TEMPERANCE AND EDUCATION by Canon Farrar

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · April 1, 1880

FromThe Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, Vol. 55, No. 14

TEMPERANCE AND EDUCATION.

By Canon Farrar

I READ a story the other day which impressed me very much. It was from the Jewish Talmud, and it touches very much upon the position of teachers. The story runs that there had been a long drought in Palestine, and all the chief heads of the Jewish religion were engaged in praying for rain. The priests prayed for rain; the Pharisees prayed for rain; the rabbis, and the scribes, and all of them prayed for rain, and yet no rain came. At last one person, whom no one knew at all, stood up and prayed to God for rain, and immediately he who causes his wind to blow and his rain to fall, blackened the whole sky with clouds, and there came a burst of abundant rain. And then all the priests, and scribes, and Pharisees turned to this obscure and unknown person, and said, “Who art thou whose prayers are heard when all our prayers have been rejected?” and his answer was, “I am a teacher of little children.”

That story shows, what is also confirmed by many other passages from the Jewish writings, the high estimation in which they held the teachers of the young; and I think all the wisest men in all ages have done the same. You will all remember what Luther’s estimation of them was when he said if God had not called him to be a preacher of the gospel, the one office he would have chosen in preference to all others would have been that of a teacher of the young.

You need hardly be reminded of how a celebrated Roman Catholic ecclesiastic remarked, when he was speaking of the conversion of England to Roman Catholicism, in which he was a firm believer, “Give me the children, and I will give you the parents;” and I for one may safely say to the large body of English teachers, under whose influence, perhaps, many thousands of children are passing year after year, “Give me the children of England for a time, and then, even if the parents are entirely absorbed in the public house, we may have some hopes of the future.”

One thing is quite clear—that you may with perfect safety encourage your children to become total abstainers. I think you may not in the least degree fear the consequence of leading your children to take the pledge, but rather in doing so you will be conferring on them the possibility of spending a life saved from thousands of temptations, and far less liable to the danger and misery attendant upon the lives of the class from which those children are drawn.—Canon Farrar.