he learns that self-knowledge, self-control, and "self-sacrifice," which are necessary to the future missionary, and no less so, to the future teacher. It is a religious, a spiritual training which the future educator receives first as the foundation of all other training. Education and reform must begin at home. The teacher is to instruct his pupils in the principles of true and solid morality. If he does not possess and practise these principles himself, he will be a corrupter of youth instead of a father and friend, "a blind leader of the blind, and both shall fall into the pit," as the Divine Teacher expresses it. If without practising these principles he endeavors to teach them, he is a hypocrite; his deeds will belie his words, and the eyes of the young are sharp and their perception is keen; they will soon discover the discord between the teacher's action and his precepts, and the former will have a more powerful influence on them, than the latter, as the Latin adage has it: Verba movent, exempla trahunt. Even the pagan rhetorician Quintilian insists on this point: Ipse (magister) nec habeat vitia, nec ferat: "The teacher should neither have nor tolerate faults."[1] The teacher is daily for hours with his pupils, speaking to them, moving before them, his every word, his every gesture, his every smile is watched by a set of keen critics. All this must imperceptibly exercise a deep influence on the youthful mind. How perfect, therefore, ought the teacher to be, how faultless, how exemplary! But this moral perfection cannot be acquired except by severe self-control, by rigorous self-discipline, the acquirement of which forms the great end of the religious noviceship.
- ↑ De Inst. Orat., II, 2.
