometimes over-critical with their pupils. They demand statements in just one certain order of words. There are, of course, some things that should be said just so, but the great majority of things should be known clearly, and then expressed freely in the language of the learner. If the teacher finds a pupil stating a great truth in language that adequately conveys that truth, the teacher should appreciate the pupil's effort, and not insist upon a restatement and another restatement until the thing is said in just the way the teacher wants it said. The result of this insistence is that the pupil becomes impressed with the finicky, fussy quality of the teacher, and at last loses interest in the truth itself. If, however, the truth in the mind of the child is not clear, the teacher should hold to the discussion and ask for a restatement, a reorganization of the thought, again and again and again, if need be, until the thing is clearly understood. The emphasis of the teacher's concern should be upon what the child thinks, and freedom should be given to the child to formulate his thought in language of his own spirit. Thought versus In order to help the pupil to right expression, The English of the Bible the teacher should constantly point out the beauty, the simplicity, and the strength of the English of the Bible; hold it up as a model; encourage the child to state things in the same splendid English in which the truth of God comes to him. in his English Bible. Dr. Faber More and more, writers are recognizing that the purest English to be found anywhere is in the Bible. Many of the Psalms are models of strong and yet simple English. Of this English in the Bible a noted divine, Dr. Faber, says: "It lives on the ear, like a music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of church bells, which the convert hardly knows how he can forego. Its felicities often seem to be almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the national mind, and the anchor of national seriousness. The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses. The power of all the griefs and trials of a man is hidden beneath its words. It is the representative of his best moments, and all that there has been about him of soft and gentle and pure and penitent and good speaks to him forever out of his English Bible. It is his sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed and controversy never soiled. In the length and breadth of the land there is not a Protestant with one spark of religiousness about him whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible." How did Jesus impress his pupils? We are told in Matthew 7:28 that the multitudes were astonished at his doctrine. The source of this astonishment is easily discovered. He did not teach as others taught. There was something in the quality of his instruction that lifted it out of the class of man's effort. People who went to hear him did not go away with the feeling that they had the old things repeated to them in pretty much the same manner as they had been accustomed to hear them from year to year. Here was a teacher with a new method as well How Jesus Impressed Others as a new message. Their astonishment was due not only to the original material that he presented, but also to the original manner that he used. There was an earnestness and a directness and a power in this teacher that differentiated him from his contemporaries, and that still differentiates him from all other teachers. This peculiar and distinctive quality of his teaching is explained in the next verse. He taught them as one having authority. There is a world-wide difference, even among men, between an author of a subject and an expounder of a subject. For a man to teach with authority |