Chapter XIV Galvanic Teaching In his exceedingly suggestive book entitled "Before an Audience" Mr. Shepard insists strenuously on what he calls "physical earnestness" in a speaker. It is not meant by this that we are to go before our scholars with our nerves a-quiver, with headaches coming on, with our brains throbbing and our muscles drawn tight. A speaker must be, as Mr. Shepard insists, an animal galvanic battery on two legs. He must be at something corresponding to electric tension. He must be in earnest with his body, not lazy with it. No teacher who is not spirited will succeed with children, or with any one, long. Nothing will more quickly win and permanently hold a child's attention than earnestness. Children's capacity for serious thinking is greatly undervalued. There is more philosophy in them than you dream of. They are very much in earnest themselves, and they rejoice to see other people very much in earnest. I do not mean by this that one should always be serious with them. Nothing will gain their attention more than a joke; but joking with children is as dangerous as feeding them candy. They have no more taste henceforth for anything else, and to keep their attention you must continue to feed them candy and deal out jokes. The most successful teachers of children, judging not by the interest of the children so much as by permanent spiritual results, are those that are always deeply in earnest; and yet their earnestness is shot through and through with the sunshine. The intensity I am advocating must not be the intensity of an auger, that bores. Oh, if teachers only knew enough not to teach too much! If one good idea is got into the heads of the children as the result of the lesson half-hour, then you have scored a victory. If you try to get in eight good ideas, you will not score one-eighth of a victory. Some teachers that I know want to get the whole body of theology and the entire system of ethics into each lesson. They skip with haste from truth to mighty truth, crowding into a lesson twenty weighty points, each one of which would be amply sufficient for the half-hour. The result is an impossibility of attention, for not enough is given about any one thing to fix it and hold it down. Our Sunday-school teaching reminds me sometimes of a daily paper--all cut up into paragraphic articles; and if there is any topic of universal knowledge omitted, it will appear in the evening edition. A confirmed newspaper reader has become incapable of following an extended discussion, or of reading a book. I have stood before Sunday-school classes to which their teacher was in the habit of propounding a series of disconnected questions from a book or paper, and I have found it quite impossible to hold the attention of such classes for any length of time on one matter. They were anxious for another paragraph, for fresh head-lines, for a change of subject.