Newspaper Page Text
October 7, 1922
Annual Address to Jer
uelß. Y. P. U. Conven
tion
By A. B. CAPERS, President
Above and beyond all specific and
direct endeavors of the Sunday School
Teachers to instruct, to influence, to
manage, and to guide spiritually, the
students of his class there are impartant
general duties, growing out of the re_
lation of the teacher and students in the
Sunday school, which ought not to -be
lost sight of by the teacher, and which
by their recognition and performance,
tend to round out, and to make per
manently effective and complete, the
entire work of the teacher in his every
effort for his scholars good. For the
full understanding of the nature and
scope of these duties it is essential that
a Sunday-school teacher should realize
the authorization and validity of the
divinely sanctioned relation between
himself and the scholars. The same
is applied to the Union and the pulpit.
If indeed a teacher feels that the re
lation is merely one of convenience or of
happening, and that it is outside of and
apart from the divinely authorized
agencies for the moral and spiritual
training of the race, he is likely to give
it a minor place, in comparison with
what he deems the more important in
strumentalities for shaping the character
and destiny of immortal soul; but if he
sees in that relation a linking agency be
tween the family and pulpit, originally
approved and directed by God, and if he
clearly understands that as a teacher, a
distinct spheie of responsibility after
its, kind, as is the sphere parent, or of
pastor, at once his work is lifted up in
to a new and larger, prominence and he
is prepared to recognize the various and
and ever pressing duties which inevit
ably grow out of such a relation, aud
which can neither be slighted nor be
evaded.
Hence it becomes a vital matter to
gain a clear conception of the basis of
the teachers relation to his scholars.
The Sunday school in its present
name, is hardly more than a century
old; but just so far as it stands for, or is
THE A T HENS REPUBLIQDE
accepted as, the religious school, or the
Church school, it represents an agency
which is more than forty iCenturies old;
an agency which antedates by twenty
centuries the Pulpit as a distinct and
permanent agency; an agency which is
the junior only of the family, and which
has a like stamp of God’s approval with
both Family and Pulpit between which
it stands in the divine economy.
In the beginning, God committed to the
Family the religious training of the
r ace, and for the first fifteen centuries
or more of that exalted mission.
Had the family fulfilled the places
had every father and mother been faith
ful in his or her sphere there would per
haps, have been no need of another ag
ency for the right training of the Child
ren.
But the Family did not prove thus
competent, To the contrary, it so far
failed through the sin of the first par
ents and those who came after them that
the whole race became corrupt and as
God himself chooses to put it, God had
repented that he had made man; and he
swept the race from being save a single
godly household to bridge over the
chasm of ruin. Beginning again with His
plan for mans training, God selected
Abraham as the feu ider of a new people;
and in this new begining God did not
shut up man’s destiny within the scope
of the family alone; but He approved
and established the Church and the
School as a co-working agency with
the Family for the proper training of
the race Abraham was a teacher before
he was a father.
He had at least three hundred-eight
teen insti ucted, or catechized. Scholars
in his household before he had a child
of his own.
God declared to Abraham that he was
a man who should train, not only his
children, but his household —his whole
tribe, as the term meant in those patri
archal days —in the theoiy and practic
of religion.
Foilwing his plans for the reformation
and the right training of man, God di
rected a recognition of the Church Sch
ool in its co-work with the Family, and
it just as explicitly commanded by him,
under the Mosiac eeouemy, that all par
ents should bring their childien to the
gatherings of the people in the chu ch
school, as it was that those parents should
teach their children faithfully in their
homes.
Moreover, it was distinctly declared
that the object of this gathering of the
children into the church school was in
order that the incompleteness of the
JFamily might be supplemented by the
teachings of the school; that the child
ren who have not known anything thro
ugh family religious instruction, may
hear and learn in the school to fear the
Lord.
And from that day to this the family has
never been entitled to claim for itself,
in the plan of God, the exclusive re
sponsibility, for or the charge of, the
religious instruction and influencing of
the children. In one form or another,
the school has had its existence from
the days of Moses until its latest and
most efficient devlopment in the mod
ern school, (which is now practically
accepted as the approved form of this
agency in well nigh every branch of
the Church of God.
The Levites were as Sunday School
Missionaries, in the days of Jehosaphat
when at his command, thtf ‘taught in
Judah, and had the BopSfof thtf Law 6f»'
Jhe Lord with them, add went about
throughout all of the Citiek .of Judah» ..
and Taught the people. So, again, ip
the days of Josiah and Nehemiah. ..’The
very Names of the superintendents and
teachers, and the precise Order of the
exercise, of a school, or a Bible school
or a Sunday School as it would now be
called, four centuries and before the
days of our Lord, are fully recorded in
the eighth chapter of the Book of Neh
emiah. The Jewish Rabbis show us
that, from the earliest days of the syna
gogue the second service of the syna
gogue was a gathering for social exer
cise in the form of free questioning and
answering. “Beth—Mid —Rash the
house of searching-they called that ser
vice in olden times; We call it Sunday
School.
There is every reason to suppose that
it was in such a school as this that Je
sus was found by his parents, in the
Temple-Courts, when he was twelve
years old where he was sitting before
the Teachers “both hearing and asking
them questions. The Talmud informs
us that there were Four Hundred and
Eighty seperate Synagogues in Jerusa
lem, in the days of its glory; and the
Rabbis claim is that Jerusalem was
destroyed because the Schools were
neglected. The distinctive features of
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