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THE
MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
The Works of Dn Pattison
The History of the English Bible
i2mo, 281 pages. Price, $1.25.
The Making of the Sermon
i2mo, 402 pages. Price, $1.50.
Public Worship
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The Ministry of the Scsnday School
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i2mo, 56 pages, paper. Price, 10 cts.
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Sent postpaid on receipt of price.
American Baptist Publication Society
Z430 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia
T
HE MINISTRY OF THE
SUNDAY-SCHOOL *
BY
T. HARWOOD PATTISON
'Professor in T{ochester Theological Seminary
When men do anything for God^ the very least things they never
know where it will end^ nor what amount of work it will do for
him. Love's secret^ therefore^ is to be always doing things for
God, and not to mind because they are such very little ones,
— Frederick William Faber
PHILADELPHIA
Bmerican JSaptiet publication Societis
1902
Copyright igoa by the
AMERICAN Baptist Publication Society
Published April, 1902
from tbe Society's own press
1^^ /v J
^0 tbe f aculti^ anD StuDente
OF
IRcQcnVe parfi College
LONDON
AND OF
^be WarttorD ^beological Seminan?
HARTFORD, CONN.
PREFACE
This book has grown out of the ** Ridley Lec-
tures " on " The Minister in Relation to Children
and Sunday-schools/' delivered at Regent's Park
College, London, in the summer of 1900. The
same course was given before the students of the
Hartford Theological Seminary, Hartford, Conn.,
and single lectures in the series have been used
elsewhere.
In preparing them for the press I have widened
the original scope by adding the lectures which
deal with the origin, progress, and future of the
modern Sunday-school. The literary form in
which they were originally cast when prepared
for delivery as lectures has been changed some-
what, the better to appeal to the constituency of
readers now addressed ; but I have not materially
altered the aim to which I was committed by the
Ridley foundation, namely, to deal mainly with the
minister in his relation to the young people of his
congregation. The importance of this aspect of
Sunday-school work, and the slight attention which
it has so far received, seem to me to justify this dis-
tinct and definite purpose in the book, even though
• •
Vll
Vlll PREFACE
it now addresses itself to a wider and more varied au-
dience than that for which it was originally intended.
I wish to express my grateful appreciation of
the help which t have received in the preparation
of this volume from Dr. H. Clay Trumbull, of
Philadelphia, and his son, Mr. C. G. Trumbull ; Dr.
C. R. Blackall, editor of periodicals of the Ameri-
can Baptist Publication Society; and Rev. Carey
Bonner, general secretary of the Sunday-school
Union of London.
The literature of the Sunday-school has now be-
come very large, and the marginal references in
this volume will show how much I have been in-
debted to many writers. Let me make special
mention of the works on Robert Raikes, by J.
Henry Harris ; W. H. Watson's ** History and
Work of the .Sunday-school Union ** ; and Dr. H.
Clay Trumbull's admirable Yale lectures on the
Sunday-school ; the report of the World's Sunday-
school Convention, held in London, in 1889, with
much statistical literature of the same kind and of
later date ; and also of Dr. S. L. Gulick's excel-
lent summaries in " The Growth of the Kingdom
of God." Many valuable suggestions of a prac-
tical nature will be found in Dr. Edward Judson*s
little book on **The Institutional Church," and in
the "Handbook on Sunday-school Work," by Rev.
L. E. Peters.
January i, 1902. ^ • "• "•
CONTENTS
I
The Bible and the Child i
II
The Sunday-school in the Eighteenth Century 47
III
The Sunday-school in the Nineteenth Century 75
IV
The Minister and the Young People of the
Congregation 105
V
The Minister and the Sunday-school 149
VI
The Minister in the Sunday-school 185
VII
The Sunday-school and the Twentieth Century 229
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD
The authority of the Bible the first consideration. The
Old Testament : Patriarchal times ; the child in the larger
family of Israel. The New Testament : Jesus now the
prominent figure. Subsequent Ages : Growth of priestly
assumption ; the Reformation. The early days of the
Sunday-school. Inadequate conception of the child's
nature. Misconception as to pastoral obligations. The
growth of more healthful views.
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD
To the young chaplain who inquired of the
Duke of Wellington whether, in the face of the
prejudice, superstition, and ignorance of the
Hindus, it did not seem to him a hopeless and
extravagant enterprise to preach the Christian
religion to the people of India, the answer came
back without a moment's hesitation : " Look, sir,
to your marching orders — * Preach the gospel to
every creature.* '*
This suggests the course for us to pursue in
considering the duty of the Christian minister in
relation to the young people of his congregation.
His work among them, whether in the pulpit, the
school, or the home ; whether as preacher, teacher,
or friend, must be settled by the instructions and
examples which he finds in the Bible. The author
of this book is the Father of the child. In no
other volume in all literature is there a gallery of
children with faces so varied or so interesting.
Every type of child may be found there, and the
tenderest as well as the ripest life is set in high
and inspiring light, and looked at with reference
3
4 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
not to time alone but also to still wider and more
lasting relations. So that when we study what
by precept and example the Bible teaches us as to
the children, we may expect to find our way direct
to the will of God in relation to the church in its
treatment of them, and to that will, also, in rela-
tion to the minister of his holy religion, who by
his life and teaching is the servant of the church
and the messenger of the gospel to the youngest
lamb of the fold.
Unquestionably much attention is given in the
Bible to the lives of children. The charm which
the book has for those who have not as yet
caught its deeper notes is due in large measure to
this. In contrast with other sacred books of the
ages it is full of child life. In its earlier chapters,
onward from the voice that calls Cain to account
for the death of his brother, we are taught the
lesson, afterward to be emphasized by Jesus him-
self, that the life of the young is dear to God.
The destinies of the world seem to travel down
to Egypt with the lad Joseph, and to rock with
the infant Moses in his ark of bulrushes on the
Nile. The helm of history is for the time in the
grasp of the child. And this in its turn suggests
that in the sight of God the child is not only dear
to his heart, but also precious beyond our human
computation. It is from him that we learn that
It is
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 5
Awful to behold
A helpless infant newly born,
Whose little hands unconscious hold
The keys of darkness and of dawn.
The old schoolmaster who always lifted his cap
to his scholars, as to the future masters of the
world, was right. Jacob climbing through dubious
paths to the height of Peniel ; Joseph learning that
it was not his brethren, but God, who sent him
down to Egypt; Moses attaining to a diviner
parentage by refusing to be called the son of
Pharaoh's daughter ; Samuel waking in the temple
to a loftier consecration than any Eli could bestow
as he cries, " Speak, Lord, for thy servant hear-
eth"; David taken from the $heepfold to feed
and guide the chosen people ; Josiah crowned a
child, but not too young to become a reformer as
well as a ruler — these are lives which in their
earlier developments are prophetic of the mighty
power to be wielded through all time by him of
whom Isaiah cried centuries before his birth,
'* Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given,
and the government shall be upon his shoulders." ^
So true is it that alike in the home, the nation,
and the whole wide world it is the little child that
leads. For we have not learned the teaching of
the Bible aright until from other lips than those
of Jesus we hear the words which gained a newer
^ Isa. 9 : 6.
6 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
and deeper meaning as he spoke them : " Except
ye be converted and become as little children, ye
shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." ^
In considering what the Bible teaches as to the
minister in his relation to children, we will turn,
in the first place, to the Old Testament.
When we do so, what impresses us at once, I
think, is that the whole history of the human race
strikes its roots in the family. Of Abraham, the
Lord says : " For I know him that he will com-
mand his children and his household after him. " ^
Here, in germ, is the principle of family training,
out of which I believe all other training must
grow. Back of the priest we see the patriarch ;
back of the church, the family. Abraham was
the head of the household, and, therefore, its
minister. You remember how nobly Burns pic-
tures this high office in the " Cotter's Saturday
Night," when, bending over the big ha* Bible :
The priestlike father reads the sacred page,
How Abram was the friend of God on high ;
Or Moses bade eternal warfare wage
With Amalek' s ungracious progeny !
Or how the royal bard did groaning lie
Beneath the stroke of heaven' s avenging ire ;
Or Job' s pathetic plaint and wailing cry ;
Or rapt Isaiah's wild seraphic fire ;
Or other holy seers that tune the sacred lyre.
1 Matt. 18:3. * Gen. 18 : 19.
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 7
And the patriarchal portrait receives its crowning
touch when,
Kneeling down to heaven* s eternal king,
The saint, the father, and the husband prays.
The development of the theocracy can be followed
step by step from the call of Abram — " I am the
Almighty God, walk before me and be thou per-
fect " ^ — to the prophecy (among the last words
of the Old Testament) of the day in which " there
shall be upon the bells of the horses holiness
unto the Lord," ^ and through it all no national
or ecclesiastical changes are suffered to affect
this fact of the supreme importance of the family
as the foundation of human society. The insist-
ence on the duties which the parent owes to the
child and the child to the parent hinges on the
truth, never lost sight of for one instant, that God
is the Father of both the one and the other. In
other words, it is the religious aspect of the house-
hold that is of paramount importance.
To this may be traced the obligation under
which the parent is laid to train his children. To
him, and not to priest or instructor, is it said of
the commandments, the statutes, and the judg-
ments by which the people were to be guided :
" Thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy chil-
^ Gen. 17:1. * Zech. 14 : 20.
8 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
dren, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in
thine house, and when thou walkest by the way,
and when thou liest down, and when thou risest
up." ^ The preservation of the national records
seemed to hinge upon the maintenance of this un-
written history. So Joshua says to the Israelites,
when at last Jordan has been crossed and Canaan
reached : " When your children shall ask their
fathers in time to come, saying. What mean these
stones ? Then ye shall let your children know, say-
ing, Israel came over this Jordan on dry land. For
the Lord your God dried up the waters of Jordan
from before you, until ye were passed over," and the
spirit of the theocracy breathes in the final words
of the passage, " That all the people of the earth
might know the hand of the Lord that it is mighty :
that ye might fear the Lord your God for ever." ^
Thus is fulfilled the psalmist's aspiration in ages
long subsequent to this, "Instead of thy fathers
shall be thy children, whom thou mayest make
princes in all the earth." ^ Although as the years
passed on the disposition to do this work of
parental instruction by proxy and deputy would
inevitably grow, yet such passages as these, and
many others like them, would be ready to his hand
when the national reformer recalled the Hebrew
to his duties and sounded the keynote of revival
^ Deut. 6:7. * Josh. 4:21. « Ps. 45 : 16.
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 9
in the heart of the family : ^ " Set your hearts
unto all the words which I testify among you this
day, which ye shall command your children to
observe to do, all the words of this law." And
for us the insistence upon parental obligation at a
time when church and school are such convenient
and capable substitutes for it, and when in the
vaunt of numbers we are tempted to lose sight of
the value of each one, is surely of equal impor-
tance. There was profound wisdom as well as
shrewd wit in the repartee of Julia Ward Howe
when Charles Sumner refused to give her help for
a runaway Negro, saying in his lofty way : " I no
longer care for the individual ; I am only inter-
ested in the race,*' and she replied : " I am glad
that God Almighty has not got quite so far as that
yet." We may be well assured that he never will,
and that we, for our part, never ought to.
To this hour the Jew is the most powerful illus-
tration of heredity. Find him where you may, he
cannot be hid. But this law in its very highest
aspect is expressed in the parting resolve of
Joshua: *'As for me, and my house,' we will serve
the Lord." . We have no right to insist upon the
malign and fatal working of this law of heredity in
some instances, while laying no stress upon its
golden fruitage in others. He who by the opera-
^ Deut. 32 : 46.
lO THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
tion of a natural law visits the iniquities of the
fathers upon the children to the third and fourth
generation, also makes promise of unspeakable
blessing to us and to our children if we be obe-
dient. "The Scriptures," says Horace Bushnell,
"have a perpetual habit, if I may so speak, of
associating children with the character and destiny
of their parents. They do not always regard the
individual as an isolated unit, but they often look
upon men as they exist in families and races and
under organic laws.** ^
For here, as elsewhere, example speaks louder
than precept. The father is a teacher in every
case. His very silence, his prayerlessness, his
irreligion, his indifference to the highest claims of
the soul, come to form a part of the child*s train-
ing. And equally he who wears the white flower
of a blameless life in the presence of his family is
a preacher of righteousness, although his lips are
inapt to set forth the truth which is incarnate in
his daily conduct. Both alike illustrate Jean
Paul's saying that the mother puts the commas
and semicolons into the child's life, but the father
the colons and the periods. We remember how
the twisted strands run, now white and now black,
through the royal annals of Judah and Israel:
"Azariah did that which was right in the sight of
^ "Christian Nurture," p. 39.
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD II
the Lord, according to all that his father Amaziah
had done," or "Jehoiachin did that which was evil
in the sight of the Lord, according to all that his
father had done.*' ^ We weary of the swing of
the pendulum with its monotonous burden imtil
we reflect that it is the pendulum which always
and everywhere tells off the history of human
lives.
One more word must be added before we leave
this point of the duty of the parent under the
theocracy to train his children in religion. The
teaching which was prescribed was not so much in
the history of the nation as it was in the laws of
God. In our admiration of the heroic deeds by
which a patriotic ancestry won for us our liberties
are we not tempted to overlook the principles,
powerful and sometimes perhaps stern, by which
their devotion was inspired.^ To "teach and to
do" were duties which went hand in hand in the
Mosaic legislation,^ and both were to be practised,
so that ** thou and thy son and thy son's son, all
the days of thy life," may flourish and increase in
the land that floweth with milk and honey. We
shall see, by and by, in what this instruction
consisted, but I say this much at once because it
seems to me of great moment that we should
recognize that all religious teaching in home and
^ 2 Kings 15 : 3 ; 2 Kings 24 : 9. ^ Deut. 6.
12 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
church and school must be scriptural. The Bible
is not only a book of examples, it is also a book
of precepts. There is law in its life as well as
life in its law. The unfeigned faith in Timothy,^
his inheritance from his grandmother Lois and his
mother Eunice, came, we may well believe, from
the fact that from a child he had known the Holy
Scriptures, which were able to make him wise
unto salvation.
We have been speaking hitherto of the child in
the household where the father was in some very
important sense priest as well as patriarch. This
must have continued even after the Jewish hier-
archy grew in stateliness and splendor. The
claims of that hierarchy could never supersede the
rights and duties of the parent toward his sons
and daughters. To them he stood as the per-
petual reminder of the relation in which Jehovah
stood toward each of his children, for, as we
know, that relation was paternal, never priestly.
And so by solemn rites the child was early brought
into another family, wider, more wonderful than
the little circle at home — I mean the family of
Israel. The lesser led to the larger, but to each
the center was the same. There, in the faith of
the devout Hebrew, rose the august and inspiring
Presence to whom appeal might be made by every
II.. _i . .... . _ I
^ 2 Tim. 3 : 15.
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 1 3
son of Israel : " Have we not all one father ? hath
not one God created us ?** ^
Into this family the Jewish child was brought
by a primitive rite which was not peculiar to the
Hebrews. As consciousness asserted itself and the
world about him appealed to his heart and mind he
came to understand to how much this rite admitted
him and how widespread and how strong was the
influence of his national religion. That religion
consisted of two things : ** Knowledge of God, which
by a series of inferences, one from the other, ulti-
mately resolved itself into theology ; and service,
which again consisted of the proper observance of
all that was prescribed by God and of works
of charity toward men.** *
That multitudes initiated into the family and
trained in its ceremonial observances and in its
moral code failed to take up their sonship was of
course true. The personal life, then as now, too
often proved that all "are not Israel that are of
Israel.** But my point is not affected by this fact.
What I aim to make clear is the perpetual pres-
ence of religion, ritual or moral, during the whole
life of the Hebrew, and especially for our present
purpose, during his early years.
It was never out of sight or hearing with him.
^ Mai. 2 : lo.
' Edersheim, "Sketches of Jewish Social Life in the Days of
Christ," p. 125.
14 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
Occasionally he would be taken up to Jerusalem
to the great festival, borne thither on a tide of
expectant or triumphant song and listening to the
pulsations of the splendid and imposing national
faith at its fountain head. But independent of
these special occasions his memory would, from
the first, be richly stored with sacred associations.
When his own candle was added to the family
illumination at the feast of the Dedication ; when
he took his part in the good cheer of Purim ;
when the home was abandoned for the booth at
the feast of Tabernacles, and when with scrupulous
care the Passover meal was made ready, he would,
perhaps all unconsciously to himself, associate the
most gladsome and the most serious moments of
his young life with religion.^
Still more to our purpose is it to follow him in
his hours of schooling in the precepts of the law.
By and by parental instruction was supplemented
by the teaching of the synagogue school. Here
it was that, as Philo says, the Jews learned from
their earliest youth to " bear the image of the law
in their souls.** ^ The vicissitudes of war, civil
strife, changes of fortune or of place, banishment
itself, any or all of these might separate the Jew
from the land of his birth and from the city of his
solemnities, but the synagogue school was a per-
. ^Edersheim, ** Sketches," etc., p. io8.
^Trumbull, "Yale Lectures on the Sunday-school," pp. 7, 8.
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 1 5
manent institution. Like the pillar in the wilder-
ness, it went with him always, alike in the daylight
and in the darkness of his fortunes. Instruction
in the law came in time to rise above public wor-
ship among the features of the synagogue. The
exile multiplied these Bible-schools amazingly. ^
At least eleven different expressions were coined
to describe them. Attendance upon them ulti-
mately became obligatory. At five years of age
the Hebrew Bible was to be begun, and that, let
us notice, not with Genesis, but with Leviticus ;
not with history, but with law.^ From the age of
six onward through his whole life the Hebrew
remained in school. " Entering thus early," says
Doctor Trumbull, "the Jewish scholar never came
to an age for graduation from that school. He
was to continue in it during his earthly life-course
and at death he was supposed to pass on into the
heavenly Bible-school beyond." ^
We see, then, that the Sunday-school of to-day
is in the direct line of succession from the Bible-
school of the Jewish synagogue, and so we can
understand the satisfaction with which, a century
or more ago, Robert Raikes, the founder of our
modern schools, wrote after attending the first
anniversary of the Sunday-school in an English
parish church : " The happy choice of a text had a
^ Trumbull, ** Yale Lectures on the Sunday-school," pp. 8, ii.
