[This address was prepared in reference to Sunday-schools, but the principles inculcated apply equally well to all schools.-ED.]

I believe it to be impossible to over-estimate the importance of the question which has been assigned to me for discussion this afternoon. I am inclined to believe, also, that there are very few questions of as much importance which are so poorly understood as this. I believe that the undeveloped resources for thorough instruction, contained in the art of questioning, can be fittingly compared to the silver mines of Colorado before the American people had begun to explore them. What treasures of precious metal were hidden away in the pockets of the mountains, only awaiting intelligent approach for their development! So there lie treasures of thought and instruction, and the blessings to humanity that would flow from them, only waiting the intelligent use of the art of questioning.

There are several kinds of teachers in our Sunday-schools. There is one kind which bears the name and bears nothing else; which never looks at the lesson from week's end to week's end, except when in presence of the class, and which then picks up the lesson paper, hears the class read the lesson, verse by verse, then turns to the questions at the end of the lesson, reads a question, and if it is answered, reads another. If it is not answered, he turns to the answer in the lesson paper and reads that, after he finds it, which frequently takes him a good while. He then reads another question. Meantime Joe is half asleep, and Jim is getting ready to stick a pin in him, and Bill has rolled a piece of his lesson paper into a ball, and thrown it in somebody's eye in a distant class. In seventeen minutes out of the thirty assigned, this teacher has read all the questions, usually few in number, and read all the answers he can find. The remaining thirteen minutes his class is an insufferable nuisance to the rest of the school,

provided he is the only teacher of this kind in it. If there are others, there are several nuisances, which, to use a legal phrase, ought to be abated.

He

There is another kind of teacher, who is careful and studious. surrounds himself with lesson helps and other sources of information. He fills himself full to the brim with Scripture geography, and history, and customs, and inferences, and deductions, and what-not, till he is so full that it is necessary to put a stopper in the bottle to keep it from slopping over at every step he takes. He goes down to the Sunday-school, waits impatiently for the preliminary worship and other exercises to end, then pulls the stopper out of the bottle, and gurgle, gurgle, gurgle it goes down the open mouths of the wondering class till the bell rings for the close of the lesson.

"And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew,

That one small head could carry all he knew."

Whether the class has learned anything clearly, or whether it has all gone into one ear and out of the other, as clean water passes through a sieve, he does not know, and never will know till the judgment day.

These are two extremes, between which there is a large and varied assortment of gradations, and midway between which is that golden medium-the model Sunday-school teacher, who devotes a sufficient amount of time to thoroughly understand the lesson himself, in its text, facts and truths, its legitimate inferences and practical applica tions, and who understands and practices the art of questioning. For ideal Sunday-school teaching, the latter is as important as the former. If you should drop a lump of rock candy (which is only crystallized sugar) into a cup of tea at a hasty meal, the tea would be drunk without much sweetness, and the lump remain. If you should grind it well, so that it was in grains, and drop it in without stirring, the hasty cup of tea would be somewhat sweeter, there would be a good deal of sugar in the bottom of the cup. But put the granulated sugar into the tea and stir it well, and it is all absorbed, and even the hasty cup of tea is sweet.

Now, our work has to be a hasty cup-thirty minutes, out of 6,720 waking minutes of the week, is what we get with our pupils. The undigested and unarranged and unselected mass of comment which some teachers drop into the waiting soul-cups before them is the lump of rock-sugar; the arranged and selected store of information which other teachers drop in, in the same way, is the granulated sugar;

but the skillful questioning is the stirring spoon, which so mingles the sugar of truth with the soul itself, that it shall sweeten the whole life of the coming week. See to it, teachers, that it is sweetness as well

as light.

The first requisite to a mastery of the art of questioning in practical use, is a thorough familiarity with the lesson that you intend to communicate. Out of nothing, nothing comes. You may have the theory of questioning at your tongue's end, but this will be of no use without you understand the lesson thoroughly. Fill your own mind, not with everything that has been said or can be said upon that passage of Scripture, for you have only thirty or forty minutes for your lesson, and you will only be bewildered by the amplitude of your material. You cannot put a pigeon in a wren's nest.

First make yourself familiar with the bare text and the meaning of all its words. Then read a few judicious comments which will bring out the leading thoughts of the passage, unless you are one of the minority who can make these for themselves. Then decide how much of this you can profitably introduce within the lesson-time. Then select the portion most important to your class. Then make yourself thoroughly familiar with so much of the thought conveyed or suggested by the passage, as that you really know it. Then look for parallel authorities of God's word, and then for pertinent illustrations from the wide domain of human and other nature; then prepare a set of questions which will elicit this line of thought from your class, if they have already reached it in their home study, or will show that they have not reached it, and what it is necessary for you to communi

cate.

