A man or a woman with a book is the picture of the Sunday school teacher. The Book is always essential. It is the emblem of the teacher’s mission – to declare God’s will, to tell of God’s love. The message is in the book, and a teacher without his book would seem to be unattested.
Every teacher should have his own Bible. Of course Bibles are all alike, and one finds the same words, whatever the edition, small type or large, limp cover or stiff boards. Still every teacher should have a Bible of his own which he may use daily in his personal reading. It does not seem enough just to pick up any Bible that may be within reach, today one, tomorrow another.
A book is like a friend; we learn to love it, and it seems to get to know us better as we use it the longer, and opens its heart to us more and more freely as we commune with it more and more familiarly. It is easier to find what we want in a Bible we have used long – we know just where to look for it, on which page, and where on the page. It is strange, too, how it learns to open at our favorite chapters.
Then the teacher who uses his Bible much and to whom the book becomes a real friend, wishes to mark it, indicating the passages which have helped him, and noting on the margin memoranda and references which may be of value to him in his own spiritual life or in his work with others. Some old and well used Bibles tell the whole spiritual history of those who have read them, in the texts that are underscored. We cannot mark any Bible but our own. Besides, there is something sacred and confidential about the marks one makes in one’s own Bible; they tell the story of spiritual experiences which only one’s own eye should see. One does not care to put such records of heart life in any Bible but one’s own. It would be making too free with sacred things.
Page 1