# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1862_S360
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

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

achieve results and have less trouble and effort. The Christian-minded
schoolteacher does otherwise. In this too he is a follower of Christ, in
that he devotes himself with all the greater love and patience to the
weaker and more neglected children. Just as the Lord has dealt, and still
daily deals, with his own poor, sinful soul — teaching and enlightening it
continually through his Spirit and Word, bringing it from one degree of
knowledge and clarity to another — so, in grateful love in return to
Christ, he deals with his poor, weak pupils, and does not let himself be
held back, in the exercise of this love, by their slow and dull
understanding or by the natural reluctance of their flesh. And, by
adding to it many a heartfelt, interceding sigh and "Ephphatha," God
sometimes lets him see some lovely fruit of this labor of his love; for
especially in the knowledge of Christian doctrine, which is rooted in
simple childlike faith, such doubly simple children sometimes get further
than those who have more understanding than faith.

These, then, would be the four foremost points in which the love of
Christ shows itself vividly in the teacher's fatherly teaching and
upbringing of his pupils. And where these points are constantly put into
practice, there the corrupt character of unbelieving schoolteachers, in
its manifold misshapenness, is excluded — such as: first, the grim,
harsh, despotic character of the taskmaster on the one hand, and the
carnally good-natured, weak, trifling, characterless, improperly familiar
character on the other; second, just as much a mechanical overloading
with, moreover, indigestible teaching material, as an over-artful
mouth-fitting and rationalistic decomposing and killing of what is living
— the former accompanied by a predominant arousal of fear of
punishment, when the spirit balks at being a mere storehouse of dead
knowledge, the latter by a predominant arousal of ambition, in order, at
public school examinations, to be paraded, like the parade horses of a
well-drilled riding master, before an astonished public