'Edersheim, ** Sketches," p. 130. '**Yale Lectures," p. 192.
l6 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
remarkable effect in commanding the attention of
the audience. The Scriptures could not have
furnished a passage more literally applicable to the
subject. It was taken from Deut. 31 : 12, 13:
' Gather the people together, men, and women,
and children, and thy stranger that is within thy
gates, that they may hear, and that they may
learn, and fear the Lord your God, and observe to
do all the words of this law : and that their chil-
dren, which have not known any thing, may hear,
and learn to fear the Lord your God/ " ^
When from the Old Testament we pass to the
New, we find no material change in the view of
infancy, childhood, and youth, as God sees them
and as he wills that his ministers shall regard
them.
Now, the prominent figure in our pictures is
Jesus, the ideal young Hebrew. Glance at his
own life. A poor woman standing in a London
gallery before a picture of the Virgin and Child,
was heard to say, "Who wouldn't be a good
mother with such a son as that ? '' But that his
Father's business is calling to him so imperiously,
we could wish that we knew more of that fair
childhood and that opening youth. What we do
know is wonderfully fascinating. In the temple
at eight days old he was initiated into the family
1 Gregory's ** Life of Robert Raikes," p. 178.
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 1/
of Israel. Over the babe, cradled in his arms,
devout Simeon broke forth into the prayer which
in its last words
Did attain
To something of prophetic strain.
In Nazareth, growing in wisdom as he grew in
age, Jesus was subject to his parents ; and in all
probability in the synagogue school of the little
city " he learned his earliest earthly lesson from
the book of Leviticus.'* ^
So he made ready for the visit to Jerusalem
which was taken " after the custom of the feast '* ; ^
and in the higher school, as we may dare to call it,
in the temple, the boy of twelve found his place
among the doctors of the law, " hearing them and
asking them questions, so that all that heard him
were astonished at his understanding and an-
swers."
Consider the course which Jesus pursued with
children and young people. Naturally they had a
great charm for him. Still in his eyes heaven lay
around them. To have a little child in his arms
was to come nearer to heaven than he could come
in any other way. Follower and crowd had to
stand back when the child appealed to his love.
There was a depth in the child's wondering glance,
and a response in the child's simple embrace which
* Trumbull, p. 29. * Luke 2 : 42.
B
1 8 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
he sought for in vain elsewhere. The kingdom of
heaven was within appreciable reach of the arms
that held the infant, and the child set in the midst
of envious and ambitious disciples — a, jewel in a
swine's snout — preached a silent sermon on the
humility without which no man can ever be truly
great. The man whom we think of as the young-
est and most childlike among the apostles was the
disciple whom Jesus loved, and the only other time
when that expression is used is when the young
ruler kneels at his feet to ask what he shall do to
inherit eternal life. The young girl at his bidding
arose from the dead ; and it was a young man, the
only son of his mother and she a widow, on whom
he worked the miracle of resurrection at the gate
of Nain.
This natural attraction toward the life which
was still in its springtide comes to have a deeper
meaning when we listen to the words which fell
from our Lord's lips as to children. Of such, he
said again and again, was the kingdom of heaven.
To despise one of these little ones was the gravest
offense, " for I say unto you, that in heaven their
angels do always behold the face of my Father
which is in heaven." ^ Among the last injunctions
to Peter was that to " Feed my lambs," which, in-
terpret it as we may, can scarcely have been spoken
1 Matt. l8 : lo.
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 1 9
without some profound reference to the young life
to be hereafter folded in the church which our
Lord came to found.^
It is to Jesus, then, that we look as the model
teacher, for while John the Baptist came preaching
in the wilderness, it was Jesus who rather taught,^
beside the lake or in the court of the temple. It
is in Jesus that we see the model pastor, by his last
words to Peter and the other disciples giving its
perpetual place in the Christian ministry to the
prophecy of Isaiah, *< He shall feed his flock like a
shepherd, he shall gather the lambs with his arms,
and carry them in his bosom.'* ^
It is to Jesus also that we turn for the model of
what each minister should aim to be in his relation
to the young people of his congregation. More
than the teacher, more than the pastor, he should
aspire to be their friend. For the infant in arms,
for the little child beginning to run, for the young
man on the threshold of life, Jesus had an irresist-
ible attractiveness. He had, as no other before or
since, the one touch of nature which makes the
whole world kin. And this youth saw and to
this youth responded, while lives more mature in
the ways of the world held aloof.
On the mount of ascension Jesus was parted
from his disciples and a cloud received him out of
^ Craft, "The Bible and the Sunday-school/* p. 107.
* Trumbull, p. 33. ' Isa. 40 : ii.
20 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
their sight. But still the traditional insistence
upon the value of the child, which lay at the very
foundation of the Jewish theocracy, and received
a fresh emphasis from the lips of our Lord, re-
mained. " For the promise,'* said Peter in his
address on the day of Pentecost, " is to you, and
to your children." ^ Children at a very early age
were baptized and added to the Lord. There is
nothing which makes Paul so much one of our-
selves as his tender affection for Titus, " my own
son," or for " Son Timothy," ^ the heir of his in-
spiring charges ; or for Onesimus the runaway
slave, "whom I have begotten in my bonds." In
Timothy himself we find the earliest example of
boyhood in a Christian family. " To his recollec-
tion, there probably never was a time when he did
not sympathize with the piety so venerable in Lois,
so lovely in Eunice. He had been trained for
Christ, and grew up a lamb in the Shepherd's
fold." ^
Paul's Epistles are the witnesses that because a
boy or girl came into that fold filial duties were
by no means relaxed. Rather were they strength-
ened by new and more sacred bonds. *' Children," *
the injunction now ran, "obey your parents in the
Lord ; for this is right." Here was a new motive
^ Acts 2 : 39. 2 I Tim. I : 18.
' S. G. Green, "Christian Ministry to the Young," p. 18.
* Eph. 6 : I.
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 21
for a natural duty. You catch its force still bet-
ter in another form of the same injunction : "Chil-
dren, obey your parents in all things ; for this is
well pleasing unto the Lord." ^ The ancient Jew-
ish conception seems to be lifted into a serener
light as we listen to John when he begins his sec-
ond Epistle : " The elder unto the elect lady, and
her children, whom I love in the truth.'* *
As to distinct teaching, such as was the strength
of the synagogue school, it is abundantly evident
that to it under the new order which was gradually
growing up, all the old honor was paid.^ Paul, who
had himself been a scholar in the school of Gama-
liel, made the synagogue wherever he went in his
journeys as a Christian missionary the scene of
careful, patient, exhaustive teaching, while at
Athens,* in the market-place, every day, he dis-
cussed the truths of the kingdom with them that
met with him. There seems, therefore, to be
some reason in the claim that the ancient Jewish
schools, which had gained in number and in influ-
ence after the exile, became now " the fresh start-
ing points of the Christian church * in all the
earlier apostolic work under the requirements and
the authority of the Great Commission.*' The
Bible-school was literally the nursery of the church.
"The Apostolic Church,*' as Baron Bunsen says,
* Col. 3 ; 20. * 2 John i. ' Trumbull, p. 48.
* Acts 17 : 17. * Trumbull, p. 48.
22 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
"made the school the connecting link between
herself and the world/' ^ And the Acts of the
Apostles, which is indeed but the first chapter in
the acts of the Holy Spirit to which no limit of
time can be put, closes appropriately with the
figure of Paul in his own hired house in Rome,^
where he received all that came in unto him,
preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those
things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ with
all confidence, no man forbidding him." A teacher
to the last, and so a model for many of us to whom
may be denied his eloquent tongue, his burning
zeal, and the varied and adventurous chapters in
the history of his ministry.
My reason for pursuing this line of thought will
be made plain if we pass from this clear, exhilarat-
ing air into the ages which followed. To do so is,
little by little, to change our atmosphere for the
worse. How this happened it is not to our pur-
pose to describe. The Hebrew conception of the
home, with its careful training in the law, dies out.
The apostolic practice of free discussion is trans-
formed into the medieval pronouncement of dog-
matic conclusions. The simple rites of the primi-
tive church stiffen into awful and mysterious
sacraments. There is little or no home nurture
encouraged. The child is handed over to the
1 Trumbull, p. 39. * Acts 28 : 30, 31.
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 23
priest for instruction. The formal catechism, with
its perplexing definitions, becomes the authoritative
substitute for the more natural conversation of an
earlier day. Jesus no longer sits in the midst of
the doctors, hearing them and asking them ques-
tions. The child spirit is not now welcome there,
and the heart of the child beats there, warm and
responsive, no more. An era comes of hard dog-
matic theology. In science the Middle Ages
made the sun go round the earth, substituting
center for circumference ; and in their religious
dialectics, by a like confusion between greater
and less, the world of human life revolves about a
hard and fast system of thought. In the sphere of
our own subject the child is made for theology, not
theology for the child. Among other ominous
features which mark this changed aspect of the
Christian faith we note the growth of fear as an
instrument of spiritual influence. Threats take
the place of promises, and once more the disciples
repel the child from the arms of the Master.
It might be a suggestive inquiry, were this the
place to pursue it, how far the debased medieval
teaching as to children in their relation to the
church cast a shadow over the Protestant Reforma-
tion, which was a revolt against it, and to what
extent that shadow lingered in the later Puritan
teaching, which influences us yet. Because this
influence has been so virile in its effect on the life
24 THE MINISTRY OF ^HE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
of the church and the commonwealth we must
pause for a few moments to glance at one or two
of its characteristics.
Let us try to picture to ourselves what religion
meant to the Puritan boy or girl in the old Eng-
land of the Ironsides or in the New England of
the Massachusetts settlers.
" When your children shall ask their fathers '* ^
suggests the Jewish method of teaching. It is
significant that the question comes from the child,
the answer from the parent. An exchange of this
kind has often dismayed the elders as much as if
the boy had gained possession of the rod or the
horse of the spur. But in the early Christian time
the religious teaching, following the Jewish model,
" was mainly by the approved means of question
and answer." ^ The word "homily*' suggests that
in the services of the meeting-house the sermon
was so free in its cast that questions were en-
couraged. " Even when the ministry was trans-
ferred to a designated class of persons this right
of joining in conversation with the preacher (as he
discoursed) was not wholly surrendered by the
congregation." ^ To the neglect and abandonment
of this wholesome practice we owe it that the tone
of the preacher became gradually authoritative and
dogmatic, " As who should say, ' I am Sir Oracle,
1 Josh. 1:51. * Trumbull, p. 52. ^Ibid.^ p. 54.
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 2$
and when I ope my lips let no dog bark.'" The
Bible-school of Paul and his fellow-apostles (had it
been preserved) would have held the spirit of
ecclesiastical assumption in check. The layman
would have had his chance. Even the child might
have put his question. The evidence is only too
abundant that the reverse condition of things pre-
vailed. The layman who raised his voice was apt '
to pay for his contumacy with his life. And even
under the Puritan rule the child was bidden to be
seen but not heard. The prevailing impression as
to children, in the England on either side of the
Atlantic, seems to have been that they must be
held in, if not with bit and bridle, then with rod
and rule. Dr. E. N. Kirk, in our own country,
recalled the days of his childhood as days " when
indoctrination and restraint were the highest aim
of parents, preachers, and teachers.'*
The Puritan was so much accustomed to be
persecuted that we need not wonder at his import-
ing into the theological teaching which he gave to
his children some of the sterner and harsher
elements of medieval theology. I cannot think
that religion to the Puritan boy was so joyous or
so wholesome a thing as it was to the young He-
brew. The "New England Primer" was scarcely
an evolution from the conversations in Paul's hired
house in Rome, and the " Bay Psalm Book"
can hardly be put in tune with the jubilant or-
26 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
chestra of the sons of Asaph. To refer to the
" New England Primer" is to speak of the Ameri-
can classic of the eighteenth century, about which
it is no exaggeration to say that •* there never has
been printed in this country a book laying no
claim to inspiration whose influence has been so
extended and enduring as that of the ' New Eng-
land Primer."* In many respects, I had almost
said in most, it seems to be a compendium of
religious faith and practice well worthy of the
place which it held unchallenged for a hundred
years in the life of the colonists. All the more
interesting, therefore, is it to turn to its pages for
light upon our present subject. There is much
said and taught as to young people. These four
lines we are bidden learn by heart :
Have communion with few,
Be intimate with One,
Deal justly with all,
Speak evil of none.
Are they not almost cynical in their shrewdness ?
Certainly they are not likely to promote sociability.
The "Advice to Youth,*' in another part of the
book, is not founded on the Gospels, but is a
paraphrase from the closing words of Ecclesiastes,
and what we notice is that the burden of its mes-
sage recalls rather the despair of Anacreon than the
exhilaration of the last chapter of the Philippians :
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 2/
Behold, the months come hasting on
When you shall say, my joys are gone.
The view of sin is remarkable chiefly by defect.
Much stress is laid upon its origin in the heart,
due to "Adam's sin imputed to me, and a corrupt
nature dwelling in me," so that this nature is
" empty of grace, bent unto sin, only unto sin and
that continually." But little is made of its moral
heinousness, of the present punishment it brings
with it, of the shame and degradation into which
it drags our manhood and womanhood. Even in
the lines which seem to incline toward a brighter
view of the possibilities of life, a sudden twist at
the last brings in the inevitable lash :
What' s right and good now show me, Lord,
And teach me by thy grace and word.
Thus shall I be a child of God,
And love and fear thy hand and rod.
This element of fear is rarely absent, but in al-
most every instance it is dread of future retribu-
tion rather than of present punishment. At any
moment that future may become the present, for
Cruel death is always near,
So frail a thing is man.
Even in the famous alphabet from which genera-
tions of New England children learned their let-
ters, Y gives us a cut of a boy with a wine cup
28 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
rather larger than his head before him, while the
skeleton at the feast rises on the other side of the
table, and the cheerful legend runs :
While youth do cheer,
Death may be near,
and the exigencies of the letter which comes be.
fore this, — X, — are met by bidding the child to
say — and how he must have wondered who
" Xerxes ** was : —
Xerxes did die, and so must I.
Probably in all Protestant literature there is
nothing more sombre or tragic than the " Dialogue
between Christ, Youth, and the Devil," with which
this primer concludes. It is at some grotesquely
terrible twelfth century carving over a cathedral
portal that we seem to be gazing as we read what
Death, the last speaker, says :
Youth, I am come to fetch thy breath.
And carry thee to the shades of death.
No pity on thee can I show.
Thou hast thy God offended so.
Thy soul and body F 11 divide.
Thy body in the grave F 11 hide,
And thy dear soul in hell must lie
With devils to eternity.
It almost appears as though the treatment of
children were somehow turned about since the days
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 29
when Jesus drew the babes to his arms and blessed
them. The answers in the ** Shorter Catechism "
are as a rule admirable, and the definition of the
chief end of man has probably never been ex-
celled. But to commit these answers to memory,
as an exercise in sheer mnemonics, must have led
to a wrong conception of religion. The intellect
rather than the heart was appealed to. And so the
mischief made itself apparent when a system or a
scheme of theology took the place of religion, and
the decisions of councils or assemblies, embodied
in carefully weighed phrases, rose between the
child and the simplicity that is in Christ. It
seems strange when we remember the picture of
Philip Doddridge, the little boy, learning the
Scripture history from the Dutch tiles in the fire-
place, as he sat on his mother's knee, to hear
Philip Doddridge the divine saying: •* Without a
miracle it cannot be expected that much of the
Christian scheme could be understood by these
little creatures in the first dawning of reason,
though a few evangelical phrases may be taught
(to them), and sometimes, by a happy kind of acci-
dent, may be rightly applied." ^ In that saving
clause of concession, "a happy kind of accident,'*
lay the whole catechetical method, and among the
triumphs of the evangelical revival, for which no
^ Trumbull, p. 125.
30 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
man sighed more sincerely or prayed more ear-
nestly than did Philip Doddridge, the establishment,
and spread of the Sunday-school is assuredly one
of the most glorious.
Striking its roots in the Middle Ages rather
than in the first days of Christianity, the Puritan
conception of the child was so much in evidence
when the Sunday-school system was founded that
it is well for us to recognize its powerful influence.
It is impossible to acquit that conception of grave
injustice to the child himself, and consequently of
grave misapprehension of the minister's duty
toward him.
Was it not a mistake to make religion so largely
a matter of the understanding, to the neglect of
the feelings ? To do this (and it has always been
the weakness of Protestantism) was untrue to the
child's nature. In it there are wide and fruitful
margins of imagination bordering the hard, beaten
track of fact. Nothing in the child's life is felt apart
from its atmosphere, or looked at apart from its
sunlight. A child sees each thing in the concrete,
or else sees it not at all.^ Perhaps in consequence
of this natural delight in fancy, the child finds very
1 *' When I say my prayers, ' * a little child said lately, **I al-
ways see everything. "When I say, * deliver us from evil, ' I see
God going out with a spear to fight Satan ; and when I say, * for-
give us our trespasses,* I see him with a big rubber cleaning a
blackboard."
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 3 I
few difficulties in the narratives of the Bible.
Often he lives in a world of imagination ; and there
the axe can swim, and the cruse of salt can heal
the bitter waters of the fountain ; under stress of
circumstances there is nothing wonderful in the
ass speaking, and it was to be expected that the
whale, being prepared for the purpose, would swal-
low Jonah. There is no skepticism in a healthy
childhood, and so the highest science when once it
recognizes that there are more things in heaven
and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy,
sees a new application in those great words :
** Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as a
little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of
heaven." *
Consider also the misconception which the min-
ister is likely to form, under the teaching which
we have in view, of his duties and privileges as the
pastor of the lambs of the flock.
