For Teachers

WE implore thy blessing, O God, on all the men and women who teach the children and youth of our nation, for they are the potent friends and helpers of our homes. Into their hands we daily commit the dearest that we have, and as they make our children, so shall future years see them. Grant them an abiding consciousness that they are co-workers with thee, thou great teacher of humanity, and that thou hast charged them with the holy duty of bringing forth from the budding life of the young the mysterious stores of character and ability which thou hast hidden in them. Teach them to reverence the young lives, clean and plastic, which have newly come from thee, and to realize that generations still unborn shall rue their sloth or rise to higher levels through their wisdom and faithfulness. Gird them for their task with thy patience and tranquillity, with a great fatherly and motherly love for the young, and with special tenderness for the backward and afflicted. Save them from physical exhaustion, from loneliness and discouragement, from the numbness of routine, and from all bitterness of heart.

We bless thee for the free and noble spirit that is breathing with quickening power upon the educational life of our day, and for the men and women of large mind and loving heart who have made that spirit our common possession by their teaching and example. But grant that a higher obedience and self-restraint may grow in the new atmosphere of freedom. We remember with gratitude to thee the godly teachers of our own youth who won our hearts to higher purposes by the sacred contagion of their life. May the strength and beauty of Christ-like service still be plainly wrought in the lives of their successors, that our children may not want for strong models of devout manhood on whom their characters can be molded.

Do thou reward thy servants with a glad sense of their own eternal worth as teachers of the race, and in the heat of the day do thou show them the spring by the wayside that flows from the eternal silence of God and gives new light to the eyes of all who drink of it.