The Sabbath-School Index: Pointing out the history and progress of Sunday-schools, with approved modes of instruction.Pardee, R. G. (Richard Gay)
Religion
The Sabbath-School Index: Pointing out the history and progress of Sunday-schools, with approved modes of instruction.
Pardee, R. G. (Richard Gay)
Sunday schools
On _Thursday morning_ he takes an hour before, or an interval of
business, to explore a desperate neighborhood, and succeeds beyond his
expectations in exciting interest and enlisting recruits for the
Sunday-school from among the juvenile portion of the disorderly gang.
He also takes occasion to call on little Pat Lawless's mother, and is
successful in getting her pledge to co-operate with him in the attempt
to rescue her boy from untold depravity and almost certain ruin. Pat
is notoriously the ringleader in the worst gang of boys in the
neighborhood, and every body was surprised to see little Harry Page
leading him into the Sunday-school for the first time on the last
Sabbath morning.
On his way back from business, _Friday_ evening, he calls for a few
minutes on an intelligent young Christian who recently came into the
place, in order to seek his Christian acquaintance, and invite him to
look up for himself a class of scholars from the neglected
neighborhood he visited the day before, and he succeeds in inducing
him to bring into the school and teach a fine class of street-boys the
way of life; he takes a hint from the conversation with his young
friend, and concludes to get up a neat printed certificate of reward
to the pupils for bringing in new scholars. In the weekly
prayer-meeting he has a word about the school, just enough to enlist
their sympathies and their prayers.
_Saturday morning_, on opening the daily paper or a book, he sees a
striking providence, an interesting fact or incident of life, which,
he remembers at once, will aptly illustrate or enforce an important
truth in the lesson for the next Sabbath, and carefully notes it down
and _thinks_ it over, and in the evening we find him full of hope and
interest at the teachers' meeting. Thus closes his labors for the
week. It is _only_ a week! but how valuable is that life of which this
is but a week!
Now, all this is no mere fancy sketch. We have had living
superintendents--not _one_ but all together--sitting for the portrait
here drawn, and whose lives have supplied all the illustrations, and
who pursue a somewhat similar course every week, and on every
returning Sabbath-day. Thus, without scarcely an hour's interference
with his duties to his family, his business, or the public, the good
superintendent has found time, and has been enabled every day during
the week, to do something for the Sunday-school, simply because he
loves it; his heart is on it, and he loves constantly to devise ways
of doing good by it. He never expects to be, and he never will be,
satisfied with the school as it is; but, however great the progress,
he will keep his mind actively at work to plan improvements in the
arrangement, the order, the discipline, the enterprise, or the
teaching, and thus, _Upward and Onward_, will be his perpetual motto.
A stagnant business, he knows, will soon droop and die.
VI.
THE LIBRARY AND LIBRARIAN.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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