The extreme emphasis which the Puritan clergy-
man placed on a corrupt nature in the child would
be likely to befog him as he looked at children
themselves. He would endeavor to make them
square with his theology, and although it might be
a task as difficult and painful of accomplishment
as the Chinese foot-binding, yet it must be done.
So the child would not be understood ; and here
1 Matt. i8 : 4.
32 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
as elsewhere ignorance as to your material is likely
to prove fatal to sound building. Then, in due
course the time came when the pendulum swung
to the opposite extreme, and Channing's appeal
found many responsive hearers :
You must have faith in the child whom you instruct
Believe in the greatness of its nature, and in its capacity
of improvement. . . Have faith in his nature, especially
as fitted for religion. Do not, as some do, look on the
child as born under the curse of God, as naturally hostile
to all goodness and truth. . . Was it an infant demon
which Jesus took in his arms and said, ''Of such is the
kingdom of heaven " ? Is the child who, as you relate to
him a story of suffering or generosity, listens with a tearful
or kindling eye and a thrilling heart, is he a child of hell ?
My friends, have faith in the child ; not that it is virtuous
and holy at birth ; for virtue or holiness is not, cannot be,
born with us, . . but have faith in the child as capable of
knowing and loving the good and the true, as having a con-
science to take the side of duty, as open to ingenuous mo-
tives for well-doing, as created for knowledge, wisdom,
piety, and disinterested love.*
Another evil which may be traced to an erro-
neous view of the resources and capacities of the
young, was a disbelief in their early conversion.
" A New England clergyman's wife," says Dr.
Trumbull, " told me, years ago, that when, as a
child, she and one or two of her playmates were
interested in the subject of personal religion, they
1 "Works," p. 359.
'fHE BiBLfi A>^D iHE CMiLD 3^
dared not be detected by their parents in social
prayer, lest their action should be deemed irrev-
erent, and they were necessitated to seek Christ
clandestinely/' ^ When the great awakening
swept over Northampton, in 1734, Jonathan Ed-
wards was ** amazed at the large numbers of chil-
dren who professed what he regarded as a genuine
experience." ^ The truth was that the conception
of what conversion meant had become inadequate
to the thing itself. There were no doubt good
men and true in the churches who were as much
scandalized at the early devotion of the young as
were the chief priests and scribes with the children
of Jerusalem crying their hosannas before the
Saviour as he entered the temple, and they as
much as the chief priests and scribes needed to
lay to heart the psalmist's words : " Out of the
mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected
praise. *
Perhaps it is owing to these unrevised theologi-
cal conceptions, which had come centuries before
from the churches that made no place for conver-
sion in their ecclesiastical arrangements, that the
Sabbath-school, when first it was proposed in
America, found little favor with many good people
and some opposition from others. Professor Aus-
tin Phelps, in looking back to the days of his child-
1 Trumbull, p. 174. » Allen's "Edwards," p. 158.
» Matt. 21 : 16.
C
34 THE MiNiStRV 6F tttE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
hood, remarks that biblical exposition was not
common, except in the exercises of public worship,
and then he goes on to say :
Nearly all the exposition of the Scriptures which the
people received was from their pastors and was given by
them from their pulpits. The formal, religious instruction
of children at home was confined mainly to two things,
the Westminster Catechism and the text of Scriptures,
both of which were committed to memory. Aged persons
are still living who give evidence of this fact in their own
religious culture.
The second Sabbath-school in Massachusetts was estab-
lished by my father, at the suggestion of a Christian lady,
in his parish at West Brookfield. It was done in opposi-
tion to the judgment of some of his most devout parish-
ioners. They refused to countenance the innovation by the
presence of their children. And he has told me that they
and others who favored it had reflected so little on the
subject that they scarcely knew what to do with the children
who did attend.^
It cannot be due to mere accident that the more
healthful feeling and policy of the ministry and
the church, as regards the young people of the
congregation, dates from the beginning of the
Sunday-school era. The old New England idea
seems to have been that the Lord's Day was not to
be secularized by any kind of instruction. Not
even of the Bible was there to be any teaching.
The day was sacred to worship, and, while that
1 **Theory of Preaching,** p. 206.
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 35
worship included its full share of preaching, noth-
ing which savored of a school class was to intrude
upon it. For Bible instruction the week-day
schools were designed. The better class of min-
isters no doubt catechised in these schools, and,
later, in the churches, in an intelligent manner.
But for the rest it was easier to preach than it was
to catechise, and it was easier, when catechising
needed to be done, to keep to the words of the
book. So it came about that in process of time
the catechism was dropped in the day-school in
favor of secular subjects and in the church service
in favor of the sermon. ^*An untaught genera-
tion — untaught in any form of the divinely ap-
pointed Bible-school — was a sure result, and the
religious decline of New England was inevitable.*' *
Not yet, it would seem, had our forefathers dis-
covered that often the Sunday-school is the starting
place for the church. This is one lesson which
our home missionary societies have taught us.
The church to-day owes fully as much to the
school as the school owes to the church. How
emphatically true this is we may have further op-
portunities to point out. At present there are
two results of this new feeling in relation to chil-
dren.
First, I think the pastor came to believe, as his
» Trumbull, pp; 88, 89.
36 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
predecessors had not, in bringing children into the
church. He must fold as well as feed the lambs
of the flock.
How reasonable this sounds to us. To quote
Dr. Edward Judson : * ** It is sometimes said that
even a child can be converted; it should be said
that even a grown person can be. The nearer the
cradle, as a rule, the nearer Christ. The most
intelligent Christians are readiest to accept chil-
dren." And so the same writer happily compares
the conversion of the child to crossing a stream
near its source. To do so is easy. " Only a step
will take you across, and you may even pass from
bank to bank without knowing it." But every
after mile of the river's course, broadening the
water, increases the difficulty of crossing. Perhaps
it was to meet this familiar experience that the
church, neglecting child conversion and Christian
culture, was driven to violent and artificial revival
methods. The still small voice had no longer a
hearing amid the hundred vociferating tones of
business and pleasure, and so the cornet, the big
drum, the American organ, by and by the whole
orchestra, had to be turned on. More than half
of the evils inevitable to the clamorous revival —
noisy, irreverent, shallow — must be placed to the
account of the church, which by its neglect of the
* "The Institutional Church,*' p. 109.
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 37
reasonable methods pursued under the Hebrew
theocracy, and so on to the days of the apostles,
was driven to resort to methods which were often
as unreasonable as they were unscriptural. We
must of course recognize in passing that the better
men among the evangelistic preachers are now in
full and happy accord with the more excellent way
which we are commending. But it is difficult to
account for the leakage in American church-mem-
bership — often largest in the districts which have
been roused and swept by a revival— on any other
explanation than that the so-called conversion of
the young people has been preceded by no nurture
and followed by no training. It has been little
more than a passing breeze, seized at the moment
to fill the sails, and when that has died away, the
convert, numbered among the trophies of the
awakening, has lain
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.
The humanity of early church-fellowship must
be apparent. The nominal conversion of one
already versed in sin and sadly wise in the ways of
the world is often little more than the life pre-
server which hangs from the ceiling of the state-
room in an ocean steamer. Neglected at ordinary
times, it may be hastily assumed in a time of dan-
ger or alarm, perhaps to save, but perhaps and
38 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
quite as probably only to entangle the wearer and
so hasten him to his end. The simple and natural
conversion of the young is like learning to swim,
once learned not always practised, but never to be
forgotten. It should be the aim of the Christian
minister to bring the lamb into the fold before the
bitter winds are abroad. A wrong is done to God,
to his wisdom, and to his love, by any course
which allows men and women to believe that
salvation is something which comes in only when
sin has run riot in the soul ; that the far country,
with its bitter bondage and its hard hunger, is a
necessary step toward the father's house and wel-
come. There is no need that we continue in sin
that grace may abound. No ; " Thou shalt call
his name Jesus : for he shall save his people from
their sins." ^ Religion is indeed an antidote when
the poison has been taken, but it is far more and
far better. It is a preventive first, and a cure
only when as a preventive it has not been used.
"I am," says Jesus, "the bread of life." The
journey into the far country, the riotous living, the
citizen's field, and the degrading companionship of
the swine, must have sown tares in the memory
of the prodigal which would, in a happier future,
shame and torment him, and from which he might
have been free had he never cried, " Father, give
* Matt. I : 21.
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 39
me the portion of goods that falleth to me." No
return to the God of our youth, after we have
wandered far from him, can take the sting from
the natural law in the spiritual world : " He that
soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corrup-
tion."
A pastor of long experience says : \
We are verily guilty if we do not thoroughly believe in,
labor, and pray for, early conversions. Is it not written :
* * Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth ' ' ?
that Eli «* perceived that the Lord had called Samuel, the
child** ? that Josiah began, when eight years old, to seek
after his father* s God ? Robert Hall became a Christian
at twelve, Matthew Henry at seven. Mr. Spurgeon states
that in one year he had baptized forty children and that
they had held out better than an average equal number of
adults.
This leads me to notice the second feature in
our present conviction as to the relation of the
minister to the children in his congregation. I
mean the increasing importance which he attaches
to Christian nurture.
When Horace Bushnell used that phrase a
generation ago it fell upon the ear of the church
almost as the accent of an unknown tongue. The
suspicion of a strange new doctrine which attached
to some of the conclusions of his fresh and vigor-
ous volume attached, in a certain degree, even to
^Baldwin, ** A Forty-one Years' Pastorate," pp. 53, 54.
40 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
its fortunate title. And yet that title was a re-
covery, and, like the casket brought up from the
sunken wreck by the diver, carried in it great
treasure. For Paul wrote : " And ye fathers, pro-
voke not your children to wrath ; but bring them
up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord."
How early that nurture begins — if indeed it
can even be said to have a beginning — we need
not inquire. It should be the atmosphere into
which the new life is bom. The child should no
more be able to recall its first breath than he can
recall his own first step. It goes with the birth-
right and is part of it. To the children that have
not known anything, to the little ones that cannot
discern between their right hand and their left
hand, it belongs. Can any one say when feeling
begins in the mind of a boy or girl ? The things
which still affect you the most keenly are the
things which cannot be traced to their source :
A boy* s will is the wind* s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.*
It was for a draught from the well of Bethlehem ^
that David longed in the hot day, begirt with the
enemy, but when first he drank of that well no
Philistines rose between him and its cool waters.
The remembrance clung to him through sheepfold,
* Longfellow, ** My Lost Youth.** * 2 Sam. 23 : 16.
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 4I
court, and camp, and at the moment when his
thirst was fiercest the memory was the most tan-
talizing, until, turned by the valor of his three
mighty men into reality, it became a drink offer-
ing to be poured out unto the Lord.
At the earliest opportunity, and touching with
great care the faculties only half conscious, the
parent and pastor should begin the work of Chris-
tian nurture. " For before the harvest, when the
bud is perfect, and the sour grape is ripening in
the flower, he shall both cut off the sprigs with
pruning diooks and take away and cut down the
branches." ^ Millet, afterward to win fame as the
painter of the **Angelus," was but a little boy
when he saw his first sunset on the waves ; his
first, I say, because first in the impression which
it made upon his mind. The splendor of the
scene threw the child into an ecstasy of delight.
" My son," his father said, taking off his cap rev-
erently, " it is God." The boy never failed after
that to associate with the setting sun the power
and the goodness of God. There were after years
of willful wandering from him, but at length the
influence started by the profound word from his
father brought him to his true self and to his true
home. And so, to lift this truth to its highest set-
ting, we may say with Horace Bushnell,^ speaking
1 Isa. 18: 5. 2 *• Christian Nurture," pp. 11, 12.
42 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
of the children thus early nurtured in the Chris-
tian life :
Perhaps they will go through a rough mental struggle at
some future day and seem to others and to themselves there
to have entered on a Christian life . And yet it may be true
that there was still some root of right principle established
in their childhood which is here only quickened and devel-
oped, as when Christians of mature age are revived in their
piety after a period of spiritual lethargy, for it is conceiv-
able that regenerate character may exist long before it is
fully and formally developed.
At present I am saying nothing further as to
the more definite and formal training which must
surely make an important part of this nurture. So
much depends upon early impressions uncon-
sciously received that I have been content to dwell
chiefly upon them. And the pastor will be remem-
bered by the boy as that boy grows up and leaves
home, and when sermon and prayer fade out of
his memory, more by what he was than by what
he said, just as to his old students at Rugby
Thomas Arnold was not a schoolmaster so much
as a very incarnation of character in the class
room and of devotion in the chapel. But Christian
nurture is incomplete if it depends only or even
mainly upon the power of a good example or the
atmosphere of a godly home. There must be
careful teaching based upon the truths revealed or
emphasized in the Bible. It was when Jehosha-
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 43
phat sought the Lord so that his heart was lifted
up in his ways that he instituted throughout his
whole kingdom the most complete system of
biblical instruction of which we have any record.
His chosen officers " taught in Judah ; and had the
book of the law of the Lord with them, and went
about throughout all the cities of Judah and taught
the people." ^
Equally explicit, in its insistence on an intelli-
gent study of Scripture, is the better known pic-
ture of Ezra standing in the midst of the people in
Jerusalem, on his pulpit of wood, and to the men
and women and all that could hear with under-
standing, reading in the law of God distinctly and
giving the sense and causing the people to under-
stand the meaning.
To do this is primarily the work of the parents
with their children, but also of the minister as
well. The crown and consummation of Christian
nurture is not an ability to repeat in their order all
the books of the Bible, or to pass examinations on
Scripture geography or on the lives of the Herods.
These are but things which accompany salvation.
What we must aim at supremely is the develop-
ment of the Christian life.
My chief concern in this chapter has been with
that. I have tried to show how strong and deep
' 2 Chron. 17 : 7-9.
44 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
is the divine love for children and what ample pro-
vision has always been made by our heavenly
Father for their religious education. Starting
with the far-off days when the roots of national
life were struck firm and deep in the family and
when the father was also the priest to his house-
hold, we have followed the divine method through
the life of the Hebrew people, catching the voice
of the child in the simple festivals which gladdened
the year at home, and the more splendid celebra-
tions in the holy city to which now and again he was
carried. We have seen how he went, on the week
day and on the Sabbath also, to the synagogue,
associating the acquisition of all knowledge with
the fear of the Lord, which was the beginning of it
all. We have mingled with the throng that sur-
rounded Jesus of Nazareth and watched his tender
care of the little ones, and listened to his profound
teaching as to children and the kingdom, and seen
his divine glory as it displayed itself in raising
young life from the grave. There was no break in
the line of testimony when the present Jesus be-
came the ascended Lord. No directions are clearer
than those which Paul gave to parent and children
alike, and no more attractive or affecting picture
is there than that of the old veteran and his young
companions, Timothy and Titus.
I have endeavored to indicate some of the cor-
rupting causes to which we must trace the partial
THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD 45
loss of this "tale of olden time, long, long ago";
and with far keener zest, I trust, we have seen the
recovery of the true idea — so closely bound up
with alike the Old and the New Testament — under
the evangelical revival of our own era, which gave
to us the institution of the Sunday-school and the
insistence on Christian nurture. It was only after
he had served a painful apprenticeship to expe-
rience that Richard Baxter, himself a prince in
the pulpit, discovered that the pulpit is not the
only throne which the preacher has to fill, but that
"education is as properly a means of grace as
preaching/' ^ The truth which came so late to
him he might have found in the old book of Prov-
erbs : " Train up a child in the way he should go :
and when he is old, he will not depart from it."^
* Bushnell, p. 25. ' Pro v. 22 : 6.
II
THE MODERN SUNDAY-SCHOOL IN THE
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Characteristics of the century. What led to the estab-
lishment of Sunday-schools. The impulse of human
sympathy. The evangelical revival. Precursors of the
Modern Sunday-school. Borromeo, AUeine, and others.
The originators of the Sunday-school. Robert Raikes,
Rowland Hill, Charles of Bala, Hannah More. Immediate
results.
II
THE MODERN SUNDAY-SCHOOL IN THE EIGHTEENTH
CENTURY
We are in the habit of tracing the Sunday-
schools of the present time to the eighteenth cen-
tury. While this is true, it needs to be remem-
bered that the causes which led to their being
established were in operation long before the
century dawned, and also that the first half of the
century gave scant promise of the great awakening
in morals and religion with which it closed. It
was a period of political and spiritual stagnation.
The statesmanship of Sir Robert Walpole expressed
its highest ambition in his maxim, " Quieta non
moverey The bishops of the Established Church
of England anticipated in their conduct and often
in their counsels Talleyrand's famous advice,
" Above all things, no zeal.*' The Nonconformists
were almost equally afraid of enthusiasm, and even
the devout Philip Doddridge, while praying for a
revival of religion, did not dare wish for it to come
in his time.
The beginning of the eighteenth century was a
period of moral barrenness. Politics were corrupt,
49
50 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
social life was coarse, and religion, like some shallow
stream creeping through a region of marsh and
sand, moved slowly if it moved at all. The bril-
liant Granville had the clergy as well as the laity
in his thoughts when, in 1709, he wrote to his
friend Harley : " We constantly remember you, I
can't say in our prayers, for I fear we don't all
pray, but in our cups, for we all drink." Even
fifty years after this, the genial bachelor, Gilbert
White, the vicar of Selborne and the chronicler in
charming language of its natural history, loved to
fill his house with guests and to dance on Saturday
night almost to the dawn of Sunday morning.
