The whole country, not long since, was touched--many people were shocked--by the news that a Christian minister had dared to see with his own eyes the evils he was fighting, the existence of which he had been challenged to prove. Many good people at that time thought he had made a mistake. He said, "It is necessary that some one see these things. Do you think that I would be so base as to ask another to do what I would not do myself?" The result has proved the soundness of this position. No one now doubts that Dr. Parkhurst was in the right. For not only were the facts shown to exist as alleged, but (and this is the point) the man himself who had seen them was so filled with a burning sense of their terrible reality, that he clung to his point with an everlasting grip, carried it triumphantly, and laid the foundations of our "civic renaissance." The vast audience who heard Bishop Thoburn, missionary to India for thirty years, at Chautauqua, was stirred to its depths by the simple power of the man. What was the secret of his power? It did not lie in his bodily presence; it grew out of what the man had done. He was a man of action. He had given his life, and had lived. His speech was of that which he had lived. You felt that he had a right to speak--for every sentence had behind it weeks of real life. Who has not felt the same when listening to one who speaks of that which he does know? And who has not felt the difference when trying to listen to one who talks, but whose words are not loaded with life? You must have seen, acted, felt, if you would make your hearers see and feel and act. Talk is cheap, especially borrowed talk. It is not the story in the lesson quarterly that you can build into the lives of your class; it is the story in you. It is the picture that has become a part of your life, that will be most likely to be built into the fabric of theirs. _Order._ The way in which a subject lies in the mind of an ordinary, unregenerate adult, one may be safe in saying, is just the wrong way--the way in which it should not be presented to a child. The order of exposition is in general the reverse of the order of acquisition. The natural man who has forgotten how things look to the eyes of a child has a tendency to put things wrong end to; word first, thing last; precept first, example last; to plunge _in medias res_ without introduction--in short, to put the mental or spiritual cart before the horse. And it requires self-sacrifice to reverse the order, enter into the limitations of a little child's mind, see with his eyes, think his thoughts.