Oldalképek
PDF
ePub

hardened girls who drive away every right and good feeling from their hearts, and seem not to care when they have done what is wrong; I will give you a book, or work-box, like the others, or it shall be even a prettier book, or a larger and more expensive work-box." Should I have the same pleasure in the present as if I had it as a reward? No. Why? Because I should not experience the feeling of having done well. The feeling of having done my duty would be wanting; and if that were wanting, all the books and work-boxes in the world would fail to give me pleasure. Indeed, in the case which I have supposed, far from taking pleasure in the lady's gift, I am pretty sure I should say to her, "I am very much obliged to you for being so kind to me, but I had rather not have a book until I feel it can be given to me as a mark of my Teacher's approval." Any of you, if you had money enough, could buy the same things that we shall give you, but if you had a thousand guineas you could not buy a reward. I mean a reward, in the sense in which I give you rewards. You could not buy my good opinion, if you had this school-rocm full of sovereigns. It must be obtained by your own good conduct. You could not buy the blessing of a good conscience-that must be obtained by a sincere desire to please God-and whether you had rewards or not, I think you would be desirous to gain my good opinion, and, above all, I trust your first and chief desire would be to serve and please God. It is my belief that our rewards will help you to do this-will, with his blessing, assist you to find the path of duty-and when you have found it, will, as it were, stretch out a helping hand to guide you onward in the narrow but pleasant way. They will encourage those who have been trying to do well, and they will help to persuade those who have failed of doing so to act differently for the futurenot for the sake of the reward, but for the sake of doing what is right.

Were I in your place, I should value the cards very much. You will understand now why I should value them. There is no value in the card itself, but there is value in that which the card expresses there is value in

the feeling that you have been endeavouring, with God's help, to do your duty. The rewards will some of them wear out; but if you were to take care of the cards, they would last for a great many years. They would last if you were to live to be old women; and I am sure you would always have pleasure in looking at them. I should store these cards amongst my greatest treasures, as things which I should always like to look upon; just as I shall always like to keep that pretty little PrayerBook which you gave me. I prize that book far more than if I were to buy the handsomest Prayer-Book in all England, because the book which you gave me shews me that which I could not buy-it shews me that you love me. It is an outward token of an inward feeling, and that inward feeling is what I value-that feeling of love, which all the gold and silver in the world could not buy.

Now, I must begin to read the quarterly cards. Did the rules allow of it, I should not read them aloud today; for, as you all know, every card this quarter is not a card to be read with pleasure. I shall not say more than is absolutely necessary on the painful subject which is fresh in the recollection of all. A spirit of insubordi nation-a spirit of resistance to the authority of those who are set over us is an offence of no trifling natureit is at the root of all kinds of evil. It was a very serious fault, and I trust it has been seriously repented of. I have abundant reason to believe it has; and, believing this, I should be sorry indeed to add to the pain which must be renewed at this time. I think must all see, you from the explanation I have given you of rewards, how impossible it is to give a reward, which means an expression of our approval to conduct which has been entered in the class-book as "very bad." In fact, we should not dare to write down in our class-books, and on the cards, that conduct to be good which we know to be bad. How painful soever it may be to us and to you, we must not call that sweet which God pronounces to be bitter; that is, we must not say the conduct of any one is good when God, in his word, plainly says that it is bad. If you behave really and seriously bad, we have

no choice left about the matter-we cannot do otherwise than enter your conduct as bad—that is, unless we ourselves act wrongly also. We certainly could write good when we ought to write bad, but I hope we know our duty better than to imagine we are at liberty to take such a course as that. I assure you few things would have given me greater pleasure than to have discovered a way in which we could justly have given even a No. 3 reward to the girls to whom I have alluded; because, as I said before, I have great reason to be full of hope concerning them to believe that, for the future, better things may be expected.

When we assembled yesterday at the quarterly meeting to sum up the marks, I felt, and we all felt, that if we were to act rightly, we must leave that conduct without a reward. I desire to speak with the greatest kindness and gentleness on this painful subject. I feel, and I trust you all feel with me, how sad it must be for elder girls, those who possess many right and good feelings, to be refused a reward now at the end of the year, when I should have been so glad to have said, that whatever the backwardness of some of our girls might be, as regarded their learning, that their conduct was all that we could desire it to be. It is not bad lessons-I have said this before, and I repeat it again and again— it is not bad lessons, but bad conduct, about which I am, and about which I hope I shall always continue to be so very serious.