More to our purpose is it to recognize in pass-
ing the widespread youthful depravity, and of this
we shall find abundant proof as we go on. A
coarse and brutal age registers its vices in the
children. As the Talmud puts it: "What the
child says out of doors he has learned indoors.**
It is true that the age was not lacking — to
reverse a well-known epigram — in the excellencies
of its defects. Rude it certainly was, but it was
not soft ; coarse it was, and also strong. The Brit-
ish people prided themselves on their vigor. Pro-
tracted wars had indeed impoverished the land
and robbed the fields of a large proportion of the
tillers of 'the soil, but it should be acknowledged,
as one among the few helpful symptoms with
which the century opened, that poor and sordid as
IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 5 1
were the conditions of large masses of the popula-
tion of England, never had a higher value been
set on the national virtue of courage.
Already the forces were gathering which would
appeal to this virtue and summon it to a nobler
conflict than the main in the cock-pit or the wrest-
ling bout on the village green. They were strong
men and women who before the century reached
its third quarter responded to the passionate ap-
peals of George Whitefield and built themselves
into the society organized by John Wesley.
The spiritual torpor of the eighteenth century
was effectually broken before that century touched
its fiftieth year. Doddridge had written his *' Rise
and Progress of Religion in the Soul"; Wesley
had made the Holy Club of Oxford a spiritual
force in the community ; Whitefield had joined
two continents with the cry, "O Earth, Earth,
Earth, hear the word of the Lord"; John Newton
had yielded his sturdy and genial heart to the
service of Christ and his church; and in New
England, Jonathan Edwards, combining with a
metaphysical acumen still peerless in its force an
imagination that Dante might have envied, had
flung himself into the religious quickening of his
parish in Northampton and started a train of con-
sequences which aimed at nothing less than the
evangelization of the world. The practical benevo-
lence of Robert Raikes; the missionary zeal of
52 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
William Carey ; the philanthropy of Hannah More ;
the persuasive eloquence of William Wilberforce,
consecrated to the cause of freedom; and the
social reform of Thomas Chalmers, in which he
anticipated so much of the work to which the
church is giving itself to-day, all these, directly or
indirectly, had their rise in the first half of the
eighteenth century. When the sun of the century
sloped toward the west an impulse of human sym-
pathy was coming to be its chief glory. For the
prisoner languishing in his foul cell, for the lunatic
in his fetters, for the miserable waif in the work-
house, and the hapless climbing boy in the chim-
ney, relief was at hand. "The moral, the philan-
thropic, the religious ideas which have molded
English society into its present shape" were al-
ready active.^ And when John Wesley wrote, in
1784, "God begins his work in children," he
showed where the emphasis of reformation must
be laid. The Sunday-school was an inevitable
consequence of this strong impulse of human sym-
pathy which throbbed in the blood of the country
a hundred and fifty years ago.
The evangelical revival of the same period can
scarcely be separated from this quickened philan-
thropy. The one was the works, the other the
faith of the same great movement. Mr. John
* J. R. Green.
IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 53
Morley says that "with the death of Cromwell the
brief life of Puritan theocracy in England expired.
It was a phase of a movement that left an inherit-
ance of some noble thoughts, the memory of a
brave struggle for human freedom, and a procession
of strong and capacious master spirits, with Milton
and Cromwell at their head. Political ends mis-
carry and the revolutionary leader treads a path of
fire." But he lights up the gloom of this apparent
failure of a great experience when he adds : " It is
our true wisdom to learn how to combine sane and
equitable historic verdicts with a just value for
those eternal qualities of high endeavor on which,
amid all changes of fashion, formula, direction, the
world's best hopes depend." Without any doubt
the religious revival of the eighteenth century was
a return to Puritanism, but it was the Puritanism
of the Protestant Reformation rather than that of
Oliver Cromwell. "The glorious Reformation"
was one theme of which the devout members of
the Established Church of England never tired,
and Hannah More could not forgive her favorite
prot^g^f Macaulay, whose studies she had directed,
because in the pages of the " Edinburgh Review"
he expressed his admiration for the tenacious vi-
tality of popery. She was so grieved at his defec-
tion that she changed her purpose of leaving him
her library, a change of which the pain was, we
fear, greater to her than was the loss to him.
54 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
When we speak of the modern Sunday-school as
the child of the eighteenth century we must not
forget the good work of earlier years, nor when
we call Robert Raikes its founder must we fail to
do justice to those who preceded him in the enter-
prise now so closely associated with his name.
The story of the Sunday-school movement cannot
be fairly told unless we recognize that here, as
elsewhere.
The healing of the world
Is in God' s nameless saints.
Many of them have no memorial on earth, and
many more are barely known. An accident re-
vealed the fact, for instance, that some years
before Raikes began his work in Gloucester, "a
quiet, studious, unobtrusive Independent min-
ister"^ at Nailsworth, not far away, was in the
habit of teaching the children of his congregation
on Sunday. He may have been one of many who
established and maintained schools for the religious
instruction of children independent of the move-
ment started by Robert Raikes. Indeed, two
hundred years before this time. Cardinal Borro-
meo drew upon himself the hatred of the monas-
tic order by establishing among the churches of
northern Italy a number of Sunday-schools. For
teaching poor children to read in the cathedral of
1 *' Robert Raikes : the Man and His Work," Harris, p. 138.
IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 55
Milan he was charged with being ** a desecrator
of the Sabbath, the sanctuary, and his priesthood.
His Sunday-school was thought to be a dangerous
innovation." In the beautiful parish church of St.
Mary Magdalen, in the west of England town of
Taunton, the saintly Joseph Alleine catechised
and instructed children in the middle of the seven-
teenth century. There is no pleasanter picture
than that which shows us the vicar of Catterick
in Yorkshire, Theophilus Lindsay, just a hundred
years later, getting about him the village boys on
Sunday afternoons and forming them into a large
circle, " himself holding a Bible open in his hand,
with which he walked slowly around, giving it
regularly in succession to the boys,*' ^ so that each
read the book in his turn and had the passage
explained.'* Mr. Lindsay subsequently became a
Unitarian, and a monument in the forecourt of the
Unitarian Chapel, Essex Street, London, associates
his name with the names of Cardinal Borromeo
and Robert Raikes as the " originators of Sunday-
schools."
Among the friends of children, and the most
successful workers for them, we should certainly
mention Isaac Watts, whose ** Divine Songs " an-
ticipated by nearly two centuries the children's
book which some of the best authors of the present
^ " Robert Raikes and Northamptonshire Sunday-schools,*' p. I.
56 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
day have given us. The change in public senti-
ment in this matter of writing for children may be
inferred from his words : " I well know that some
of my friends imagine my time is employed in too
mean a service while I write for babes ; but I con-
tent myself with this thought, that nothing is too
mean for a servant of Christ to engage in if he can
thereby most effectually promote the kingdom of
his blessed Maker."
Probably it would be fair to claim for Robert
Raikes that what he did was to revive and organize
the work of instructing children in the truths of the
Christian religion. This work had never entirely
died out. The catechism is almost as old as the
church. Its value in the estimation of the clergy
rose or declined with the rise or decline of religion.
Too often it " so fell into disuse that when prac-
tised it seemed a new thing and pious donors gave
legacies for its perpetuation.*' ^
The Reformation recognized its worth and in-
sisted under heavy penalties that it should be
maintained. With the Puritans it "grew into a
kind of domestic inquisition," especially in Scot-
land, and many among the Nonconformists of
England continued to employ it as the medium
for the religious teaching of their children. When
Robert Raikes writes that " Providence was pleased
' Harris, ** Robert Raikes," p. 155.
IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 57
to make me the instrument of introducing Sunday-
schools/' he had in mind the schools of his own
system. A layman himself, he took the work out
of the hands of the clergy to the extent that
henceforth it was no longer doomed to depend on
their faithfulness for being done or to lie at the
mercy of their negligence for being left undone.
We have thus far been tracing the causes which
led to the establishment of Sunday-schools in the
eighteenth century, a century which before it was
fifty years old saw the stagnation of its earlier
period finally broken up, although it needed all
the forces which the evangelical leaders could
muster to lift Great Britain from her spiritual
torpor and put a soul behind the ribs of death.
The modern Sunday-school system, however, was
not to originate with Methodism or with the clergy
of the Established Church of England. In com-
mon with other great philanthropic enterprises, it
was to be bom in the heart of a layman and to
number among its earliest advocates men and
women who were well known in the ranks of busi-
ness, politics, literature, and fashion. Of how
much service this was to the movement we shall
see if we glance at some of the prominent figures
in the early history of Sunday-schools.
By common consent the first place in the group
belongs to Robert Raikes, who was born in the
old cathedral city of Gloucester in 1736, lived
58 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
there all his life, and there died in 1811. He
came of good Yorkshire stock, and his father, who
was printer and publisher of the " Gloucester Jour-
nal," was fearless in maintaining the liberty of the
press at the time when it was gagged and banned,
and high-minded in his resolve that in an age of
moral corruption his paper should be kept clean
and sweet. Ability and integrity had their reward,
and the Raikes family has not ceased to boast of
its number of men of mark in Church and State
down to the present time. At twenty-one, by the
death of his father, Robert found himself sole pro-
prietor of the newspaper, and his philanthropic
spirit can be detected in its columns from the time
that he became its editor. He made his paper
"a means of communication between the prisoners
and debtors, whom he found naked and starving
and rotting in the jail." ^
A very human as well as a very humane person
was Robert Raikes ; gay and genial in tempera-
ment, with a certain childlike pleasure in his own
success and a simplicity of mind which never cul-
tivated the English virtue of reserve. He was
fastidious in his tastes, in his dislike of dirt and
disturbance, in his shrinking from what was coarse
and rude. Although in the estimation of the
cathedral city, where social lines would be drawn
* Harris, p. 103.
IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 59
Strictly, he was in trade, he maintained a generous
house, had a handsome service of plate, and took
some pride in saying, "I keep no shop." The
circumstance which led to his interesting himself
in the depraved and neglected children of Glouces-
ter may have been that when he was reading proof
in his office he was "much annoyed by children
playing under his very nose." And if this offended
his taste, his moral sense was still more shocked
when through the window came their curses as
they quarreled and fought over their hop-scotch,
five-stones, and chuck.
Perhaps to moralize was a characteristic of the
age in which he lived, but the moralizing of the
eighteenth century too often ended on itself. Not
so in the case of Raikes. " Ignorance," ^ he wrote,
"is the root of the degradation everywhere around
us"; "idleness is a consequence of ignorance";
" prevention is better than cure " ; " religion must
wait on improved education among the masses
before we shall be able to make much advance,
but religion and education may go together." A
more excellent way than begging in the columns
of his newspaper for pence for starving prisoners
was now in sight. It took him twenty years to
come to the conclusion that any genuine reforma-
tion must begin, not in the cells of the Gloucester
* Harris, p. 72.
60 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
jails, but in the gutters of Gloucester streets, that
even his Sunday-schools were not sufficient, but
that education the whole week through must be
tried. The conclusion once reached was held to
tenaciously to the end. That he was a layman
and a journalist in the tide of public affairs, and
given to regarding them as a citizen rather than as
an ecclesiastic, was an augury for good, but it was
fortunate also that with a message to a country in
which Church meant the national establishment
and State meant the government of King George
III., he was a loyal Episcopalian. William King,
a woolen card-maker, who was a Dissenter and a
follower of Whitefield, talking over the desecration
of the Sabbath with him, said that he himself had
tried to open a Sunday-school in his native village,
but "that from multitude of business through the
week he could not attend to it as he wished.'* " It
will not do for Dissenters," rejoined Raikes, "it
must be from the Church." He was attached to
his sovereign, lighted bonfires when the news of
British victories reached the office, attended with
alacrity the mock execution of Tom Paine (found
guilty of treason and sentenced as an outlaw), and
read the book of Revelation and the Prophets for
references to the politics of France and her bewil-
dered republic.
When, in a very quiet way, he started his first
Sunday-school, it was for boys only. An old man
IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 6 1
who lived into the sixties of the last century re-
membered being sent to a Sunday-school in Sooty
Alley, opposite the City Prison, — called Sooty
Alley because the chimney sweeps lived there, —
and while he did not recall learning anything, his
memory carrying him back over eighty years,
testified that there were no girls in the school and
that the boys were " turrible bad." This was in
1 780. Within three years the young savages were
brought into some kind of order, the girls, little
better at first than they, were admitted, and when
William Wilberforce was brought to see the school
the boys had learned to bow and the girls
to courtesy when strangers entered the room.
The children repeated simple prayers and the
catechism, and answered Bible questions, and
sang Doctor Watts' hymns. When Mr. Raikes
marched his children to church every Sunday
their clean clothes and good behavior made them
conspicuous in the congregation. They no longer
stuck pins into one another during service, nor
fought and swore so that the parish beadle had to
be called in to expel them. The fastidious Mr.
Raikes, whom his fellow-citizens were wont to
sneer at as a dandy, sat among them and kept
them under control by the power of his presence
as much as by the fear of his rod.
Closely associated with Robert Raikes was
Rev. Thomas Stock, a clergyman, who was also
62 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
headmaster of the Gloucester Cathedral School.
The two men seem to have met by accident one
day, and, comparing notes, the one with an expe-
rience gathered from editing his paper and visiting
the jail, the other with an experience gained in
country parishes where he had tried to teach the
children their catechism, determined that some-
thing must be done to reclaim the young ruffians
swarming in the streets around them. Stock was
a man of gentler spirit than Raikes, with his tem-
per under better control, and a nature patient and
yet firm.^ It is said that the rules which he drew
up for the conduct of his schools gave the model
for those adopted later by the Sunday-school com-
mittees. The old house still shown in St. Catha-
rine Street, Gloucester, although it has been
changed somewhat in the course of years, is sub-
stantially the same as it was when "a school was
established in it by the joint enterprise of Raikes
and Stock." ^ To this hour the house goes by
the name of " Robert Raikes* first Sunday-school.*'
The fact that Raikes lived in a dull cathedral
city, hard to stir to any enthusiasm or win over to
any new methods, makes his success all the more
remarkable. But it also accounts for the com-
parative indifference with which for a long time
his work was regarded, as well as for the feeling
^ Harris, p. 107. ^Ibid.^ p. 35.
IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 63
of depression against which even his gay nature
and sanguine temperament were not always proof.
" I walk alone," he said. " It seems as if I had
discovered a new country where no adventurer
chooses to follow.*' But this was far from being
a fair statement of the case. Into the new coun-
try which he had so far discovered the quickened
evangelical life of England was not long in follow-
ing him. In London, Rowland Hill, the minister
of Surrey Chapel and one of the most original of
men, in the foremost rank of the pulpit orators
of his time, and responsive to the cry of humanity
whenever its tones reached him, began a Sunday-
school about 1784. It is interesting to note that
in the schoolroom of his chapel the Religious
Tract Society was formed five years later, and
that it grew out of the demands of the new enter-
prise. In the same room in 1803 the Sunday-
school Union was inaugurated.* Closely connected
with these movements was the work of the Rev.
T. Charles, of Bala, who, beginning Sunday-schools
in Wales, was gladdened by a wonderful religious
awakening in his parish and the whole country-
side, largely attributable to the Sunday-school
instruction. From this revival sprang the call for
Welsh Bibles, and it was when he made his way to
London, and before his colleagues on the com-
1 ((
Northamptonshire Sunday-schools,** p. 18.
64 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
mittee of the Religious Tract Society pleaded that
a society should be formed to supply the Scriptures
to the Welsh people in their own tongue, that
Rev. Joseph Hughes, secretary of the Tract So-
ciety, uttered the memorable words, " If for Wales,
why not also for the empire and the world?*' from
which grew the British and Foreign Bible Society.
The Sunday-school was a parent of the other two
societies, in the same way as demand is the parent
of supply.
What Robert Raikes did for the children of the
city, Hannah More did for the children of the
country.^ One of five sisters, daughters of a
Suffolk gentleman of damaged fortune but high
character, who became the head master of a school
in Gloucester, Hannah More sat on her father's
knee as a little child listening to the poetry of
Virgil, Horace, and Homer, and at seventeen had
written a drama to be acted by the pupils of her
sisters' school which at once brought her into
notice. She was twenty-seven when she paid her
first visit to London. Garrick, who had met with
a criticism of his acting from her pen, introduced
her to his wife, in whom she found her most inti-
mate friend ; Reynolds, the greatest living English
painter, made dinners in her honor; at the house
of Mrs. Delaney she touched a former generation
- ----- M II I ■ - ■ I ■ I "1 ^^ -*- '"' " ' —^^^'
* Bom 1745.
1^ THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 6$
when she shook hands with Horace Walpole ; the
bluestockings of London welcomed her as one of
themselves; Edmund Burke, the incomparable
orator, paid her compliments as sincere as they
were graceful; and the famous Samuel Johnson
approached her in his most affable mood, toying
with a macaw on his finger and reciting a verse
from a hymn which she had composed. Her
sprightly letters remain as the chronicle of her
social and literary triumphs. As we read them,
however, we notice their tone growing more seri-
ous. Even when at the crest of the wave of
fashion she had craved a quiet which London
could not give, and in the intoxicating hour when
her play of "Percy" ran neck and neck with "The
School for Scandal" in the race for popularity,
"being of the Christian faction," she firmly de-
clined all invitations to Sunday dinners and routs.
The death of Garrick and her close companionship
with his widow (whose " domestic chaplain " Han-
nah was jocularly called) cut her aloof from the
pleasures of the town, and before long her heart
was wholly given to God.^ She settled at Cowslip
Green, ten miles from Bristol and ten from the
romantic Cheddar Cliffs, where she was so shocked
at the condition of the villagers about her that
she wrote to a friend, " I have devoted the rem-
* "Hannah More's Memoirs,** Vol. I., p. 400.