I do not mean that you should slavishly adhere to the prepared list of questions, for it will frequently be the case in a wide-awake class that their answers will suggest or even necessitate new questions which had not occurred to you. But it is well to prepare a set of questions which may serve as an outline, at least, of the course of the lesson, as an artist makes an outline of his portrait, to be filled in at leisure with minute details and harmonious shading. Until you acquire a measure of skill yourself in the art of questioning, avail yourself of the very best and most comprehensive set of questions you can find, the set which, when answered, will most fully lay bare the secrets of the passage, for God's word is full of secrets, to be found only by "searching the Scriptures." I regret to say that the larger number of Sunday-school publications which have come under my notice, pay but little attention to this important department of their legitimate

work, and also that inadequate views of the importance of wise ques tioning, keep the teachers who most need it from demanding what they so much need.

In studying the art of questioning, remember that there are a number of classes of questions; that quite a variety of objects is to be attained by well selected questions. A question from a pupil to a teacher has for its object the gaining of information. But a question from a teacher to a pupil has not this object, except to obtain information of the amount of the pupil's knowledge on the matter in hand. One class of questions has this object, but it is only a class. There are many questions asked by a wise teacher which he does not expect the pupil to answer. They are asked for other purposes than ascertaining the pupil's knowledge. It is only by a knowledge of these various purposes, and a due regard for them, that we can practice the art of questioning successfully.

To begin, however, with the first and most obvious use of interrogation, What do we wish to ascertain as to the pupil's information?

At the basis of all is knowledge of the text itself. The Sundayschool is an institution for the study of God's word. Everything else is incidental-this is vital. History, chronology, geography, physiology, ethics, religion itself, are no part of the Sunday-school curriculum except as they center around, flow from, or cast light upon some part of the Word of God. I beseech you to write this ineffaceably upon your mental tablets. It is the pole-star of Sunday-school work; it is the safe-guard against a hundred mistakes in the Sundayschool management. The Sunday school session that does not result in a better knowledge of some part of God's word is a failure, no matter what else may have transpired. Not large audiences, not fine singing, not elegant libraries, not general enthusiasm, are the degreemarks of the Sunday-school thermometer, but the amount of the Word of God known and understood. Therefore the first object of your questions is to know how much the scholar knows, first, of the text. It is well, therefore, to frame a series of questions that will bring this out; a series of questions which, when answered correctly, will reproduce in the answers the sense of the text, if not its exact words; the exact words, however, when these are essential to the

sense.

Questions in regard to the religious meaning of words or sentences may require several additional questions. If a pupil has given a wrong answer, it is much better to cause him to see his mistake, and lead him to a right answer by a series of suggestive questions, than to

substitute the right answer off hand. Having worked it out himself, he is far more apt to retain it. This was one of the characteristics of the method of Socrates, to make men see their own mistakes by ques tioning.

If you can not lead the pupil thus to the correct answer, then, of course, it must be directly communicated. But when you have thus given it to him, see that he gives it back to you before the lesson closes, for the double purpose of knowing whether he has grasped it, and fixing it more firmly in his mind..

It will be seen that what I have thus far presented, simply amplifies Fitch's first three rules:

1. Never teach what you do not quite understand.

2. Never tell a child what you could make that child tell you. 3. Never give a piece of information without asking for it again. A great deal of thought may be profitably expended upon the questions of recapitulation and their answers, to be asked and answered at the close of the lesson, so that the pupil may carry away one or two or three clear-cut ideas from its teaching. The mastery of the art of questioning will find one of its surest manifestations at this point.

But here at once recurs the thought, emphasized at an early stage of this address: The teacher must himself have mastered the thoughts of the passage in order that he may ask these questions and be prepared to answer them.

An address upon the art of questioning would be incomplete without some remarks upon the manner. The same question may be asked in one of two manners, one of which will invite, and the other repel, the attempt to answer. Here again recurs the necessity of knowing the lesson. There are bright pupils in every school who will know by a half dozen questions whether the teacher knows the lesson. If they decide he does not, that teacher's power for good is largely abridged, if not utterly destroyed. There is nothing that wins and holds a child better than the crisp, decided way of the man who is thoroughly familiar with his lesson, and knows just what he is going to teach.

Then the manner must show that you are interested in the lesson, that for the time it is occupying your whole thought. If you can willingly stop in its midst to talk with a neighboring teacher, or with one of the class on some different topic, if you can bear the impertinent intrusion of superintendent, or secretary, or librarian during the study hour without holy indignation, you lose so much of teaching