(d) Rewards. Scholars should be paid a reward, perhaps of ten cents for each book, if they can succeed in tracing and finding any book which has been out of the library two months or more. These plans, or others, may lessen, but no plan will entirely remove, the evil of books lost to the library through neglect or a worse crime.
THE TEACHER'S QUALIFICATIONS AND NEED OF TRAINING
While the superintendent in the school is the moving and guiding intelligence, the pulse of the machine, the teacher in the class is the worker at the anvil, or the loom, or the lathe, for whom all the plans are made, and upon whom all the success depends. In the warfare for souls he is on the picket line and at close range, fighting face to face and hand to hand. The sphere of his effort is small, that group gathered around him for an hour on Sunday, but in that little field his is the work that counts for the final victory. His task requires peculiar adaptedness, supplemented by special training.
1. =His Qualifications.= There are on the American continent not less than a million and a half Sunday-school teachers, who give to the gospel their free-will offering of time, and toil, and thought. They are not like civil engineers or the majority of public-school teachers, graduates of schools that have given them training for a special vocation. In every respect they are laymen, engaged for six days in secular work, and on one day finding an avocation in the Sunday school. Yet there are certain traits, partly natural and partly acquired, which they must possess, if they are to find success in their Sabbath-day service.
(1) _A Sincere Disciple._ The Sunday-school teacher must be a follower of Christ, not merely in profession but in spirit. He is one who has met his Lord, has heard and has obeyed the call, "Follow me." He enlisted in the grand army of which Christ is the Commander, before he received his assignment to the army corps of the Sunday school, and his fidelity to the department is inspired by his deeper loyalty to his Lord. It is eminently desirable that the Sunday-school teacher should be a member of the church; but it is imperative that he should be a disciple of Christ.
(2) _A Lover of Youth._ By far the largest proportion of scholars in the Sunday school, perhaps nine tenths, are under twenty-five years of age. Therefore, with few exceptions, the teachers must deal with young people; and youth at all its stages is not easy to understand and to manage. Moreover, the fact that not only the teachers, but to a large extent the scholars, are volunteers enters into the problem. Pupils attend the week-day school and submit to a teacher's rule because they must, whether their teachers are acceptable or are disliked. But the rule in the Sunday school is not the law of authority; it is the law of persuasion. The teacher who cannot draw his scholars, but repels them, soon finds himself without a class. In all teaching sympathy, or the coördination between the interest of the teacher in the pupil and of the pupil in the teacher, is a strong factor in success; but in the Sunday school it is an absolute necessity by reason of the voluntary element in the constitution of the Sunday school. That mystic power which will combine uncongenial spirits, and fuse the hearts of teacher and scholar into one, is love. Let the teacher love his scholars, let him see in each pupil some quality to inspire love, and the battle is half won. Love will quicken tact, and love and tact together will win the complete victory.