In picture-work, as in everything else, love is the principal thing. A teacher of little children, whose privilege it is to help them to enter into loving appreciation of buds and leaves, soil and roots, winter and how everything prepares for it, spring and how it wakes everything to new life, must herself love nature. No "science" falsely so called will suffice. "_Do you really love nature?_" as President G. Stanley Hall has said with an indescribable emphasis on every word, is the question of questions to ask such a teacher. "_Do you really love the pictures of the Bible?_" is likewise the question of questions for the parent and teacher whose high privilege it is to lead children from the first of their acquaintance to love the great Picture-Book. IV. SIDE-LIGHTS. "Can you apply a parable?" says one of Robert Louis Stevenson's characters. "It is not the same thing as a reason, but usually vastly more convincing." The spiritual truth which we would have enter the child's mind--how is it to gain admittance? Not by a surgical operation; much less by the use of a foreign language or--what is quite the same thing--of abstract language. Not by any direct means, but indirectly, by objects, scaffolding, types, the story, and the illustration. "Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact, and no spiritual fact can be understood except by first knowing the natural fact, which is, as it were, its double." It is so with the child, it is no less true of grown folk. If it were not for the world of nature--of boundless horizon, ceaselessly flowing rivers, of deaths and resurrections, of parasites--we should be powerless to grasp the truths of the world of spirit. The circle in the water, for example, the apples on the plate, one specked, then all rotten, these all are but letters of the alphabet by which we spell out _Influence_. There must first be in the thing-world--to give one more example--the "rolling-stone," "the last straw," "the bird in the hand," "the leaven," the ore, worth seventy-five cents as ore, worth four dollars as bar-iron, worth $400,000 when worked up into hair-spring, before we can understand, or explain, or talk about the corresponding things in the realm of the unseen. Which is only another way of saying that he whose mind is not filled with the truths of nature is but ill furnished for understanding the truth of God. How may we gain this power to enrich our teaching with side-lights?