To use the newspaper to the best advantage in your teaching, you must have well in mind all the lesson themes for months in advance, since a striking event of to-day might not illustrate this week's lesson, but the lesson of five weeks ahead. Your best plan is to cut out each day the paragraphs and articles that seem likely to be of use, and preserve them in a series of envelopes. Mark one set of envelopes with the topics and dates of a year's lessons. Let another set contain the clippings arranged by subjects, as: "Love," "Faith," "Temperance," "Missions," "Theater," "Heroism," "Inventions." These will contain poems as well as prose. Some, rather than classify the bits of biography under the characteristics especially prominent in each case, will prefer to arrange them alphabetically, in a separate set of twenty-six envelopes. As the envelope for each week's lesson is used, distribute its contents through your permanent file. Frequently glance over your clippings to refresh your memory concerning them; otherwise they will become so much dead wood. Not an unimportant result of all this is that it will teach your scholars to read the newspaper as a Christian should. In this great American university our scholars should be taught to skip the courses in evil and elect those in goodness. And a final word,--which, indeed, no teacher is likely to need, though it must be said: keep the whole matter subordinate. It is not proposed to turn our Sunday-schools into classes for the study of current events. We have to do with one Life, and with that alone. We are teaching not all kinds of truth, but him who is the Truth. Whatever we admit into our teaching that does not exalt him and throw light on his life and doctrine is a harmful impertinence. We are not to study the lamp, but the Book that lies beneath it. Chapter XXIII On Taking Things for Granted The cliff-scaler, who lowers his comrade down the precipice, does not take for granted the fastening around the tree or the stoutness of the rope; but the Sunday-school teacher too often throws his young people into the treacherous depths of thought and life with little care for their life-rope's integrity or moorings. More than once or twice or thrice in my own experience, after weeks and months of supposedly thorough intercourse with my scholars, an awkward question, better aimed by Heaven than by myself, has disclosed some fatal doubt, some fundamental misconception. I had been taking for granted that my boy really believed Christ to be divine, or that he had at least the beginnings of a conception of the Saviour's mission to the earth, or that he knew by experience the meaning of prayer, or that he actually had confidence in a future life.