E
66 THE Mlt4lStRY Of the SUNDAY-SCHOOL
nant of my life to the poor and those that have no
helper, and if I can do them little good I can at
least sympathize with them, and I know it is some
comfort for a forlorn creature to be able to say,
'There is something that cares for me."* From
that time until her death, at eighty-eight years of
age, she remained constant to her resolve. To
supply the spiritual and intellectual needs of vil-
lage children, "immersed in deplorable ignorance
and depravity," she opened first one school and
then another, battling with the prejudice of the
farmers, the brutality of the squires, and the open
or concealed opposition of the parsons, and bringing
to bear on the boors of Somersetshire villages all
the arts of coquetry which had once been practised
in the drawing rooms of London. ** Miss Wilber-
force," she wrote to William Wilberforce, the most
fascinating of philanthropists, who shared with
herself and others the expenses of her enterprise,
" would have been shocked had she seen the petty •
tyrants whose insolence I stroked and tamed, the
ugly children I praised, the pointers and spaniels I
caressed, the cider I commended, and the wine
I swallowed." ^ In the end she conquered. The
schools were rapidly filled with boys and girls.
The teaching in the class on Sunday naturally
paved the way for simple services for older people.
* "Memoirs,** Vol. I., p. 339.
IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 6/
The clergy were shamed into activity and found
their hands again. Her house at Barley Wood
*• became a Mecca whither pilgrims of all sorts
resorted ; not the leaders of the evangelical school
alone, but many others came to listen to her bril-
liant conversation, yield to her enthusiastic philan-
thropy, and own that here was a religion which
was as cheerful as it was sincere and as inspiring
as it was practical."^ It is easy to see why the
Sunday-schools of Robert Raikes and Hannah
More attracted a notice which might have been
denied to the school of the clergyman of the
parish or the minister of the dissenting meeting-
house. It was impossible to look on them as
simply work demanded by a sense of duty. The
journalist who was thoroughly successful in his
honorable calling and the literary lion who for
more than one season was the rage of London
deliberately devoted their lives to reaching the
children of city slums and country hamlets with
the truths of the gospel. Evidently religion was
no profession to be practised by the clergy only, but
rather a life to be lived out by every true follower
of Him who went about doing good. Business
paused to watch Robert Raikes as he marshaled
his waifs into church, and frivolity grew serious, at
least for a moment, as the irresistible Hannah
^Overton, **The English Church in the Nineteenth Century,"
p. 91.
68 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
More was seen ministering to the plowboys of
Somersetshire. This was religion in earnest. It
meant something. It was the happy fate of Han-
nah More, living to extreme old age, ** to see the
battle against vice and ignorance, which at first
she waged if not single-handed at any rate with
the support of a very few, ultimately carried on
by a large and formidable army in all parts of the
country." ^ She is really a link between the
chapter in the history of Sunday-schools which
tells the story of their birth and that which details
the story of their progress. At the immediate
results of the Sunday-school enterprise we must
now glance in closing this part of our subject.
In 1 780 the Sunday-school was an experiment.
Within five years it was an assured success. The
" Gentleman's Magazine,*' still famous in the his-
tory of literature from its association with the
early struggles of Samuel Johnson, and at that
time the most influential journal in Great Britain,
understands that "the establishment of Sunday-
schools (1784) is becoming very general." To
"the truly benevolent Mr. Raikes," it informs its
readers, "it is incredible with what rapidity this
grain of mustard seed is extending its branches
over the kingdom." Raikes estimated the num-
ber of children under Sunday instruction in Eng-
^ Overton, p. 91.
IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 69
land and Wales in 1780 at two hundred and fifty
thousand ; the Bishop of Salisbury warmly recom-
mends the schools ; the Bishop of Llandaff takes
some steps toward introducing them into the large
towns of his diocese; the Dean of Lincoln be-
lieves that the contemplation of criminal England
"would be a gloomy office but for the establish-
ment of Sunday-schools'*; the devoted Fletcher,
of Madeley, begins six schools in his district, and
marks not only moral reformation but spiritual
quickening among both young and old.*
In America the growth of the Sunday-school
system was so general and so rapid that it is hard
to say just where the first seed was sown. A
Sunday-school was organized as early as 1 780 in
Virginia under the directors of Bishop Asbury ;
in 1 791 Philadelphia saw a Sunday-school society
formed to secure religious instruction for poor
children, which continues active still ; in the same
year a Sunday-school was started in Boston ; and
two years after, Kate Ferguson, a Negro, began
one in New York ; in 1797 the first Baptist Sunday-
school was begun at Pawtucket, R. I.,^ and was
modeled upon the plan of the Raikes* schools in
England ; before the century closed the Sunday-
school was an accepted and essential agency of
any progressive church ; while out of systematic
* "Johnson's Cyclopaedia,** art. "Sunday-schools."
' ** A Century of Baptist Achievement,** p. 236.
70 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
Sunday-school movements in Pittsburg, Pa., in
Philadelphia, in New York, and in Boston, grew the
American Sunday-school Union, which was organ-
ized in 1824. The first Sunday-school in Canada
would seem to have been organized by Rev. Wil-
liam Smart, a young pioneer preacher, at Brook-
ville, in the year 181 1, almost immediately on his
coming to America from England.
Of course there was opposition. The bishops
were by no means unanimous in their approval,
and many of their clergy were open in their oppo-
sition. The alarmists feared that " the education
of the poor would unfit them for menial service,
raise discontent, and foment rebellion.'* In Scot-
land a prominent Presbyterian minister declared
that while Sunday-schools might be needed in
England, where few parents in common life were
qualified to instruct their children in the principles
of true religion, no such argument held good in
regard to his native country. Sunday-schools were
" reflections on every parish where they were ap-
pointed.'* Yet this was the very country in which
Thomas Chalmers before long unearthed the de-
pravity of Glasgow, and where within fifty years
Thomas Guthrie, plunging into the reeking wynds
of Edinburgh, founded ragged schools. The Sun-
day-school, however, was destined to conquer, and
in 1798 a society was formed in Edinburgh called
** The Sabbath Evening School Society,** having
IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 7 1
for its object the extension of the system to the
country at large. In the north of Ireland an inde-
pendent effort on behalf of the neglected children
of a country district was made by Doctor Ken-
nedy,^ curate of Bright parish, County Down, and
out of a singing class established by him in 1774
grew a school held regularly every Sunday for an
hour and a half before the morning service. It
was not until eleven years later that he learned of
the work of Robert Raikes and remodeled his own
school on the Gloucester plan.
The moral reformation wrought by the early
Sunday-schools was matter for general remark.
"No plan," wrote Adam Smith, "has promised to
effect a change of manner with equal ease since
the days of the apostles." ^ Children once con-
spicuous for brutality and profaneness became
quiet and respectful and Sunday revels and wakes
were suppressed. Formerly a day of licentious
idleness, Sunday was now in hundreds of parishes
a day of public worship. Children who used to go
about begging of any stranger that came into the
village now went to church and behaved well. At
Bolton, as the children sang their hymns, John
Wesley thought that their voices could not be ex-
celled unless it might be by " the singing of angels
in our Father's house." As they grew up with a
1 Harris, p. 181. * Ibid.^ p. 129.
T2 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
knowledge of reading, the young farmers, abandon-
ing the public house, took to reading, and used
" their bacon racks in the double capacity of book-
cases." ^ " The Sunday-schools established by Mr.
Raikes/' says Green, "were the beginnings of
popular education. By her writings and by her
own personal example Hannah More drew the
sympathy of England to the poverty and crime of
the agricultural laborer." It is not claiming too
much for Robert Raikes and Hannah More to say
that by their devotion to the children of the poor
in city and country they prepared the way for the
career of the Earl of Shaftesbury, and made pos-
sible the reforms in the treatment of the boys and
girls in the factory and on the farm in which his
great name is embalmed.
The second half of the eighteenth century, in
striking contrast with the first, saw both England
and America stirred to a new passion for the
Christian life. The evangelical awakening which
we associate with the consecrated generalship of
Wesley, the pleadings of Jonathan Edwards, the
apostolic zeal of Whitefield, the missionary enter-
prise of Carey, found in the Sunday-school a most
fertile field for prayer sowing and joyful reaping.
George HI. recognized the true source of Eng-
land's strength when, visiting a Sunday-school at
^ Harris, pp. 79, 80.
IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 73
Brentford, he uttered the wish "that every poor
child in my kingdom should be taught to read the
Bible." The king builded better than he knew
when he said this, for he unconsciously defined
what the true mission of the Sunday-school was to
be. Following the Revolutionary War, the earlier
efforts of the Sunday-school in England and
America " were in line with those of Robert
Raikes in England, religious teaching, being held
secondary to secular and moral instruction. In
proportion as secular and public schools were pro-
vided for communities, the work so changed that
religious teaching became the dominant purpose." ^
In the Baptist Sunday-school at Pawtucket, to
which I have already referred as organized in
1797, it was not until eight years later that the
distinctly religious features were introduced.^
Slowly the Bible came to its own, but by the
close of the eighteenth century, while very much
remained to be done, — as indeed much remains
to be done still, — it was generally recognized that
the Sunday-school was not a means of moral
reformation alone, but more and also better. It
was a medium for distinctively Christian teaching,
fairly to be included in the Commission of its
Divine Founder: "Go ye into all the world and
preach the gospel to every creature."
1 Dr. C. R. Blackall.
' ** A Century of Baptist Achievement," p. 236.
\ I
Ill
THE MODERN SUNDAY-SCHOOL IN THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY
The decline of Sunday-schools with the opening century.
Causes in England. Secular education. Political condi-
tions. Growth of cities and increase of child labor. Inade-
quate organization. The revived interest in Sunday-schools
due (i) to better organization ; Sunday-school Unions ;
statistics of growth, Great Britain and America ; (2) to better
teaching ; the catechism ; the use of the Bible ; the Inter-
national Lesson Series.
Ill
THE MODERN SUNDAY-SCHOOL IN THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY
It will be remembered that in the early days of
the Sunday-school movement there was, in England
certainly, a necessity for better secular teaching.
How to read and write and even to cypher the
scholar needed to learn before he could with any
measure of intelligence study the Bible. In the
estimation of Robert Raikes ignorance was the
root of the degradation which he found everywhere
around him. Even religion itself, said he, had ** to
wait on improved education." Simultaneously,
about the beginning of the nineteenth century two
men became interested in popular education, and,
I had almost said, stumbled on a plan of employ-
ing the elder scholars to teach the younger. This
plan lay at the foundation of the systems with
which their names are associated. These two
men were Dr. Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster.^
When a chaplain at Madras, Doctor Bell happened
in an early morning ride to pass by a Malabar
school where he saw a number of children seated
* Otcrton, p. 236, et seq,
77
78 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
on the ground writing with their fingers on the
sand. It suggested itself to him that the older
scholars in the British Military Orphan Asylum
could under his care teach the younger ones their
letters in this primitive way. Out of this sprang
the pupil-teacher system. A few years later a
poor Quaker lad, barely twenty years of age,
named Joseph Lancaster, obtained from his father
the use of a room in the Borough Road, in London,
in which he might keep a cheap school for the
poor in the neighborhood. To this school scholars
came in abundance, but money did not. He could
not afford to pay an assistant, and so was "com-
pelled to make use of the services of his pupils to
teach each other as monitors, and this practice,
the sheer offspring of necessity, ended in the
demonstration and definition of the power of one
master to teach hundreds.*' Doctor Bell was an
Episcopalian, and held that the national religion
must be the foundation of national education.
The parochial system was ready to his hand, and
so, under the " National Society," " national
schools " were planted or revived in the parishes
of England. Joseph Lancaster was a Quaker, and
believed that secular education, while it was not
to be irreligious, should be strictly undenomina-
tional. Out of this conviction came the " British
and Foreign School Society," with its widespread
network of British schools. I glance at the for-
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 79
gotten controversy as to the priority of Bell or
Lancaster only to call attention to its influence
on Sunday-schools. Undoubtedly the revived in-
terest in national education hastened the settle-
ment of the moot question whether the combina-
tion of secular with religious instruction in the
Sunday-school needed to be any longer continued.
But another result was that the growth of the
spirit of nonconformity led to the conclusion that
the children of parents who were dissenters ought
to be at liberty to go to their own places of wor-
ship, instead of being marched, as in the time of
Robert Raikes and Hannah More, to the parish
church. This was the arrangement which Joseph
Lancaster made in his schools. Plainly the lines
between conformity and nonconformity to the Es-
tablished Church were to be tightly drawn in the
matter of both sacred and secular schooling.
When the nineteenth century began, Sunday-
schools were slowly feeling their way to their true
vocation. It was only twenty years since the first
school was opened by Raikes in Gloucester. The
prospering gale was not yet filling out the canvas
of the good ship, and at times her sails flapped
ominously in the wind. The early years of the
new century were indeed in many directions years
not of progress, but of decline. In America, ac-
cording to Dr. H. Clay Trumbull, " Bible study
and Bible teaching were at a lower ebb than at
8o THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
any earlier period." ^ In Great Britain, neither
Church nor State was clear in its mind as to what
this innovation, with its strong infusion of the lay
and voluntary elements, portended. The French
Revolution had outraged the conservative preju-
dices, which the country gentlemen of England mis-
took for principles, and strengthened the conyiction
that the masses of the people could only be kept
quiet by being kept ignorant. Sunday-schools
were or would be " nurseries of Jacobinism." Even
a bishop of intelligence so far violated the usual
episcopal caution as to declare of some of the
schools held in connection with the conventicles
of the dissenters that there was much ground for
suspicion "that sedition and atheism are the real
objects of these institutions." ** Indeed," he added
with unpardonable vagueness, " in some places this
is known to be the case." This alarm was neither
widespread nor long-lived. The cure for it, as that
same bishop pointed out, was for the clergy of the
Church of England to promote the establishment
of Sunday-schools in their parishes. As a rule
the clergy took this advice, and " at the commence-
ment of the nineteenth century the Sunday-school
had become a part of the regular organization of
almost every well-worked parish." *
A more powerful reason for the temporary
* Harris, p. 220. * Overton, p. 245.
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 8 1
eclipse in the progress of Sunday-schools in the
Old Country is to be found in the decline of the
evangelical party. It was still indeed the strong-
est party in the national church, and remained so
for twenty-five years more, but its leaders were
passing away, and the fervor of its first zeal was
dying out. We need also to remember that the
Sunday-school was not at this time a purely volun-
tary system. Teachers were still paid in many
instances. The need for secular instruction was
still recognized. The Board school, now almost
universal in England, with its improved methods
of teaching, came nearer to the sunset than to the
dawn of the century. The Sunday-school was not
as yet so entirely religious as to appeal to the
passion for souls, which was the distinguishing
feature of the evangelical revival, a passion which
held its own even when the revival was treasured
among the traditions of a great past. Nor had
that revival laid hold on the mass of the clergy,
otherwise than to either shame or stimulate them
into a life somewhat worthier of their sacred call-
ing and less indifferent to their ordination vows.
The clergyman of that time was no longer the
clergyman of Fielding's novels, but neither was he
the minister of Paul's letter to Titus.^ "He
farmed his own glebe," says Froude, "kept horses.
^ Overton, p. i6.
F
82 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
shot and hunted moderately, and mixed in general
society. His wife and daughters looked after the
poor and taught in the Sunday-school/* The de-
cline in the first enthusiasm for Sunday-schools
was only one symptom of the decline in evangeli-
cal religion, or, as perhaps it would be fairer to put
it, in the failure of evangelical religion to over-
come the inertness of the long years of spiritual
lethargy and unfaithfulness.^ The Sunday-school
had not, so far, found its feet. It had not defined
the path which it was hereafter to pursue.
What has just been said of the Sunday-school is
also true of Great Britain at large. She had the
excellence of "the giant's strength," but too often
she used it tyrannously, " like a giant." She had
not yet learned how to control her own resources.
The development of machinery and the application
of the power of steam had given an immense
impulse to her manufactories, and — what we need
to notice for the bearing it has upon our subject —
the great centers where these manufactories were
being carried on " became studded with vast mills
surrounded by a densely crowded population, and
a demand for the labor of women and children
had been created which gave rise to frightful
abuses and cruelties." ^ The village life of Eng-
land was no longer the country's chief pride. The
^ Overton, p. 5.
* Hodder, **The Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, " p. 20.
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 83
population of the kingdom was increasing by
gigantic strides, and that population was centering,
a black ominous mass, in the manufacturing towns.
To meet this changed condition of things, neither
the government nor the church was ready. To
quote the biographer of the Earl of Shaftesbury :
There were no efficient educational laws in existence ;
industrial schools, mechanics* institutes, workingmen's
clubs were unknown ; the poor laws were pauperizing and
degrading ; the science of sanitation, a free newspaper
press, limited liability, employers' liability, all these had
yet to be. The church was in a state of lethargy, and the
vast machinery of philanthropy, with which we have been
familiar since the beginning of the second half of the nine-
teenth century, was only in its infancy.^
The increased demand for child labor would
naturally affect the Sunday-school. In common
with every humane enterprise, if not blocked by
the greed of the manufacturer it would be chilled
by the indifference of an age to which, as never
before, material issues were appealing. For nearly
half a century this condition of things was to con-
tinue, until Lord Ashley (afterward Earl of Shaftes-
bury) gave a voice to the people, appealing on
behalf of humanity at the bar of public opinion.
" We ask," he cried, in bringing in his " Bill for
the Regulation of Labor in Factories," "but a
slight relaxation of toil, a time to live and a time
* Hodder, pp. 1 14, 1 15.
84 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
to die; a time for those comforts that sweeten life
and a time for those duties that adorn it." ^ Eng-
land, outside of Parliament, was more ready to
respond to the dumb appeal of the overworked
and underfed millions of her population than were
her rulers ; but Sir Robert Peel was taken aback
when to his sarcastic inquiry whether the House
of Commons was prepared to "legislate for all
these people,'* and for restriction of hours of labor
in agriculture, the House broke out in a tremen-
dous cheer. Now this battle for the people was
also the battle for the Sunday-school.
