Few lessons in the seven years' course will be so admirable as these for committing to memory. If you want to inspire your class to better work in that line, now is your time. Note that the psalms are all optimistic. Sound their key-note of peace and joy. Here, if anywhere in the Bible, spiritual teaching is needed. An essential part of the preparation for teaching the psalms is devout prayer. Chapter XVII Those Temperance and Missionary Lessons Intemperance is the church's greatest foe, missions her greatest task. Around these two topics cluster the highest chivalry, the most splendid romance, of our modern world. The shout of the battle is in them, the sweep of the regiment. No lessons are more important than those devoted to these two great themes, and none can be made more interesting. And yet to many a teacher they are bugbears. To these eight lessons--one sixth of the whole--they go with dull hearts. They do wish the Lesson Committee would leave them out of the list. What is the trouble? There is no life back of the lesson. They have "got up" their lesson as best they can; but a lesson is not got up, it grows up. They do not know enough about missions and the temperance reform to be interested in them. No information, no inspiration. To be sure, there are few passages in the Bible suitable for use in temperance lessons, and but few referring directly to such enterprises as modern missions. The Acts record merely the beginnings of missions, and intemperance was scarcely a problem in New Testament days. Nevertheless, both temperance and missions find in the Book their fundamental and sufficient inspiration; and taking our starting-point from the lesson text, we may fairly launch forth into seas as wide as the world of men and action. Indeed, so multiform are the phases of these two topics that to avoid confusion and leave clear impressions every temperance or missionary lesson should have a specialty. Let me indicate a few of the many possible themes. 1. _A Bible Search._--Spend the hour hunting out everything the Bible says upon temperance, or all the leading passages bearing on missions. The scholars will read them aloud. Some verses they will repeat from memory. They will mark them with colored pencils in their Bibles. They will discover the central thought in each reference and write it on the blackboard, thus building up a compact summary. The exercise has an air of finality that will please the scholars.