#11.# It is well also for the teacher to possess #adequate# knowledge; he should be able to separate a fact into its parts; that is, analyze it. This analytic power makes for vivid teaching but it is a power that the pupil in his early years cannot acquire. Only the mature mind is analytic, and the teacher who knows how to analyze a fact or a lesson knows the secret of proportion in teaching, the power to know what to make emphatic, what to make subordinate. It is a poor teacher who is unable to distinguish between a vital element and a non-vital element.
#12. Related Subjects.#--The teacher should also know such related subjects as will best enable him to make clear each point under treatment in the lesson. A teacher should have a working knowledge of biblical geography and of sacred antiquities. He should know how to use a concordance, how to work up cross-references, how to interpret peculiar idioms, and in general how to use the text of the Bible in the most effective manner. He should know the general principles of organization pursued in a modern Sunday-school, together with the outlines of the history of the church, and should have a general knowledge of the translations of the Bible into the English language.
#13. Thinking Principles.#--In addition to the subject-matter, the teacher should know something of the laws of thought, and the best way to use knowledge as an agency in _forming_ these laws of thought. All these laws are scheduled in any elementary treatise on psychology, and the best method of using knowledge to train the soul is set forth in any good treatise on pedagogy. Thus to a knowledge of the subject-matter the teacher must add a knowledge of psychology and of pedagogy. Scholarship alone is not the test of a good teacher.
#14.# If one reflects for a time upon his own methods of acquiring knowledge, he will begin to understand the operations of the human soul. When one reads that knowledge enters the soul only through the special senses, or that ideas may be recalled by memory, it is of the utmost importance that he should ask himself the question: What do these statements mean? An illustration will help to answer this question: I know that fire will burn my hand; the knowledge of this fact entered my consciousness through the sense of touch, and my memory recalls it.