My dear children, I think I need not tell you that I love you all. When you first knew me, you might not have been sure of this; but now I think you know it, and I think you also know that mine is not that wrong, foolish love that would pass over your faults unreproved. If I did not love you, it might be so. When you did what was wrong, I might let it pass unnoticed, or at least very slightly noticed, and care only about your reading, writing, and sewing: I feel that I could no more act in this way towards one amongst you than if you were my own young sisters. I do not believe that you yourselves would wish me to do so; but if you did—if all the world wished it-I must still be firm, and do that

which it is my duty to do. Were your conduct unhappily to render it necessary, there is no pain I would not give you-no punishment, provided it were a right and proper punishment, which I would not consent to inflict, in the hope of, with God's blessing, curing you of your faults, now that you are young, and thus saving you from a great deal of future misery. I do not fear, girls, to tell you this. I do not think you love me the less because you know this to be the case.

66

Some persons think that the young do not love those who are very strict and particular about their conduct. They cannot know the young as well as I do, or they would surely have a better opinion of them. Children have far more wisdom in this subject than many people give them credit for; and if those who think in this way were to come amongst us here, we could prove to them that we love one another." I feel assured that those girls who have no rewards would say, and say it too with all their hearts, "I love my Teachers and my school;" and, what is more, I have not the smallest doubt but that they will prove their love in a way which is always far more satisfactory than mere words. You remember the way in which our Lord Jesus Christ told his disciples to prove their love; "If ye love me, keep my commandments." I may very humbly take up those gracious words of our blessed Lord, and use the argument with you: "If you love me, if you love your Teachers and your school, try to behave well, and to do what is right. Let your conduct be such as to reflect credit on yourselves, and on our dear little school. You are now starting afresh. The old marks are destroyed, and there is a new class-book. Let it be free, quite free of bad conduct marks." When I give you the next quarterly cards, if we live that long, let the first words I say to you be, "Every girl has a good conduct mark." Only think how happy we should all be! How delighted we should all feel! I was going to say I think it will come to pass; but I will not say that—I have said it before, and have been disappointed. I dare say, if I could get into your hearts at this moment-that part within you which thinks I should find every one of you, from the

[blocks in formation]
[ocr errors]

eldest to the youngest, thinking within yourselves, "No, you shall not be disappointed again: I will have a good conduct mark." And that is a right and good resolu tion; and if you have it, be thankful for it; but, remember, there is only one way of keeping it. You must not cease to pray for God's help. Your own strength—the strength of the best man, woman, or child in the world is perfect weakness. Remember this, and do not think you can ever be good, really and sincerely good, without the help of God's Holy Spirit. You may put on an outward appearance of goodness-you may be diligent, attentive, and well-behaved here in the school-roomand all the while, notwithstanding this shew of goodness, you may be proud and selfish, untruthful and unkind, ill-tempered and quarrelsome. We all know this is not real goodness. It is not the goodness which God requires, and it must not be the goodness which we require. We wish you to be good-not to only seem good. We wish you, of course, to behave well in the school-room; but we desire to feel that you will also behave well out of the school-room-at all times and in all places-not in our presence only, but also in our absence. We are very anxious that you should learn to be kind, gentle, and obliging in your whole manner and behaviour; we wish to believe that if others should act so wrongly as to try to teaze, vex, and be spiteful to you, that you would not act wrongly also, and be cross and unkind in return; but that you would forgive them, and be very kind to them, and do them all the good in your power, like the little Christian child who gave some of her beautiful fruit to a girl who often pushed her off her seat at school, "because," as she said, "she thought it would shew her that she wished to be kind to her." And this was doing what God commands to be done. "Do good to them that hate you," was a command of Jesus himself; and we must take care that we do not refuse to obey when God commands.

We have no excuse for disobedience, because, though our own sinful hearts would never of themselves be willing to shew all the lovely tempers and dispositions which shone so brightly in the character of our Lord

« ElőzőTovább »