Undoubtedly the most serious obstacle to the
healthful growth of Sunday-schools a hundred
years ago was lack of system. The experimental
period had not yet been passed. There was no
large combination of Sunday-school workers for
general conference and united action. Just as the
first carriages which ran by steam were modeled
on the unmeaning lines of the ancient stagecoach,
so the first Sunday-schools were modeled on the
lines of the day-schools. The teachers in the
schools which Raikes began in Gloucester and
Hannah More in Cheddar were all paid. At a
Sunday-school anniversary in Northamptonshire, in
1789, we find that, "in addition to the one or two
shillings, or even more, received as wages, * rewards
* Hoddcr, p. 33.
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 85
for diligence' were bestowed upon the teachers." ^
The unpaid teacher, in common with the lay
preacher, seems to be a fruit of early Methodism.
A number of Wesleyan office bearers were lament-
ing their inability to hire teachers for want of
funds, when one of them, bolder than the rest,
said, " Let us do the work ourselves." Then, and
not before, the work got done. As early as 1785
Wesley records that there were teachers in his
schools who gave their services gratuitously. The
Sunday-school "treat" of to-day is probably a sur-
vival of the time when boys and girls had to be
lured to school by pious bribes. Presents of
clothes were made to scholars in the days of
Raikes : " Straw hats and blue bands," in one
instance, " to all the girls ; black hats and blue
bands to all the boys." By his will Robert Raikes
directed that ** his Sunday scholars should follow
his remains to the grave, each receiving a shilling
and a plum cake." The remembrance of these
funeral baked meats lingered in the mind of at least
one of these scholars, Mrs. Summerhill, until
1880. "On his next birthday after the funeral,"
she added, "we all went to a house in Bolt Lane
and had a good dinner of roast beef and plum pud-
ding." Writing half a century since, the late
Hugh Stowell Brown, of Liverpool, says : " It is
1 ti
Northamptonshire Schools, *' pp. 15, 16.
86 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
curiously illustrative of the change of customs,
that in our first Sunday-school treats, more than
forty years ago, the children were regaled with
cake and wine." Very slowly the conception of
the Sunday-school as an institution formed on the
model of the day-school, with rewards and treats
thrown in to attract where attendance could not
be peremptorily enforced, died out. Between its
disappearance and the general acceptance of the
modern idea of a purely voluntary institution, in
which love was lure enough, there was a time
when the Sunday-school declined. In the city of
Gloucester, for example, the cradle of the Sunday-
school, and ten years before the death of Robert
Raikes, unpaid teaching was made general, but
riot before the old system had shown ominous
signs of decrepitude.^ Six young men, lamenting
the decline of Sunday-schools in the city, banded
themselves together with the determination to
revive them. All their efforts were in vain, until,
having resolved to do the work themselves, " gath-
ering one night, after business hours, around a
post at the corner of a lane, within twenty yards of
the spot where Bishop Hooper was martyred, they
clasped each other by the hand, and with rever-
ently uncovered heads resolved that, come what
would, Sunday-schools in Gloucester should be
1 ((
Northamptonshire Schools,'* p. 17.
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY , 8/
re-established. As a fund to start with they sub-
scribed a half-crown each, and then dividing the
city into districts, they canvassed it for scholars.
On the following Sunday upward of one hundred
children attended, and from that time forward the
work prospered.''
The revival of Sunday-schools after the setback
in the early years of the nineteenth century seems
to be chiefly due to general organization and to
better methods of teaching.
The British Sunday-school Union dates from
1 803, and grew out of a weekly meeting of active
teachers who, grappling with the needs of London,
"found reason to lament the want of plan and
order, and desired some means by which the neg-
lected districts might be supplied with schools
and young persons of suitable dispositions be in-
duced to undertake the work." ^ A union ** de-
signed to consist of teachers and others actively
engaged in some Protestant Sunday-school " was
formed. From London it spread over the whole
country. In 1824, to guarantee the Christian
character of the institution, a doctrinal limitation
was resolved upon, as twelve years earlier the
schools connected with the union had been recom-
mended not to teach reading, writing, and spelling
in their classes on Sunday, "the same being con-
icy. W. H. Watson, "The Sunday-school Union.**
88 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
sidered as a breach of the sanctity of that day." ^
The earlier publications of the Union, however,
virtually acknowledged the general lack of a com-
mon school training by furnishing more than one
"Introduction to Reading."
After nine years of quiet growth the union
"made its proceedings more public" by inviting
the teachers and friends of Sunday-schools to a
breakfast at the New London Tavern. This essen-
tially British function, worthy of a robust people,
became so popular that although the hour of the
meal was placed at six o'clock, by 1832 the attend-
ance exceeded one thousand two hundred, and an
attempt was made (happily without success) to ex-
clude ladies. The first Sunday-school " Notes " seem
to have been published in "The Teachers' Maga-
zine" in 1 84 1, and as early as 1816 a hymn book
for teachers was issued, followed six years later by
one for the use of scholars. The Sunday-school
Union celebrated the jubilee of Sunday-schools on
the 14th of September, 1831, the anniversary of
Robert Raikes' birthday, and in July, 1852, with
the commencement of the fiftieth year of its exist-
ence, its own jubilee was commemorated by public
meetings in London (including the inevitable break-
fast), and by starting a fund to put up a Jubilee
Memorial Building, which was completed in 1856.
^ Watson, p. 19.
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 89
The first general Sunday-school Convention grew
out of a conference of evangelical Christians of all
nations held at Geneva in 1861. It gathered in
London in September, 1862, at the time of the
International Exhibition, and among the speakers
from abroad was Mr. Albert Woodruff, of New
York, who had devoted himself to Sunday-school
work in France, Italy, and Germany, and Rev. J.
H. Vincent, of Illinois, whose name is now united
with that of Mr. B. F. Jacobs as prominent in the
annals of American Sunday-schools.
In America, as in Great Britain, there were,
very early in the history of Sunday-schools, unions
of teachers for purposes of fellowship and study.
The century, as we have seen, opened with Bible
study and Bible teaching at a lower ebb than at
any earlier period. It was the Sunday-school
wisely and intelligently organized that raised the
standard of Christianity in New England and the
South, and by and by, as the chief agency of
evangelization, in the newer portions of the United
States. "The Society of Sunday-schools" in the
England of Hannah More's time found a parallel
in systematic movements in Pittsburg, in 1809, and
in New York five years later, and then in Phila-
delphia, and so on through other cities. Out of
these grew "The American Sunday-school Union,"
which dates, as we have already seen, from 1824.
One distinction between English and American
90 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
Sunday-schools seems to have been the greater Use
made in this country of denominational as distin-
guished from union methods. For instance, in
the annual report of "The Baptist Tract Society,"
in 1830, a suggestion was made that "the time
may come when the number of schools in our
denomination will be so great as to require the
Baptist Tract Society to publish a series of Sab-
bath-school books suited to their needs." ^ The
Tract Society changed its name to ** The American
Baptist Publication and Sunday-school Society,"
and in the end, under the less cumbrous title of
"The American Baptist Publication Society," came
to be generally recognized "as the specific denomi-
national Sunday-school organization." It would
be idle for us to discuss in this place the relative
advantage of unionism and denominationalism in
Sunday-school work. The evangelical Sunday-
schools of America are practically one, as are the
evangelical churches. But nothing is gained to
the whole by the sacrifice or surrender of what is
peculiar to each. The present growth of Sunday-
schools, not in numbers only or chiefly, but also
in efficiency and intelligence, is the best answer to
those who at the prompting of a laudable senti-
ment would urge any widespread union inde-
pendent of denominational lines. For all practical
* ** A Century of Baptist Achievement,'* pp. 236, 237.
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 9 1
purposes the individual Sunday-school does better
as the child of the individual church, under her
wing, and subject to her control.
In the early days of the movement little atten-
tion was paid to statistics, and one aim of the
unions when they were formed was to remedy this
lack. But the growth of Sunday-schools in Eng-
land and Wales was evidently rapid after the torpor
of the first years of the nineteenth century had
been broken.^ In 1818 four per cent, of the popu-
lation were in school, and the total of scholars was
four hundred and seventy-seven thousand, two hun-
dred and twenty-five ; in 1833 ^^e percentage was
eleven ; in 1851 it was thirteen and five-tenths; in
1880 fifteen, and in 1887 it had risen to twenty
per cent, of the population, and there are reported
six hundred and sixteen thousand nine hundred
and forty-one teachers, and five million seven
hundred and thirty-three thousand three hun-
dred and twenty-five scholars. In the United
States more attention would seem to have been
given to statistics when once the practice of get-
ting them had been begun. In 1875 there were
sixty-four thousand eight hundred and seventy-
one schools, seven hundred and fifty-three thousand
and sixty teachers, and five million seven hundred
and ninety thousand six hundred and eighty-three
1 Gulick, "The Growth of the Kingdom of God," p. 104.
92 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
scholars. In 1896 there were one hundred and
thirty-two thousand six hundred and thirty-nine
schools, one million three hundred and ninety-six
thousand five hundred and eight teachers, and
ten million eight hundred and ninety thousand and
ninety-two scholars, and at the World's Sunday-
school Convention, held in London in 1889,^ it was
announced that about one-sixth of the population
of the United States were in Sunday-schools,
while the returns of 1899 give the total of one
hundred and thirty-eight thousand one hundred
and eighty schools, one million four hundred and
thirteen thousand nine hundred and eighty-seven
officers and teachers, and eleven million four hun-
dred and ninety-seven thousand three hundred
and twenty-eight scholars. In Canada, taking the
country from the Atlantic to the Pacific, we find
ten thousand one hundred and seventy-four schools,
seventy-nine thousand five hundred officers and
teachers, and a total of scholars amounting to six
hundred and fifty-seven thousand four hundred
and forty-two.
More than once attention has been called to the
fact that the growth of intelligence, the wider
education, and the better kind of teaching in the
public schools, ran side by side with the spread of
Sunday-schools and their general improvement in
1 ** World's Sunday-school Convention Report, 1889,** p. 79.
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 93
methods and in organization. The harmony be-
tween education and religion is nowhere more
apparent than in the United States. The Sunday-
schools have the brightest young life of the coun-
try in their classes as teachers or scholars. The
growth of Sunday-schools has been simultaneous
with the growth of religion in the schools and col-
leges. A hundred years ago there were only three
professed Christians in Yale College ; to-day, out
of one thousand four hundred recent graduates of
Harvard, only two declared themselves to be un-
believers. "Never before were there so many
evangelical church-members among the students
of that institution. The Intercollegiate Young
Men*s Christian Association is the largest college
organization in the world. * No fraternity, no ath-
letic organization, compares with it in size.* " ^
It is when we pass on to consider the character
of the teaching in the Sunday-school that we
understand how vast was the growth made in the
nineteenth century. When Robert Raikes began
his work, few of the children gathering in his
schools could read. The Horn-book was the poor
substitute in old England for the New England
Primer across the Atlantic. It consisted of "a
single page upon which the alphabet and a few
^Gulick, p. 154 (1897). For details of Sunday-school progress
on the continent of Europe, see **The Day, the Book, and the
Teacher," by E. Paxton Hood, Chap. XI.
94 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
short words were printed.^ This was pasted upon
a small piece of board with a handle, and the
printed matter was covered with transparent horn,
so that the fingers of the young reader, probably
seldom very clean, should not obliterate the let-
ters." It was no doubt because education was in
so backward a condition in England that the
catechism, which relied chiefly on the memory,
was so generally used. As we have seen, it was
necessary for the Sunday-school to do what the
day-school had failed to do. A scholar in the
early part of the century recalls how **we had
long, narrow trays, filled with sand, in which with
our forefingers we used to trace the letters of the
alphabet. Then came what were called * battle-
dores,* thin pieces of wood, having printed on each
side words of two or three syllables. The next
stage was a spelling-book, and so on to catechisms
and long passages of Scripture and hymns, to be
learned during the week and repeated to the
teacher on Sunday." ^ " After morning church,"
says one of the scholars, ** Mr. Raikes used to
hear us all say the Collect for the day, and who-
ever said it best had a penny. In school the
Bible and the* catechism were taught us." Faith
in a catechism was very general, and still remains
so, although the entirely satisfactory catechism is
' E. P. Hood, p. 9.
* ** Northamptonshire Sunday-schools,** p. 15.
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 95
yet an unfulfilled prophecy. Others besides Dr. J.
A. Broadus have found an extremely difficult task
" to make questions and answers about the exist-
ence and attributes of the Divine Being that shall
be intelligible to children," and yet few will be
disposed to quarrel with the enthusiasm of Robert
Louis Stevenson when he writes that " the Shorter
Catechism opens with the best and shortest and
completest sermon ever written upon man's chief
end.** At the first public meeting of the Sunday-
school Union in London, in 1812, it was reported
that thirty-eight thousand copies of a catechism in
verse, entitled ** Milk for Babes," had been printed ;
and in the records of an old Baptist church in
Yorkshire, under date October 15, 1822, I find
that the church "thought it proper that school
children be taught to get catechisms off.'* I ask
you to notice this because it is plain, I think, that
the older Sunday-schools trained the memory far
more than we do, and to me it seems one good
sign of our times that there is once more a strong
and intelligent movement, originating with the
editors of the "Biblical World," of Chicago, to
formulate a catechism for pupils between the ages
of sixteen and twenty-one.^
It will have been remarked that under Robert
Raikes the Bible was taught in the school. No
^ — I -*
1 '* The Outlook,'' March 2, 1901.
96 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
catechism was to be suffered to usurp its place.
As early as 1794 he printed a little book of one
hundred and twenty pages, about four inches
square, ***The Sunday-school Companion,' con-
sisting of Scripture sentences. Disposed in such
Order as will quickly ground young learners in the
Fundamental Doctrines of our most Holy Re-
ligion, and at the same time Lead Them Pleas-
antly On from Simple and Easy to Compound and
Difficult Words/* The Bible was to be the text-
book in the class. Among the first publications
of the Sunday-school Union we find ^ " A Select
List of Scriptures, designed as a Guide to teachers
for a course of reading in Sunday-schools." In
18 1 8 the union prepared a "Reading book con-
sisting of extracts from the Sacred Scriptures."
And these publications were only temporary in
the minds of the managers of the union. ** The
object desired and sought after was placing in the
hands of all the scholars who could read the Bible,
a complete copy of the word of God." This it
was, you remember, which made the Sunday-
school enterprise the parent of the Bible Society.
That society, in its turn, recognized its obligation
to the Sunday-school Union when, in 1840, after
repeated applications, it complied with the request
of the committee for a cheap Bible. The object
^ Watson, pp. 44, 45.
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 97
of this concession was that, ** read under the direc-
tion of pious teachers, the Scriptures should be
studied . . . and their truths impressed upon the
memory/' ^ The reduction in the price of Bibles
created such a demand that, after expending
;£ 1 4,000, the Bible Society found it necessary in
self-defense to stop the supply. This was sixty
years ago. To-day the Bible is probably the cheap-
est book which issues from the press.
The Bible continued to be used in the classes
of English Sunday-schools certainly through the
first two-thirds of the nineteenth century. Prob-
ably it is still used in very many of them. For a
glimpse of the teaching as late as 1858 in a village
in one of the midland counties, I am indebted to
my friend, Rev. Dr. Trotter, president of Acadia
College, Nova Scotia. He writes :
In the Sunday-school of the General Baptist Church, at
Thurkeston, Leicestershire, England, where I attended as a
boy from 1858 to 1867, the exercises were ordinarily about
as follows : School was opened with singing and prayer, the
exercises being conducted by humble men, of only the
slightest education, who were either farm laborers or petty
tradesfolk. The hymns used were of a very doleful sort, a
very familiar one being :
** And am I bom to die,
To lay this body down,
And must my trembling spirit fly
Into a world unknown ? "
^ Watson, p. 48.
G
98 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
Only at the Sunday-school anniversary, when special serv-
ices were arranged, were the brighter hymns, which were
then coming somewhat into use in other places, employed.
The first of these which I can recall, and which was handed
out in printed form on single sheets, was the hymn,
** There is a better world, they say,
Oh, Sebright!"
I can never forget the delight with which this hymn thrilled
me as a little fellow of seven or eight
The prayers were very hackneyed, so much so that as
regards fixity of expression we got the advantage of a liturgy
without, however, its color and music. Nevertheless, the
ideas so often repeated were substantially correct ideas, and
they glowed with real earnestness.
After the opening exercises we were dismissed to classes.
So far as my own experience goes, and I think it represents
what prevailed in the school, the half-hour spent in class
was spent entirely in the reading of the Scriptures. There
was no international series of lessons in those times, nor
was there any systematic direction whatever of the work in
the classes. One class read in one part of the Bible, an-
other in another part Often the choice of the portion was
made after the class had assembled, the scholars having as
much to do in deciding the point as the teacher. Having
fixed upon the portion, we read by turn till the half-hour
was up. I cannot recall that there was any effort at ex-
planation. By the reading process, however, we got a
certain surface familiarity with large portions of the Bible.
At the close of the half-hour the superintendent called out
**time to dismiss," the younger children were then gath-
ered together for singing and to be talked to by somebody,
while the older scholars retired to a large vestry, round the
walls of which were folding desks, to spend half an hour
writing in copy books, this being the only opportunity
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 99
some of the poorer children had of learning to write at all.
After this the entire school was gathered together for closing
exercises, which always included a few words about the
need of being born again, or the dying of Jesus as the
ground of forgiveness, or something vital. It was a crude
jumble of exercises, but I can trace the views I hold and
the experiences through which God' s grace has led me to
certain beginnings of thought and feeling and resolve in
the Sunday-school of that dear village far away.
