uidance to the perfect
guidance; and he shall thus find his complete freedom of action in
full surrender to the will of Almighty God.

#83.# In this first stage, when parent and teacher are motive and will
to him, the child needs to be guided with the utmost care. _There must
be reasonableness in the guidance._ Caprice, anger, impatience,
arbitrariness, and severity are the methods of weaklings and cowards.
From all such the child should be freed. Consistency, kindness,
patience, reasonableness, and moderation are the methods of strong,
successful teachers. If you utter a command, see to it that the child
obeys. Nothing is quite so deadly in the realm of the will as the fact
that the pupil knows that his teacher threatens, commands, talks--but
never acts. If you really do not intend to enforce obedience, do not
utter the command. If you do not intend to compel obedience, do not
assume the role of guide and teacher. How many children come into
caprice instead of regulated conduct because they have from infancy
lived in a realm of caprice, of confusion, and of disorder; a realm
that moved by no law and hence set no law of guidance in the soul of
the child.

#84. The Aim of Teaching is Right Living.#--We err when we assume that
intellectual endeavor will inevitably lead to right conduct. Nothing
is more obvious than the fact that our conduct is far below the plane
of our thought. We _know_ vastly better than we _do_ the things that
are right and true. Nor do we quite understand the function of good
teaching if we neglect to cultivate the feeling powers of the soul. It
is my conviction that we act more nearly in harmony with our feelings
than our thoughts. If, then, conduct, right action, or character is
the end of all true teaching; if, as Jesus taught, it is not what we
know, nor yet what we feel, but what we do, that makes life worth
while, it is of the utmost importance that we should so train the
feeling life as well as the thought life as to prepossess the soul to
right conduct. But the feelings are intensely concrete. Whence arises
again the value of concrete teaching as a method in will training.

#85. Self-control.#--Aim to bring the pupil speedily into the exercise
of his own will, into self-regulated conduct. Nothing will so surely
negative good instruction as to deny to the pupil the freedom to
exercise his own will as soon as that will has become sufficiently
powerful and reasonable to be an adequate agency