# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1862_S359
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

On the Evangelical Conduct of a Christian-minded Parish Schoolteacher, Etc. 359

and ability has value only when it takes place in the prevailing fear and
love of God and in obedience to the Fourth Commandment. Rather, the
influence of such teachers is for the most part a harmful and pernicious
one, in that, in the children — and especially in the more gifted ones —
by arousing an impure spirit of rivalry, they strengthen and reinforce
the pride and ambition inherited from original sin, and at the same time
the contempt for their less gifted fellow pupils; and, compared with such
a moral corruption of the children's disposition and character, the gain
they carry away through the acquisition and increase of this or that
knowledge and skill is not to be rated highly.

Third, the love of Christ shows itself in the teacher's fatherly
teaching and upbringing of his pupils in this, that, according to his gift
for imparting the subject matter, he seeks as far as possible to combine
what is grounding with what is stimulating. For every teacher — whether
he is active at a higher or a lower school — ought rightly to combine
thorough knowledge with skill in teaching and with a stimulating
personality. To be sure, this latter quality, the stimulating and animating
one, cannot be demanded to the same degree of every teacher, since
here too there is a difference of gifts, both of natural temperament and
of temperament sanctified by grace. Nevertheless, even the comparatively
phlegmatic teacher will not lack the stimulating element in his teaching,
if he also seeks for it, in prayer, the grace of the Holy Spirit, who
increasingly heals the sinful defects even of the natural disposition, and
who, in this case, first of all helps the teacher himself to live rightly in his
subject of instruction, to be at home in it and familiar with it, and to
become ever more the master of the matter and the form in imparting
it to his pupils. In this way it comes about that these pupils not only
increase step by step in thorough knowledge and skill, but also gain
ever more delight and love for the subject and for further learning.

And it is precisely from such thorough, skillful, and animating
imparting of instruction that there flows the twofold benefit, that the
pupils not only make gratifying progress in all sorts of knowledge and
ability, but that also their mental faculties — memory, understanding,
and the power of perception and of forming images — which organically
appropriate the teaching material offered and specially prepared for
their capacity, are thereby strengthened, and become more capable of
processing the later and stronger fare.

Fourth, it is this same love of Christ, shown in teaching and discipline
from his fatherly heart toward his pupils, that moves him in particular to
devote the greater part of his time and strength to the more weakly
gifted among them. Unchristian-minded schoolteachers, who as such
keep in view their own honor more than the profit and benefit of all the
children, do the opposite. These are generally accustomed to occupy
themselves most with the well-gifted, and at most, alongside these, with
the stronger of the moderately gifted pupils, because in these they can
see more evident fruit