THE Christian Science Sunday School is a vineyard where the tender plants of the Father's planting find nurture and care, to the end of a fruitful harvest. The husbandman who is privileged to work among the vines may well find it incumbent upon him to take the shoes from off his feet, for this vineyard is very holy. It is the privilege of a worker in a vineyard to stir the soil deeply about the growing vines, to prune with vigorous shears the adventitious shoots, and to train the fruit-bearing branches over the stout trellises, that the perfect, well-formed clusters may hang their royal purple high—clear of the dust of the ground. These are the duties in which the Sunday school teacher becomes proficient. He learns to love his labor in the vineyard; and royally do the little plants respond to his care and training.
To teach in a Christian Science Sunday School is a trust not to be lightly regarded, a privilege to be prayed over as Esau prayed for his "place of repentance"—"carefully with tears." He who teaches merely because he conceives it a duty is missing a great blessing.
When the disciples were discussing what constituted greatness in the sight of God, the master Christian took a little child and set him in the midst of them, declaring: "Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven." To come into intimate touch with the simple, trusting faith of little children, to taste of the humility of the child-thought and to express childlike obedience, is to learn the foundational lessons of that greatness which 'is gauged by lowliness of heart, the quality which admits the conscious presence of God.
