f the
poor and the ignorant, he might have become not only a useful, but a
learned man.

We see a beautiful illustration of this doctrine in the case of
Sabbath-school teachers, and one reason why persons so engaged usually
love their work, is the benefit which they find in it for themselves. I
speak here, not of the spiritual, but of the intellectual benefit. By
the process of teaching others, they are all the while learning. This
advantage in their case is all the greater, because it advances them in
a kind of knowledge in which, more than in any other kind of knowledge,
men are wont to become passive and stationary. In ordinary worldly
knowledge, our necessities make us active. The intercourse of business,
and of pleasure even, makes men keen. On these subjects we are all the
while bandying thoughts to and fro; we are accustomed to give as well as
take; and so we keep our intellectual armor bright, and our thoughts
well defined. But in regard to growth in religious knowledge, we have a
tendency to be mere passive recipients, like the young man just referred
to. Sabbath after Sabbath we hear good, instructive, orthodox
discourses, but there is no active putting forth of our own powers in
giving out what we thus take in, and so we never make it effectually our
own. The absorbing process goes on, and yet we make no growth. The
quiescent audience is a sort of exhausted receiver, into which the
stream from the pulpit is perennially playing, but never making it full.
Let a man go back and ask himself, What actual scriptural knowledge have
I gained by the sermons of the last six months? What in fact do I retain
in my mind, at this moment, of the sermons I heard only a month ago? So
far as the hearing of sermons is concerned, the Sabbath-school teacher
may perhaps be no better off than other hearers. But in regard to
general growth in religious knowledge, he advances more rapidly than his
fellow-worshippers, because the exigencies of his class compel him to a
state of mind the very opposite of this passive recipiency. He is
obliged to be all the while, not only learning, but putting his
acquisitions into definite shape for use, and the very act of using
these acquisitions in teaching a class, fixes them in his own mind, and
makes them more surely his own.

I have used this instance of the Sabbath-school teacher because it
enforces an important hint already given, as to the mode of teaching.
Some teachers, especially in Sab