consideration. To this end there are doubtless several ways. "Picture-work" is one of these, and, it is believed, one of high importance. That it is neglected is beyond question. To point out its value and set forth its method are the aims of this little book.

II.

TYPES OF PICTURE-WORK.

In the Dresden Gallery, the writer once saw two children, brother and sister, one ten and the other twelve, looking at the Sistine Madonna. They entered the room, and without heeding the crowd there gathered, almost instantly fixed their gaze upon the picture. For many minutes they seemed to be under a spell. They were drinking in something. The great picture was speaking to them—to their very souls. And they understood something of its message. At all events they felt its influence—which is much better than merely to understand.

More striking, because more unexpected, was the influence of a large copy of the same picture upon a little boy not two years and a half old. Although this child was passionately fond of pictures, no other picture ever seemed to appeal to him as this one did. As soon as it was brought into the house he instantly began to examine it, and pass judgment upon it. He at once found the center of interest, the young child and his mother, then pointed to the angels, the "grandfather," and lastly to the "lady," but returned always to the "dear little baby Jesus." From this time the story of the birth of Jesus was the one story most loved by the child. And a collection of thirty or more madonnas ("mother-pictures," the child called them) by other great masters was a never-failing source of delight to him.

Even very young children appreciate the best pictures and the best stories. In fact the younger they are the better sometimes seems to be their taste. Are we doing all that we may to gratify, and at the same time to form, this taste?

But our term, "picture-work," includes more than pictures painted with the brush. Literature is full of pictures no less beautiful in theme and in execution, and even more important in meaning, than Raphael's masterpiece. The story of the good bishop, Monseigneur Bienvenu, as it is told for us in "Les Miserables," is a picture, and so are all such stories. Literature is full of them. The Bible is a treasure-house of masterpieces. More wonderful, too, are these story pictures, just as they are, if told so that they can be seen and felt, than they could ever be made with brush or pencil.

How may we gain the power to paint these pictures, helping when help is needed, standing aside when our bungling efforts would only destroy the interest and the charm—rub off, as it were, the delicate bloom?

To give help in finding the answer to these questions is the object of the chapters that follow. Meanwhile we return to our present theme. What is picture-work?

There is the main story and the telling of it—a work of art as we shall see—and there are also the side-lights, without which no story-teller can capture and hold his audience.

The story to be told, let us say, is the healing of the paralytic. But before the story begins, the ground must be cleared. The oriental house and bed must be pictured. Get a real specimen of each, if you can, of course.[1] Provide yourself with pictures in any case, but first of all, make an eastern house and bed yourself. A square paper box—a hat box will do—with a hole cut in the top, ready to be torn up when the time comes; a stairway made of paper, leading up the outside of the house to the roof; a small piece of felt—an old bed-quilt will serve equally well—with strings tied in each end, for the bed, to show how a bed could be let down, rolled, and "taken up"; with these accessories the teacher is ready to begin the work of sketching the real picture, the story of the miracle.

Not merely for children, but for grown folk too is this kind of picture-work a means of teaching. In a densely populated quarter of New York City there is to-day a minister who is not content with mere word-pictures. He brings into the pulpit the objects themselves—it may be a candle, a plumb line, a live frog, an air pump. With him the method is a success, as it has been with others. Does this seem crude? So are the mental processes of every forty-nine out of fifty the world over.

Dr. Parkhurst in the second of those memorable sermons with which he opened the public campaign against Tammany, carried into the pulpit and showed his congregation the very bundle of indictments with which he was to strike the first blow for civic purity.

Ezekiel went still further, and not only used objects but actions to enforce and illustrate his terrible sermon:

"To the amazement of the people, setting them all awondering what he could mean, he appears one day before them with fire, a pair of scales, a knife, and a barber's razor. These were the heads, and doom was the burden of his sermon. Sweeping off, what an easterner considers it a shame to lose, his beard, and the hair also from his head, this bald and beardless man divides them into three parts; weighing them in the balance. One third he burns in the fire; one third he smites with the knife; and the remaining third he tosses in the air, scattering it on the winds of heaven." Thus the prophet under divine direction foretells the disgrace, division, destruction, dispersion of his people.

Not less striking is the story of Jeremiah's dramatic sermon as graphically told by Dr. Guthrie, from whom the preceding account has been quoted:

"The preacher appears—nor book, nor speech in hand, but an earthen vessel. He addresses his hearers. Pointing across the valley to Jerusalem, with busy thousands in its streets, its massive towers and noble temple glorious and beautiful beneath a southern sky, he says, speaking as an ambassador of God, 'I will make this city desolate and an hissing' … pauses—raises his arm—holds up the potter's vessel, dashes it on the ground; and planting his foot on its shivered fragments, he adds, 'Thus saith the Lord of Hosts, even so will I break this people, and this city as one breaketh a potter's vessel.'"

It may have been the inspiration of such examples as these that moved Beecher when, in the stirring days before the war upon the platform of Plymouth Church, after taking up one argument after another against abolition and answering it, he carried each one to the side of the platform and threw it over into the pile with its predecessors, saying, "That disposes of you." And in his famous Liverpool address, did he not, when speaking of the freeing of the slaves, throw down and trample upon actual chains?

At the heart of even the boldest of such instances of picture-work, there lies a true and universal principle. And we may be sure that we are more likely to err on the side of stiffness and conventionality (which is often sheer laziness and ignorance), than on the side of reality and life.

The unaided imagination—the power of the eyes to "see pictures while they're shut"—will, however, often serve us more safely, and not less surely. That was a vivid and memorable action-picture, drawn for us by Bishop Vincent, at a vesper service at the close of a Chautauqua Sabbath, in the "Hall in the Grove." "What if the Master himself were again on the earth at this hour, here at Chautauqua, and should come up the hill, through the trees yonder, and should stand between these pillars and speak to us now…." The picture was complete and irresistible. We all saw and realized all that we needed to see and feel, in order to receive the lesson that followed.

But the imagination must be strengthened and fed by plenty of sense material. It can be trusted to respond with its pictures, provided it has been given material enough and provided these materials are