articulate—sometimes inarticulate—sounds.

"I believe it would startle and move any one," said Robert Louis Stevenson, referring to the gospel of St. Matthew, "if he could make a certain effort of imagination and read it freshly like a book, not droningly and dully like a portion of the Bible."

Who of us has not been thus startled and moved? It may have been on hearing a story read by one who read as though he had seen the men and the events face to face. It may have been by being helped to realize and see by pictures or by being ourselves on the ground made sacred by the story, or, perchance, by being in the same case as those described. It may have been on reading the old stories "freshly, like a book," perhaps after many years, when the old-time droning and the dulness are forgotten, and the simple beauty and power of the old stories come home to us. At such times we say, This is the very Word of God. Were ever pictures painted like these?

Thomas Hardy says of one of his characters that, like every healthy youth, he had an aversion to the reading of the Bible. Some of us know what that means, though we did not know it was healthy. Better, we might almost say, that the child spent his time in some other way than to read the Bible or be taught it, only to conceive a dislike for its stories. Better a child never went to Sunday-school than that he should go to have interest deadened. He may wait many a year before the freshness returns.

"Two grand qualifications are equally necessary in the education of children," said Horace Mann, "love and knowledge." The teacher of the Bible must indeed know—not know about, merely, but be personally acquainted with—the old patriarchs, their dress, occupation, country, way of life, and character; the judges, likewise, the prophets and kings, the children of Israel as a people, the apostles and their friends, and, above all, Christ himself. Does it make little difference whether we think of Christ as an oriental or as an Italian; whether as clad in the turban and flowing white robes of the East or in more conventionalized attire; whether as he is pictured for us in the vivid and startling colors of the artist Tissot, or in the cold conventional steel of our grandmother's best parlor; or the base wood-cuts of some modern lesson leaves?

To us as well as to our Lord himself it makes a vital difference whether his youth was spent amid arid wastes—as many of us picture Palestine—or in the peaceful beauty of such a retreat as that described for us in Archdeacon Farrar's picture.

We must indeed have knowledge, as full, as exact, as personal as it can be made for us or as we can make it for ourselves. And from this will come love. The more full, exact, and personal our vision, the more deep-seated will be our love. We should therefore seek our knowledge at first hand. We should look upon "helps" as we regard crutches—good until we can walk alone; bad the instant they keep us from using our own powers, seeing with our own eyes.

In picture-work, as in everything else, love is the principal thing. A teacher of little children, whose privilege it is to help them to enter into loving appreciation of buds and leaves, soil and roots, winter and how everything prepares for it, spring and how it wakes everything to new life, must herself love nature. No "science" falsely so called will suffice. "Do you really love nature?" as President G. Stanley Hall has said with an indescribable emphasis on every word, is the question of questions to ask such a teacher. "Do you really love the pictures of the Bible?" is likewise the question of questions for the parent and teacher whose high privilege it is to lead children from the first of their acquaintance to love the great Picture-Book.

IV.

SIDE-LIGHTS.

"Can you apply a parable?" says one of Robert Louis Stevenson's characters. "It is not the same thing as a reason, but usually vastly more convincing."

The spiritual truth which we would have enter the child's mind—how is it to gain admittance? Not by a surgical operation; much less by the use of a foreign language or—what is quite the same thing—of abstract language. Not by any direct means, but indirectly, by objects, scaffolding, types, the story, and the illustration.

"Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact, and no spiritual fact can be understood except by first knowing the natural fact, which is, as it were, its double." It is so with the child, it is no less true of grown folk. If it were not for the world of nature—of boundless horizon, ceaselessly flowing rivers, of deaths and resurrections, of parasites—we should be powerless to grasp the truths of the world of spirit. The circle in the water, for example, the apples on the plate, one specked, then all rotten, these all are but letters of the alphabet by which we spell out Influence.

There must first be in the thing-world—to give one more example—the "rolling-stone," "the last straw," "the bird in the hand," "the leaven," the ore, worth seventy-five cents as ore, worth four dollars as bar-iron, worth $400,000 when worked up into hair-spring, before we can understand, or explain, or talk about the corresponding things in the realm of the unseen. Which is only another way of saying that he whose mind is not filled with the truths of nature is but ill furnished for understanding the truth of God.

How may we gain this power to enrich our teaching with side-lights?

1. By studying the great masters of the art of illustration. Beecher, Spurgeon, Dr. Parkhurst, are all worthy of emulation. Beecher testifies that in his early preaching the power to illustrate was only latent. He found that he was not reaching his hearers and he began to search for "likes." He went about his farm, upon the streets, among mechanics, in fact everywhere, with the thought of the next Sunday's sermon in his mind, saying, "What is this like? what will that illustrate?" A glance at his sermons shows them full of side-lights from business, life at sea, from the farm and the home, from mechanical processes, as the cutting and polishing of precious stones, and very often from nature.

In a recent sermon Dr. Parkhurst illustrated his single point from botany, physics, physiology, a ship, and from the actual experience of two men engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the same appetite.

But the power of these great preachers is only the reflex of the method of Christ himself. No man had greater power in picture-work. In range, fertility, aptness, and result, the word-pictures of Jesus stand alone in the history of teaching, just as in respect of beauty and power they stand alone in literature.

2. The power of picturesque speech is acquired through earnestness and love of truth, as well as through rich experience of nature and of common life. This is hinted at by Emerson: "A man's power to think and to speak depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth…. Picturesque language means that he who employs it is a man in alliance with truth and God. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that a picture arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence good writings and brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is spontaneous, provided one have lived sufficiently to fill his mind with the raw materials of such pictures. One bred in the woods shall not lose his lesson in the roar of cities…. At the call of a noble sentiment, again the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, and the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his infancy. And with these forms, the spells of persuasion, the keys of power are put into his hands." And as it is with contact with nature, so it is with first hand experience of life in any form.

3. Practice. The