The Sunday-school Union of London, first by
preparing a list of reading lessons for the use of
classes and then by publishing monthly " notes "
as a guide to teachers in their private study of the
lesson for the day, had prepared the way for a still
wider and more important combination. It was in
Chicago that, under Dr. J. H. Vincent, the first suc-
cessful effort was made to promote uniformity in
Bible study in all the Protestant schools of the city.
** So successful was this experiment at uniformity
in Chicago that the schools from other towns and
cities soon began to use these lessons also. Before
the international plan was agreed upon it is believed
that there were three millions of people engaged in
studying the lessons issued from Chicago. Then
the question arose, * Why not extend this method
of studying the Scriptures throughout the United
States and so make it national ? * The indica-
tions were that that could easily be done. * But
why not strike out boldly and go still further } '
it was asked. * Why not make it international }
lOO THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
WTiy may there not be a common study of the
Bible for the world ? ' " * The question of adopting
a plan of united Bible study was debated at a Na-
tional Sunday-school Convention held in 1872 in
Indianapolis. WTien the debate was closed and
the chairman put the question to the vote, with
the exception of ten persons, the great throng
arose to vote in favor of the proposal, and as by
a common impulse the convention broke into the
doxology in which all English-speaking people
give voice to religious joy,
** Ftaise God from whom all blessings flow.**
Next day the committee which had the matter in
charge was instructed to select " A course ol les-
sons for a series of years not exceeding seven,
which shall, as far as they may decide possible,
embrace a general study of the Bible." * An Eng-
lish religious magazine, in describing what is justly
called •' a great literary syndicate," thus sketches
the work which has now for so many years been
faithfully carried on bv the staff of " The Inter-
national Sundav-school Lesson Series":
Tbe rast dimensions to which it has attained is a striking
evidence of the evangelical power of ChiistianitT. Little
more than rfunv^nve yeais since these was no diooght of
simultaneous sTvidv in our Sccdav-schools : nowadays
twenty million teachers and p:ipi!s are we^ after week
« " The Scndav XlagusM." 1901.
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY lOI
Studying the same lesson. The central editorial staff of
this great organization is the American Lesson Committee,
which held its last meeting in New York on April 17, 1901.
It has, however, an auxiliary body of associates known as
the British section, to which its work is submitted for
amendment and concurrence. As the members of this
section are divided between England, Australia, and India,
it will be seen that the entire editorial organization covers
three continents. America, however, exerts the dominant
influence, for the initiative rests with the American com-
mittee and the movement had its birth in Chicago.
Generally the sessions are held in the parlor of a hotel.
The full number on the committee roll is fifteen. The
present American Lesson Committee was appointed in
1896 and proceeded to the preparation of lessons for 1900-
1905. The theme chosen was the life of Christ and of the
great prophets, leaders, and apostles. At the first meeting
the scheme for this particular study is settled and an abstract
of the proceedings is sent to each member of the British
section — six in England, one in Australia, and one in India.
When the criticism on the abstract comes back, the com-
mittee meets again, and if the scheme is approved by the
corresponding members a detailed outline of the lessons for
five years is arranged. The first question with regard to
each lesson is, ' ' From what book and chapter shall it be
taken ? ' ' The selection must be above denominational or
controversial issues, and it must be within the mental grasp
of every boy or girl, and at least a portion of the lesson and
the golden text must hold the attention of the toddlers in
the primary classes.
Then the passage which is the gem of the lesson is se-
lected for special treatment Almost as difficult a task as
the choice of golden texts, to which much thought is devoted,
is the giving of appropriate names to the various lessons.
I02 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
When the lessons for the quarter have been chosen the
selections are subjected to a critical examination r^arding
their relation to the lessons of the whole year. In the same
manner the completion of the selections for a year is the
signal for a patient re-examination of every lesson, with
special reference to the manner in which the year' s series
fits into the plan for the period and for the entire six years
embraced in the work of the committee. Then the lessons
thus definitely selected by the American Committee are
printed on strong paper, and copies are forwarded to the
British section for final emendation. After this the year' s
lessons are sent round to the great publishing houses, which
print them as leaflets, and hundreds of commentators set to
work to assist in elucidating them.
The committee has not failed to represent with
fairness the great denominations of Protestant
Christendom, and, although Bishop Vincent and
Mr. B. F. Jacobs, who were foremost in formu-
lating the lessons, remain to-day almost alone of
the leaders at the memorable Indianapolis Con-
vention, yet the spirit of the great enterprise is
practically unchanged. Its success was no doubt
due to a happy mingling of sentiment and common
sense. The imagination of multitudes of Chris-
tian people, always eager for union, was fascinated
by the idea of the great army of Sunday-schools
engaged simultaneously in the study of the same
portion of the Bible. And the sturdy denomina-
tional feeling was satisfied that no personal con-
victions were to be offended by a plan which left
IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY IO3
it to the separate churches to issue their own
lesson notes.
Brought together (such is the testimony of Dr. Warren
Randolph, speaking in the retrospect of twenty-seven years
of active work on the International Lesson Committee), as
we have been from many different denominations, we have
found no difficulty in regard to a common ground upon
which to stand in turning every leaf of the Bible. There
is not a chapter or verse from Genesis to Revelation which
has been passed by because of differences of opinion. With
different interpretations we have had nothing whatever to
do. All that has been left to the teachers and expositors
of the different schools and different denominations. ^
During the remaining years of the century the
International Lessons held the field. As time
passed on, with a more intelligent study of the
Bible there came to be grave questionings on the
part of many whether too much had not been sur-
rendered to the mere sentiment of uniformity.
At the result of these questionings we shall glance
later on. Our study thus far must certainly have
convinced us that the International Lesson course
has rendered an incalculable service to the cause
of intelligent Bible study.
And to the whole work of the Sunday-school in
its renewed vigor we owe it, as much as to any
one cause, that the religious life of the Old and
New World has been roused and lifted. Such dark
1 it
World's Convention," etc., 1889, p. 120.
I04 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
forebodings as the century opened with were cer-
tainly uncalled for when it closed. "The univer-
sal inactivity of all religions/* which Horace Wal-
pole noted in England in 1 780 as a symptom of
degeneration ; the " daily complaints of the irre-
ligion and depravity of the age, which in 1802 a
reviewer of Doctor Blair's sermons feared to be
'not louder than just'"; the low ebb of Bible
study and Bible teaching in America at the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century, to which we have
already alluded, all these had ceased to be charac-
teristic of that century long before it reached its
last year. When Canon Farrar affirms that it is
no exaggeration at all to say that through the
organization commenced by the simple citizen of
Gloucester hundreds of thousands of Christ's little
ones have been reached and have been influenced
for their temporal and eternal good, he says only
what the history of the Sunday-schools of the nine-
teenth century proves to be even less than the whole
truth. Not the children alone, but the entire life
of the people at large, has been lifted into a brighter
light and into a purer and sweeter atmosphere by
the work which Robert Raikes commenced when,
in answer to the inward voice, " Can nothing be
done?" he responded bravely, "Try."
IV
THE MINISTER AND THE YOUNG PEO-
PLE OF THE CONGREGATION
Nothing should take the place of parental obligation.
The minister as the friend of the young people. Three
stages in the development of the young. The minister as
the pastor of the young people. Influence of infant bap-
tism. Pastoral visitation. Organizing the young people
for Christian life and work. The minister as a preacher to
the young. Children* s services. The sermon or address.
IV
THE MINISTER AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE OF THE
CONGREGATION
As there is nothing which should lessen parental
responsibility, so there is nothing which should
take the place of parental obligation. The school
and the church miss their mark when they do this.
The claims alike of God and of the commonwealth
demand that the father and the mother recognize
that on them, in the first instance, does it rest to
train their child in the duties of life. " There can
be no question,**^ says Edersheim, "that according
to the law of Moses, the early education of a child
devolved upon the father ; of course always bear-
ing in mind that his first training would be the
mother's.** It is from the home that we catch the
earliest notes of instruction. From the lifted tent-
flap or from the latticed window come these
sounds: "And ye shall teach these my words to
your children, speaking of them when thou sittest
in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way,
when thou liest down and when thou risest up.** *
Abraham was priest as well as father in his
1 ** Sketches,*' etc., p. 129. *Deut. 11 : 19.
107
I08 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
household. No after change, no partition of offices,
can affect the conclusion to which we are brought
by this fact. Even the initiatory rite of the Jews
belonged to the parent^ more than to the priest.
It was they who presented the child. It was they
who made the offerings. Bushnell, in dealing with
infant baptism, says :
According to the more ancient view nothing depends upon
the priest or minister save that he execute the rite in due
form. . . Everything depends upon the organic law of
character pertaining between the parent and the child, the
church and the child, thus upon duty and holy living and
gracious example.^
At the very outset, then, let us understand
clearly that the parent precedes the minister, the
family the church, and the home the school. The
founder of Sunday-schools, Robert Raikes, evi-
dently loved his great enterprise none the less be-
cause he loved his own home circle first, for he
writes to an old correspondent in the pleasantly
formal fashion of his century : ** I must now tell
you that I am blessed with six excellent girls and
two lovely boys. My eldest boy was born the very
day that I made public to the world the scheme
of Sunday-schools, in my paper of November 3,
1783/'
And yet home teaching is not enough. The
I (i
Christian Nurture," p. 46.
THE MINISTER AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE IO9
parents who can and who will give Bible instruc-
tion to their children are few in number. In the
majority of cases the most that we can hope for
is parental example, and the home is fortunate
when even that is what it should be. In no coun-
try in the world does the home stand for more
than it does in Germany, and nowhere, I suppose,
does the State do more in the way of religious
education in the public schools ; yet it was the
lack of intelligent Bible study that led an American
traveler in that country to start a Sunday-school
in Berlin which has met with such favor that now
«* all clergymen who are not rationalists have Sun-
day-schools.*' ^
So it comes about that we need to ask ourselves
what the church owes to the children ; and since
the minister is to so large an extent the represent-
ative of the church our theme in this chapter is
his relation to them as friend, pastor, and preacher.
And, first, let us look on the minister as the
friend of the young people in his congregation.
First, I say, because it is first. He will influence
them little as pastor or preacher unless as their
friend he has already won their hearts. Knowl-
edge comes by way of the affections ; and it is
John, " the disciple whom Jesus loved," who look-
ing through the sheen of the morning, recognizes,
1 Trumbull, p. 135.
no THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
earlier than Peter or the other disciples, the Mas-
ter standing on the lake shore, and says in raptured
tones, "It is the Lord/*
As I think of it now, in the sunny haze of many
pastoral reminiscences, no relation other than that
of kindred, seems more beautiful than this which
grows up between the minister and the children
of his parish. It was a far cry from the London
lodging to the Irish parsonage ; but to Oliver Gold-
smith the portrait of his father, the good minister,
had lost none of its vivid color as memory recalled
it ; and so he wrote :
E' en children followed with endearing wile
And pluck' d his gown to share the good man' s smile.
His ready smile a parent* s warmth express' d.
Their welfare pleased him, and their cares distressed.
To them his heart, his love, his griefs were given,
But all his serious thoughts had rest in heaven.
A pastor writing of his forty years' ^ experience
in one church says :
How it began I forget, but it came to pass that for years
at the close of each morning's service, children from four
to ten years of age, came up into the pulpit and kissed the
pastor. That custom was very beautiful. It made the pul-
pit look like a bouquet of fragrant, animated flowers. He
will never forget it, and believes that they will remember it
in all after years. On one occasion an eminent minister, in
exchange, occupied the pastor' s place, and our little ones,
* Baldwin, p. 50.
THE MINISTER AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE III
as was their habit, went up into the pulpit to salute him ;
but he started back in amazement, and exclaimed :
** Whose young ones are these?" At which greeting they
retired in shamefaced disorder. No man can do the full
work of the ministry without love for, and perpetual interest
in, children.
Let the minister, therefore, begin as early as
possible to win the affection of the children in his
congregation. Let the child unconsciously asso-
ciate him with
The sweet presence of a good diffused. *
And let those childish memories be connected with
religion. One purpose of the whole Jewish ritual,
of the private and united prayers of the family, of
the various domestic rites, of the weekly Sabbaths
and the stated festivals, was just this : *' From the
moment a child was at all capable of being in-
structed, — still more of his taking any part in the
services, — the impression would deepen day by
day. "2
The Jews, so says Philo, " were from their swad-
dling clothes, even before being taught either the
sacred laws or the unwritten customs, trained by
their parents, teachers, and instructors to recog-
nize God as Father and as the Maker of the
world." «
^ George Eliot.
^Edersheim, "Sketches,*' etc., p. io8. ^ 3id., p. no.
112 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
It is not for us to speculate on how much of a
religious nature the soul coming from afar brings
with it, nor how profound a truth Mrs. Browning
expresses when she says :
I have not so far left the coasts of life
To travel inland, that I cannot hear
That murmur of the outer Infinite
Which unweaned babies smile at in their sleep,
When wondered at for smiling. ^
Enough if the pastor comes to be associated
lovingly in the impressions of this young life, and
to become an influence for good, growing with its
growth and strengthening with its strength. The
fact that the minister assumes no priestly attitude
toward the child will make the early impression all
the purer, by importing into it no element that is
tinctured by pride or assumption. " I have re-
fused authority," said Henry Ward Beecher, " that
I might have influence, which is a great deal bet-
ter."
The one essential, so it seems to me, to this
tender and beautiful influence is that on his part
the minister preserve fresh the child's heart. Some
will remember how Mr. Beecher himself kept this,
and how as he left Plymouth Church for the last
time it was with his arms about two little street
boys who had wandered in, after the service was
^ *• Aurora Leigh."
THE MINISTER AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE II3
over, when the congregation had dispersed, and
while the organist was playing to the tired preacher
the tunes he loved the best. Somehow there comes
unbidden to our minds the words of the olden
story, as applicable to the man for whom the life
of storm and stress was now almost over : " And
his flesh came again like unto the flesh of a little
child, and he was clean." And some will remem-
ber too, how on his death-bed Thomas Guthrie,
the children's friend, begged that they would sing
to him "a bairn's hymn." The child-heart craved
its own nourishment. I pray my readers to pre-
serve it also. Apart from the joy which it will bring
into all your lives, and the relief which it will bring
into all your ministry, it will be of vast importance
in your influence on the children in the congrega-
tion if its minister can to the end say with Words-
worth •
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky ;
So was it when my life began.
So is it now I am a man.
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die !
The child is father to the man.
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
His affection for the young people and his desire
to do them good, will lead the minister to study
them. He will soon discover that the two daugh-
H
114 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
ters of the horse-leech/ "crying, give, give," have
many brothers and sisters. A gentleman found a
little boy, barefooted and in rags, on his doorstep
one morning. ** And what do you want, little one ? '*
he inquired ; and the boy looking himself over
with a rapid glance, answered, "Everything."
Every healthy child wants everything ; and how-
ever long he lives or however much he gathers, he
will not get beyond the noble discontent which
Paul expressed when he said, ** Not as though I
had already attained, either were already perfect."
To the development of what we may for the
moment call '* the young person," there have been
three distinct stages. By all means let us remem-
ber this in our treatment of the various steps of
that young person's growth. First, imagination,
when the child, like Robert Louis Stevenson walk-
ing the Edinburgh street, is forever " supposing."
The little child is in this stage ; and if one means
to engage his attention he may tell a story. To
this succeeds memory, and now a personal remi-
niscence will interest. Then comes, third, reflec-
tion, and with it powers of reasoning, which will
fasten upon a thought if attractively put. Imagi-
nation, and then memory, and then reflection —
this, roughly speaking (and with no great care for
the modern disposition to study child-life in strata),
* Prov. 30 : 15.
THE MINISTER AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE II5
this seems to be the order of the growing intelli-
gence. To recall these points when one conducts
the public service and aims to catch the attention
of the younger element in the congregation, will
be good ; but better still will it be never to forget
it. It will open to us the avenue of approach to
the hearts of the children, of the boys or girls,
and of the young people.
In the second place, we must consider the min-
ister as the pastor of the young people in his con-
gregation.
[The early Jewish riles brought each child in the theoc-
racy into close relations to the priest The churches which
observe infant baptism give, perhaps, an advantage of the
same kind to their minister. It may be viewed as a sacra-
ment, or it may be looked at only as a simple form of dedi-
cation, but in any case the pastor, by virtue of this baptis-
mal service, comes into sympathetic connection with the
child. He has some ground for appeal, although in most
cases the ground may not be taken with any pretense of
sacerdotal authority.
The writer is strongly disposed to believe that a consecra-
tion service for infants should be encouraged among us,
with the assent of the parents, and not so much as a duty
but as a privilege. There seems to be authority for it in
the practice of some Baptist churches : for instance, the
First Baptist Church, Hartford, Ct. ; Dr. John Clifford' s, Lon-
don ; and Emmanuel Baptist Church, New York City, Sam-
uel Alman, pastor, 1890. In one church in New York the
pastor for many years of his ministry has "urged it as a
duty upon Christian parents to bring their children as soon
as possible to the house of God and there publicly conse-
Il6 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
crate and name them with prayer and thanksgiving." To
every family whose child is thus dedicated, is given a cer-
tificate of consecration, and the pastor testifies that ' ' many
blessings have followed this religious ceremony." Among
the announcements made in the weekly ' ' Bulletin ' * of the
Westboume Park Baptist Church, Lx)ndon, of which Dr.
John Clifford is the minister, I find the following : "The
next baptism will take place on Wednesday evening, Jan-
uary 19th, and the next dedication service of children to
God our Father will be held on Sunday morning, January
23rd."]
One of our first duties as ministers is to include
the children of the families among those who have
the benefit of pastoral visitation. We need to
learn not only their Christian names, but also the
familiar and endearing epithets which they may
bear at home. To remember the names of the
sons of Levi or how Amram stood related to Uzziel
can be of no practical service to us which is at all
comparable with the knowledge that Mary is two
years older than Frank and two years younger
than Kate.
