The "wholes" of Scripture narrative, whole books, whole lives, whole stories _told as wholes_ by the teacher or by a single pupil, and not picked out piecemeal by the teacher from halting individuals--these are the things that in the class give interest and that in the mind live and grow and bear fruit. "Moral power is the effect of large unbroken masses of thought; in these alone can a strong interest be developed," and from these alone can a steady will spring. He who has never read or heard as a whole, at one, or at most, two sittings, the story of an entire book of the Bible, as Jonah, Daniel, Job, or one of the Gospels, has missed one of the chief sources of interest and power. Our course through the Bible--incident by incident, verse by verse, here a little, there a little, years of "lessons," but no idea even of the life of Christ as a whole--is not unlike the toilsome road traversed by the boy "reading" Cæsar as his first Latin author: so many separate, mutually repellant parts, but no wholes, no idea of what it is all about; or it may be compared to the route of the milk-man--a stop at every other house, and never a good run. Not one of these plodders, the Sunday-school pupil, the young Latin student, the milk-man's hack, can be looked upon as a model of spiritedness or of continuity. A teacher of English in the old days, when literature was used chiefly as a clothes-line on which to air grammatical linen, was once guilty of giving out a lesson in Washington Irving--so many constructions, figures, analyses, so many pages, and no more. The end came in the _middle_ of the ride of the headless horseman. But by the time the next class studied Irving the teacher had met with a change. The limit of the first lesson was set according to the structure of the story. The pupils were told to read the story. "Only read it!" said they. "Aren't we to do anything with it?" "No," said the teacher, "you are to read it _for fun_." Should one be in danger of being misunderstood in saying that we do not have enough of reading the Bible for fun, for the pure enjoyment of its stories and of its matchless pictures? The rest will come in due course. It will come just so surely as the story is _realized_. But important as reading is, telling is incomparably better. The eye of the teacher is then fixed on the class, not on the book; the tone is conversational, the hand is free to gesture and to draw. One can grasp the whole of the story and the whole of the situation. One can bring out dramatic power. For there are few stories that do not have some dramatic quality, both in the making and in the telling. The following points kept in mind will aid the teacher: 1. The story must have a beginning, concrete, interest-compelling, curiosity-piquing. "All things have two handles; beware of the wrong one." 2. It must have a climax, properly led up to, easily led down from; and that never missed.