tried to read it.

Other faculties than that of memory were called into action in those
days by problems like these: "Who was the meekest man? Who was the
strongest man? Who was the father of Zebedee's children? Who had
the iron bedstead, and whose thumbs and great-toes were cut off?"
To set a child to find these things in the Bible without a
concordance seems to us as futile as setting him to hunt a needle
in a haystack. But our fathers were not so foolish as we like to
think them; they didn't care two pins if we never discovered who had
the iron bedstead, but they knew that, leafing over the book, we
should light upon treasure where we sought it not, kernels of the
sweetest meat in the hardest shells, stories of enthralling interest
where we least expected them, but, most of all, and best of all,
texts that long afterward in time of trouble should come to us, as
it were the voice of one that also had eaten the bread of affliction,
calling to us across the chasm of the centuries and saying: "O,
tarry thou the Lord's leisure: be strong and He shall comfort thine
heart."

In the higher classes, that still were not high enough to rank with
Mr. Parker's, the exegetical powers were stimulated in this wise:
"'And they sung a hymn and went out.' Now what do you understand
by that?" We told what we "understood," and what we "held," and
what we "believed," and laid traps for the teacher and tried to
corner him with irrelevant texts wrenched from their context. He
had to be an able man and a nimble-witted man. Mere piety might
shine in the prayer-meeting, in the class-room, at the quarterly
love-feast, but not in the Sabbath-school. I remember once when
Brother Butler was away they set John Snyder to teach us. John