t love the children._ You must love each
particular child. You must become interested in each child, not for what
it is to you, or to the class, or to the school, but for what it is in
itself, as a precious jewel, to be loved and admired, for those immortal
qualities and capacities which belong to it as a human being. No matter
how degraded or depraved or forbidding in appearance that child may be,
it has qualities which, if brought out, may make it more glorious than
an angel. If Jesus loved him, you may love him. Jesus did not stand off
at a distance from the loathsome and filthy leper, while performing the
miracle of healing. He first "_touched_" the leper, and said, "Be thou
clean." We are sometimes too fastidious in our benevolence, and shrink
too much from coming into contact with those whom we would befriend.

Little real influence is ever produced upon any human being, without
creating between you and him a bond of sympathy. If we would work
strongly and efficiently upon the minds of children, we must really love
them, not in the abstract, not in a general way, but concretely and
individually. We must love John and William and Mary and Susie, simply
and purely because he or she is, in himself or herself alone, an object
of true interest and affection. In looking over a school, it is not
difficult to discover at a glance which teachers thus love their
children. It speaks in every word from the lips. It beams in every look
from the eyes. It thrills in every tone of the voice. It has a language
in the very touch of the hand and the movements of the person.

Some persons are naturally more fond of children than others are. But
those not naturally thus inclined may cultivate the disposition. They
_must_ do so if they mean to be teachers. No one is fitted to be a
teacher, who has not learned to sympathize with the real wants and
feelings of children. Pretence here is all wasted. Shams may do with
grown persons sometimes, never with children. They have an instinctive
perception of what is genuine and what is pretended, in professed love
for them. In fact, the way to win the affection of a child is to love
him, not to make professions of love.

It is not always the easiest thing in the world to exercise this love. A
teacher may have the charge of a class of children whose appearance,
manners, and dispositions are exceedingly forbidding, perhaps even
loathsome. Yet observation and study will ordinarily discover some goo