Most Sunday-school lessons are fruitful of multitudinous suggestions. Let us not teach so much that we teach nothing, or, worse than nothing, instruct in mental dissipation instead of mental concentration. We prepare for teaching with the lesson hour in view; we should rather have in view the hour following the lesson hour. What impression do we intend the lesson to make? How are we going to make the lesson stand out in relief? I must now set off against the law of intensity the complementary law of motion. A mesmeric patient is sent into the hypnotic trance by continued staring at the same stationary object. This looks like perfect attention, but it results in sleep. There is a verbal hypnotism that is very common when teachers are trying to impress an idea by holding it up stolidly and persistently before the eyes of their scholars. That is not what I mean by intensity, and it is one of the commonest ways of destroying attention. If you are anxious to impress a truth and yet hold attention, you must do it by presenting now this side of the truth and now that, now with parable and now with allegory, now with appeal and now with testimony, experience, quotation, objects. Arrived at the end, do not press the point against the scholars and stick it into them, but if they do not see it, go back and pass over the matter in a different way. Moving bodies draw and hold the eye. Every one must look at a shooting star, a jumping horse, a running man, a flying bird, a rising kite. To keep attention, our lessons must have what the critics of novels call "movement." There is to be no still life in our pictures. Everything must be stirring, dramatic. An accomplished teacher must have the power of painting word-pictures. It is not a difficult art. Hard study and zealous "putting yourself in his place" will accomplish it. Some way or other we must get the persons of the lesson clearly before our scholars' eyes, the scenes as if the scholars were surrounded by them, if we would maintain their attention. And even if the lesson is impersonal, we must dramatize it, we must invent situations and persons to illustrate the abstract thought, or we must draw illustrations from real history. These must all be real to us, or they will never be real to our scholars. Pictures always hold the attention of children. Let us remember this when we talk to them. Children are fond of motion. Let our teaching move briskly, then. Chapter XV Serial Teaching There are short-story writers who are able to hold our attention charmingly for an episode, and there are other minds which are able to lead us entranced through the varied scenes of a long serial. So also there is short-story Sunday-school teaching and serial Sunday-school teaching. Short-story teaching treats each lesson as a separate unit; serial teaching considers each lesson a part only of a great, united whole.