# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_December 1862_S362
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

362 On the Evangelical Conduct Proper to a Christian-Minded Congregational Schoolteacher, etc.

Rather, he will, especially in the case of grosser offenses, take the occasion
to uncover for the guilty one, privately and with fatherly earnestness, the
heart corrupted by original sin from which these actual sins have come,
to point out from the evil fruit the rotten tree, and at the same time
to show him his spiritual powerlessness and inability to procure for himself
another and new heart, in which the love of God and of his
neighbor dwells.

If God now gives grace for the wholesome effect of this admonition, together
with and according to his Word, so that the punished schoolchild is moved
by Moses' office and this rod of woe to a penitent recognition of sin and to a
longing for its forgiveness, then the schoolteacher has the most desirable
opportunity to paint his Savior before the eyes of the small penitent sinner
and to entice the child's faith, to seize it anew and once again to make the
forgiveness of sins its own. And it is a lovely and wholesome thing there,
especially when at home such admonition to faith and instruction in
prayer was lacking, when the teacher-father, promptly and in the very
act, together with his schoolchild, as its mouth, calls upon the Lord Christ
for the gracious forgiveness of the recently committed sin and of the guilt
of the corrupted nature, and at the same time for the grace and power of
the Holy Spirit, on a similar occasion, to resist the enticement of the flesh
and to walk ever more in the path of the fourth commandment.

Through such fatherly-instructive discipline and admonition with
individual schoolchildren who especially need it, the bond of love between
them and their schoolteacher would grow ever more inward and firm; in the
children thus reared and admonished the wholesome fruit of righteousness
would, under God's blessing, likewise not fail to appear, and through them
and with them the whole condition of the class would keep improving, so
that one would perceive, in its prevailing bearing, an earnest, attentive,
decorous, and disciplined character in it, and could detect in it something
of the fear and love of God.

This, then, would be in sum what appears to me the most important
thing in how a congregational schoolteacher, out of a father's heart and
after the love of Christ, ought in teaching and discipline to conduct himself
toward the lambs of Christ, his schoolchildren.*)

Glorious and great, noble and precious before God is, in truth, as already
indicated above, this calling, and next to and together with faithful, capable
shepherds and teachers of the whole congregation, these their helpers in the
pasturing of the lambs — insofar as they are of the same kind — are the
greatest blessings and benefits of God toward his church, indeed, insofar as
the church is also a leaven, toward the human race in general. In the eyes
of the world, and according to the judgment

*) For it is, of course, self-evident that this essay is meant to be, and can be, neither
a pedagogy nor a methodology.