Immeasurably more impermanent in method and personnel is the regular collegiate department, the Sabbath-school proper. In the early days, away back when sugar was sixteen cents a pound, the thing to do was to learn Scripture verses by heart. If you were a rude, rough boy who didn't exactly love the Sunday-school as much as the hymn made you say you did, but still one who had rather sing it than stir up a muss, you hunted for the shortest verses you could find and said them off. From four to eight was considered a full day's work. But if you were a boy who put on an apron and helped your Ma with the dishes, a boy who always wiped your feet before you came in, a boy that never got kept in at school, a boy that cried pretty easy, a nice, pale boy, with bulging blue eyes, you came to Sabbath-school and disgorged verses like buck-shot out of a bag. The four-to-eight-verse boys sat and listened, and improved their minds.
There was generally one other boy like you in the class, and it was nip-and-tuck between you which should get the prize, until finally you came one Sunday, all bloated up with 238 verses in your craw, and he quit discouraged. The prize was yours. It was a beautiful little Bible with a brass clasp; it had two tiny silk strings of an old-gold color for bookmarks, and gilt edges all around that made the leaves stick together at first. It was printed in diamond type, so small it made your ears ring when you tried to read it.
Other faculties than that of memory were called into action in those days by problems like these: "Who was the meekest man? Who was the strongest man? Who was the father of Zebedee's children? Who had the iron bedstead, and whose thumbs and great-toes were cut off?"To set a child to find these things in the Bible without a concordance seems to us as futile as setting him to hunt a needle in a haystack. But our fathers were not so foolish as we like to think them; they didn't care two pins if we never discovered who had the iron bedstead, but they knew that, leafing over the book, we should light upon treasure where we sought it not, kernels of the sweetest meat in the hardest shells, stories of enthralling interest where we least expected them, but, most of all, and best of all, texts that long afterward in time of trouble should come to us, as it were the voice of one that also had eaten the bread of affliction, calling to us across the chasm of the centuries and saying: "O, tarry thou the Lord's leisure: be strong and He shall comfort thine heart."In the higher classes, that still were not high enough to rank with Mr. Parker's, the exegetical powers were stimulated in this wise:
"'And they sung a hymn and went out.' Now what do you understand by that?" We told what we "understood," and what we "held," and what we "believed," and laid traps for the teacher and tried to corner him with irrelevant texts wrenched from their context. He had to be an able man and a nimble-witted man. Mere piety might shine in the prayer-meeting, in the class-room, at the quarterly love-feast, but not in the Sabbath-school. I remember once when Brother Butler was away they set John Snyder to teach us. John didn't know any more than the law allowed, and we made him feel it, until finally, badgered beyond endurance, he blurted out that all he knew was that he was a sinner saved by grace. Maybe he couldn't just tell where to find this, that, and t' other thing in the Bible, but he could turn right to the place where it said that though a body's sins were as scarlet, yet they should be white as snow. It was regarded as a very poor sort of an excuse then, but thinking it over here lately, it has seemed to me that maybe John had the root of the matter in him after all.
The comparative scarcity of polemical athletes and the relative plenty of the Miss Susie Goldrick kind of teachers, apparently called into being the Berean Lesson Leaf system, with its Bible cut up into lady-bites of ten or twelve verses, its Golden Topics, Golden Texts, its apt alliterations, like:
S AMUEL
EEKS
AUL
ORROWING
and its questions prepared in tabloid form, suitable for the most enfeebled digestions, see directions printed on inside wrapper.
Among the many evidences of the degeneracy of the age is the scandalous ignorance of our young people regarding the sacred Scriptures, which at the very lowest estimate are incontestably the finest English ever written. Those whose childhood antedates the lesson leaf are not so unfamiliar with that wondrous treasure-house of thought. It is not for me to say what has wrought the change.
I can only point out that lesson leaves, being about the right size for shaving papers, barely last from Sunday to Sunday, while that very identical Bible with the blinding type that I won years and years ago, by learning verses, is with me still. Yes, and as Ioften wonder to discover, some of those very verses that I gobbled down as heedlessly as any ostrich are with me still.
Remain to be considered the opening and closing exercises, principally devoted, I remember, to learning new tunes and singing old ones out of books with pretty titles, like "Golden Censer,""Silver Spray," "Pearl and Gold," "Sparkling Dewdrops," and "Sabbath Chimes." I wasn't going to tell it, but I might as well, I suppose. I can remember as far back as "Musical Leaves." There must be quite a lot of people scattered about the country who sung out of that when they were little. I wish a few of us old codgers might get together some time and with many a hummed and prefatory, "Do, mi, Sol, do; Sol, mi . . . mi-i-i-i," finally manage to quaver out the sweet old tunes we learned when we were little tads, each with a penny in his fat, warm hand: "Shall we Gather at the River?"and "Work, for the Night is Coming"; and what was the name of that one about:
