rder of relative
importance.

1. SYMPATHY

This is a very broad and far-reaching term. It rests upon experience and
imagination and involves the ability to live, at least temporarily,
someone else's life. Sympathy is fundamentally vicarious. Properly to
sympathize with children a man must re-live in memory his own childhood
or he must have the power of imagination to see things through their
eyes. Many a teacher has condemned pupils for doing what to them was
perfectly normal. We too frequently persist in viewing a situation from
our own point of view rather than in going around to the other side to
look at it as our pupils see it. It is no easy matter thus "to get out
of ourselves" and become a boy or girl again, but it is worth the
effort.

Along with this ability at vicarious living, sympathy involves an
interest in others. Sympathy is a matter of concern in the affairs of
others. The rush and stir of modern life fairly seem to force us to
focus our attention upon self, but if we would succeed as teachers, we
must make ourselves enter into the lives of our pupils out of an
interest to see how they conduct their lives, and the reasons for such
conduct.

Coupled with this interest in others and the imagination to see through
their eyes, sympathy involves a desire to help them. A man may have an
interest in people born out of mere curiosity or for selfish purposes,
but if he has sympathy for them, he must be moved with a desire to help
and to bless them.

And, finally, sympathy involves the actual doing of something by way of
service. President Grant liked to refer to a situation wherein a
particular person was in distress. Friends of all sorts came along
expressing regret and professing sympathy. Finally a fellow stepped
forward and said, "I feel to sympathize with this person to the extent
of fifty dollars." "That man," said President Grant, "has sympathy in
his heart as well as in his purse."

2. SINCERITY

Surely this is a foundation principle in teaching:

"Thou must to thyself be true,
If thou the truth would teach;
Thy soul must overflow,
If thou another soul would reach."

A teacher must really be converted to what he teaches or there is a
hollowness to all that he utters. "Children and dogs," it is said, are
the great judges of sincerity--they instinctively know a friend. No
teacher can continue to stand on false ground before his pupils. The
superintendent of one of our S