Let us study the tastes of the children. There
are many instances on record of pastoral popularity
when this was done more literally than is here
intended. The minister's pockets have prepared
the way for the minister's precepts. I remember
riding one summer afternoon with a French curiy
who was returning to his parish from the weekly
market, and how heartily he was welcomed as he
THE MINISTER AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE II 7
paused at one farm after another to drop his sim-
ple purchases, — a book for Jacques, a toy for Marie,
a doll for Babette, — and I think that I learned
then and there one of my earliest lessons in pas-
toral theology. "Talk with the children,'* said
Wesley to his preachers, " every time you see any
at home." ^ But I mean more, far more, than
this. Let us find the bent of each young mind.
We may help to develop the intellectual and moral
growth of a hundred lives. The normal school,
the college, the ministry may witness, by and by,
to the fruitage of our intelligent study of these
opening years.
I would go further. When we have won their
love and gained their respect for our words we
may now and then form voluntary classes for in-
struction from our lips in religious truth. In occa-
sional vacations, winter and spring and summer,
we can set apart one or two hours and meet those
who are free from the work of the public school.
We can talk to them directly and simply upon the
chief things. Perhaps we may set them learning
texts so as to have something with which to break
the ice at the beginning of the hour.^ But we
must shun all formality, and, as we love the class,
keep clear of all assumption of the pedagogue.
^Tyerman's **Life of Wesley," 3 : 23.
2 " Treasure Texts for Youthful Memories," Barton. The Pil-
grim Press, Chicago.
Il8 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
The purely voluntary character of the gathering
will be helped if the children are met alone, with-
out any older persons (not even their parents)
being present. A little book given to each as a
memorial of these occasional classes will become
an heirloom. This was the praiseworthy practice
of the Puritan leader, Cotton Mather. He brought
his young people into religious association, and
added to Janeway's " Token for Children '* — then
first published in Boston — a little book of his own,
which, however, hardly tempts us by its title,
" Some examples of children in whom the fear of
God was remarkably budding before they died in
several parts of New England.*' ^ But a glance at
the old-fashioned Sunday-school library may make
us less censorious when we reflect how long " the
anaemic child continued to be a great part of
spiritual literature.'* The pious but unhealthy
little boy who died early, also died out very slowly
from our books for children.
I am not aware that among the experts in sta-
tistics, often too much in evidence in our churches,
any one has gathered the figures in reference to
the causes which lead to conversion. The general
impression that preaching is the most prolific
source is probably erroneous. The influence and
instruction of a good Sunday-school teacher is
1 **Life,'» p. 221 ; **01d Chester Tales,'' p. 93.
THE MINISTER AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE IIQ
likely to be more productive of positive results
than the average sermon. But if I were asked to
what can be traced the largest number of conver-
sions which have been permanent and powerful, I
think that without much hesitation I should point
to pastoral influence. For personal surrender and
consecration in a natural and simple way, without
the unhealthful influences of heated rooms, flaring
lamps, exciting hymns, and sensational appeals,
the true minister will work all the time.
The true pastor will refuse to reckon an ap-
prenticeship to sin essential to the service of God.
The time has passed, I hope, in which the house-
hold of faith numbered no children among its
family. We have come to believe heartily in
early folding. It is preferable to Cotton Mather's
ideal of early dying. His buds all fell short of
flowers, ours blossom. The story may be recalled
— which has been told under so many guises that
there is probably some truth in it — of the good old
Scottish elder who, being deeply concerned be-
cause his pastor persistently refused to allow chil-
dren to be admitted to church-fellowship, invited
him to his house. After tea the elder took the
pastor out to see his large flock of sheep put into
the fold. Taking his stand at the entrance to the
sheepfold, the elder allowed the sheep to enter,
but as the little lambs came up he roughly pushed
them back with a heavy stick. At this unnatural
I20 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
treatment the pastor became very indignant and
exclaimed : " What are you doing to the lambs ?
They need the shelter far more than the sheep ! '*
"Just what you are doing to the children of the
church," was the prompt reply. Upon the churches
generally as well as upon that particular pastor this
lesson has had its due effect. We are prepared as
never before to bring the children to the good
Shepherd and find shelter for them in his arms.
Gradually too, although the growth of this con-
viction is slow, we are coming to see that each
stage in our human life has to be treated according
to its own capacity. Nothing seems more intol-
erable than the religious prodigy. The old head
upon young shoulders is an abortion. Boys, as
Henry Drummond puts it, are to be religious as
boys and not as old maids.^ In religion as in
other matters it has been found true that for pre-
cocity "some great price is always demanded,
sooner or later." ^ A child with a man's appetite,
a lad of twelve with the erudition of Grotius, a
cyclopaedic mind in a twenty years old student,
have no attraction for a sane judgment. It is
right that your Admirable Crichtons should die
young.
If the pastor is wise he will encourage only a
healthful and natural growth in the religious life of
* H. Drummond, **Life," p. 344,
' "Life of Margaret Fuller Ossoli," p. 374.
THE MINISTER AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE 121
his young people. It would be hard to calculate
the harm that has been done to children by teach-
ing them to repeat formulas in their prayer meet-
ings which, however much they mean to their
elders, are on their lips absurd in their unreality.
By and by they may have significance enough, but
to foist on the springtime the heats of summer
and the hurricanes of the fall is to do a wrong to
the true order of nature. How often one has
heard that tremendous word "consecration " — •* I
wish to consecrate myself — from a young girl
scarcely yet in her teens, and glibly ready with
phrases for which she really cared less than she
did for the ribbon on her hat. With all our hearts
we join with Horace Bushnell in his protest against
the
Early wasting of impressions and experiences and a creep-
ing in of untruth whilst the power vanishes and the forms
of speech remain. For both the most delicate and the
most solemn experiences become, after this method, objects
of continual reflection and conversation under which, at
last, solemn earnestness as well as all delicacy is destroyed,
and there remains either a continual self-deception, with
the semblance of the reality of godliness, or a gnawing con-
sciousness of an increasing untruthfulness and of an inner
unfruitfulness beneath a mass of phrases.*
To promote a healthful growth — a child's faith
for the child, a boy's for the boy, a young man's
1 ** Christian Nurture," p. 382.
122 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
for the young man — will be the aim of the pastor.
It may indeed be easier for him to let the usual
superficial and unreal methods remain undisturbed,
just as it may also be easier to preach moral essays
or to discuss sociological problems or to analyze
the poets in his sermons rather than Sunday after
Sunday to preach the truths which are able to
make men wise unto salvation. But if the preacher
is a good minister of Jesus Christ he will not let
his preaching and his pastoral work run on in easy
grooves and then every two or three years, calling
on his people to confess their unfaithfulness and
get up a revival, send for an evangelist and expect
to do with his poor dynamite what the minister
himself should have been doing all the time with
the divine power of Christian nurture and with the
divine provision of faithful preaching.
Has not a serious wrong been done to many a
young person brought into the church, by the neg-
lect of all after training.^ The greatest anxiety
has been shown to get him into the Christian
fellowship, and the greatest joy has been expressed
when once he was fairly within the gates ; but
what after that ? The religion even of " highly
educated young persons,*' it has been said, ** con-
sists of miscellaneous notions picked up from
formal attendance on the public worship, supple-
mented by a few promiscuous remarks heard in
the home circle, and colored by the superficial
THE MINISTER AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE 1 23
wash of fictitious literature/' * Let us set ourselves
to remedy this. The pastor should have training
classes for young converts, and instruct them fa-
miliarly in the doctrines and practices, the history
and present condition, of the church of which they
are members, as well as of the yet broader church
of which it, in its turn, forms only a part.
Do we not also need to revise what I may call
the church suffrage ? Many churches, it is cur-
rently reported, are unduly controlled by the young
people. Irresponsible, swayed by feelings or preju-
dices, contributing little or nothing to the income
of the society, yet, by virtue of their numbers alone,
they can decide the choice of a pastor or precipi-
tate his resignation, launch the church on the
troubled sea of debt on the one hand, or on the
other hinder necessary projects of extension —
although to do them justice they are apt to be ex-
pansionists of the most generous kind. The remedy
for this is some kind of manhood suffrage, some
clause in the church charter which limits the power
to vote to what, at least presumably, is an age of
discretion. It seems a misfortune that when young
boys or girls join a church, oftener than not, they
come at a bound into all the rights and privileges
which the church can offer.
These are matters of detail ; and yet they are
^ S. R. Pattison, paper at Baptist Union of Great Britain and
Ireland, 1869, p. 7.
124 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
not unimportant. Upon them all the pastor will
have to form and express an opinion. In our
church life, as much as anywhere else, is it true
that while life is made up of trifles, life itself is no
trifle.
I have set a high value upon pastoral example
in its unconscious influence on the hearts and
minds and consciences of the younger people in
the parish. It is almost impossible to exaggerate
that influence. The minister who remains many
years in one charge will enjoy its fruits, as the
transient birds of passage — ^the parochial tramps
-—cannot. Their friend and counsellor in infancy,
childhood, and youth, he will seem to those who
grow up under his care to be himself a part of the
established order of things. To adopt the fine
words of an Oxford student,^ writing in praise of
his ancient college, and to apply them to the
parish, " Here, if anywhere, the minister may hope
to hear the still voice of truth, to penetrate through
the little transitory questions of the hour to the
realities which abide while the generations come
and go." If he has a delicate sense of honor, if
he is high-minded and disinterested, if he is, to the
young people, incarnate truth and justice and love,
then the hour will never come when the influences
which he exerts will cease. On the other hand,
' Professor Frazer, Oxford, 1899.
THE MINISTER AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE 12$
any meanness or inconsistency will be quickly
marked, and not he but the very cause of right-
eousness itself may have to suffer for it. Bernard
Gilpin, the apostle of the North, in the sixteenth
century, was only a boy when to his father's hall
came for bed and board one evening, a preaching
friar. The sermon of the next day was discounted
in advance by the intoxication of the supper table ;
and when the friar in his discourse waxed eloquent
in exposing the sins of the flesh, the boy plucked
his father's sleeve and asked him how the man
dared condemn excesses when he himself had been
taken to bed drunk the night before. We have no
quicker, and I had almost said no fairer, critics of
conduct than the young people in our congrega-
tion. Certainly there are none who with such in-
stinctive appreciation will recognize a high ideal
of manly virtue, and themselves be swayed and
molded by it. To be their minister seems to me
an incalculable privilege. In the early French
revolution the schoolboys of Bourges formed them-
selves into a company, wore their uniform, learned
their exercises and marching through the streets
of the city unfurled a banner bearing this inscrip-
tion, " TrembleZy tyrans, nous grandirons !'' " Trem-
ble, tyrants, we shall grow." To muster and mar-
shall the ranks of growing life is the pastor's office,
and I know of none that is more inspiring. The
church of to-morrow marches there.
126 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
This mention of a band of disciplined volunteers
leads me to urge that we should be judicious in
organizing the young people in our congregation.
Let us not add to the already exhausting labors of
the alphabet by starting new societies calling for
new arrangements of letters to set forth their aims.
As a rule, it seems to me that, just as the poorer
the man the more numerous his family, so the
smaller the church the larger is likely to be the
number of petty organizations — each of course
with its title and its badge — which are struggling
for an existence, when, oftener than not, they had
better cease. The inscription on an English tomb-
stone, " Methuselah Coney, aged two weeks," in-
voluntarily occurs to me when I run my eye
over the list of these high-sounding enterprises.
" Strengthen the things that remain " rather than
call another piece of inflated feebleness into being.
In the Church, as in the State, what we need is
not fresh laws, but rather that what we already
have be fairly administered. And here it may not
be out of place to utter a word of caution against
the peril of inflicting on young and ignorant minds
conditions that can for the present mean nothing
to them. With Mr. Beecher I am inclined to say :
I am opposed, heartily opposed, to the imposition that
I see practised on children by attempting to make them, at
nine, ten, eleven, or twelve years old, do things and feel
things that belong to adult life and do not belong to chil-
THE MINISTER AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE 12/
dren. The idea that you can organize them and bring them
to pledges, and get them to make promises and put them
on platforms that are pre-eminently out of their reach, it
seems to me, is absolutely absurd. ^
As a practical conclusion to what has been said
about the relation of the pastor to the young peo-
ple who have been brought into his church, I
would urge that he keep in friendly and confiden-
tial touch with them. Once a year let him meet
all who have been added to the church in each
separate year and so give to them a distinct inter-
est in one another. Let the meeting be at the
same time social and devotional in its character.
Let the attendance be limited to those who have
been mentioned and to the deacons or elders of
the church. Get each one to speak, however
briefly. Have light refreshments provided and
bright music. Let the minister's own address, if
he makes one, be earnest and faithful. Each such
gathering can be utilized as a power for putting
new life into all the church and for pushing out
on aggressive lines of Christian work.
I may also recommend that each pastor have in
the vestibule of his church a pastor's letter-box, of
which he alone holds the key, and that he invite
the young people (of course not by any means
only them) to write to him on any questions of
faith and practice calling for light. But while
1** Yale Lectures," II., 185.
128 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
these simple methods are referred to, I must, in
justice to my present purpose, add that the par-
ticular way in which this pastoral influence and
this friendly touch are obtained and kept up seems
to me altogether secondary. Every man must
devise his own. What suits one cannot possibly
suit all. The country church is not to be handled
as the city church is. The less cultured are not
responsive to methods which succeed with the
more refined. Of the true pastor, as of him whose
servant he is, we may dare to say that
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfills himself in many ways.
We have now spoken of the minister as the
friend of the young people in his congregation
and as their pastor. It remains for me to deal
with a subject of great interest alike to him and to
them, I mean the minister as preacher.
Hitherto we have been thinking chiefly of how
the child, the boy, the girl, the young life in the
parish, look to the minister. But let us remember
that there are two sides to everything. Have we
ever considered the reverse of this and asked our-
selves how the minister — ^the preacher let us say
for our present purpose — looks to the child ?
" Your baby doesn't disturb me," said a minister
who was vociferating in his sermon to a mother
who was leaving the church with a crying infant
THE MINISTER AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE 129
"That isn't it, sir/' she replied, *'you disturb my
baby." When Tennyson wrote his " Northern
Farmer " we learned, almost it seemed as a revela-
tion, what the bucolic mind held as to the parson :
* * An* I hallus corned to' s choorch afoor my Sally wur dead
An* eerd un a bummin awaay loike a buzzard clock ower
my ye' ed,
An' I niver knaw' d, but I thowt a * ad summat to saay,
An* I thowt a said what a owt to * a said, an* I comed
awaay."
In the same way one cannot help hoping that the
child's laureate will some day interpret for us the
wide-open eyes and calmly wondering look with
which the first sermon is received. The young
preacher in a country congregation who dared to
hold on with his sermon half an hour after milking
time was very properly informed by the farmer's
wife that, if only he had the feelings of a cow,
under these trying circumstances, he would know
better when to stop. The minister, if he has kept
fresh and natural the child's heart, will need no
such reproof. He will hear his own voice with
the child's ear and measure his own address by
the limited rule of the child's power of attention.
At a very early age children should be brought
to church. To the church first ; to the school
second. If it comes to be a question whether the
boy or girl should go to the morning service or to
the school, I should answer without any hesita-
130 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
tion, to the service. The habit of attending pub-
lic worship cannot too soon be begun. The neg-
lect of this, coupled with the unfortunate hour at
which many of our Sunday-schools meet, — noon, —
has done much to break the connection between
the young people and the church, and to abolish
that fine old institution, the family pew. The con-
gregation dispersing at twelve o'clock meets the
children coming to school. And it may very well
be that the absence of so large a proportion of our
population from church can be traced to this fact.
When the time came for the boy to leave his class,
having in his own estimation grown too old to go
any longer to school, there was no other alterna-
tive to which he had been accustomed than to go
nowhere. We must work for the revival of the
family pew, that spectacle of solid and prosperous
devotion which marks the British as distinguished
from the American congregation. In the case of
very young children, the minister, if he is wise,
will invite parents to bring them, and the mother,
if she is wise, will resist the temptation to take the
baby to the very front pew, so as to disturb the
service to the utmost when the inevitable cry
comes. She will be content for the time to be
rather a doorkeeper in the house of the Lord.
When children are brought to the service, let as
much liberty as possible be given to them. I hope
it is unnecessary for me to say that under no cir-
THE MINISTER AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE I3I
cumstances should the child be kept awake. If it
sleeps it will do well for itself, and better perhaps
for all the rest of the congregation. Let not the
minister allow himself to be put out by reason of
any inattention on the part of the children. They
listen quite as much, in proportion, as do their
elders, but they have not yet learned how behind
a mask of polite toleration to conceal a mind which
is a thousand miles away. Think how little there
is in the ordinary congregational service to interest
a boy. How little part he can take in it. I believe
that Mr. Beecher is right when he says :
In the Episcopal and the Roman Catholic churches there
is something for children. In that regard these churches
are far beyond us. A child can follow the service in the
hook, can make responses, can read, can sing — and there
is very much of song service in the Episcopal Church . In
ours how little is there which is fitted to the thought of the
children. ^
Under the Puritan rul^ in New England the
ordinary boy seems to have been an object of al-
most perpetual reprobation. It was the settled
conviction of the minister that foolishness was
bound up in the heart of the child, and that with
him and the tithing man did it rest to expel the
foolishness and correct the child. The boys were
seated on the pulpit stairs, and what terrors were
not conveyed to them by the preacher's word were
* "Yale Lectures,'* 2, 190.
132 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
carried to them by the other functionary's rod.
Above them stretched the gallery with its wider
spaces and its greater freedom, but only when they
behaved well were they suffered to sit there. They
persisted, it seems, in breaking the windows in
search of air ; and one church book still preserves
this resolution on its pages: "The constables are
desired to take notis (notice) of the persons that
open the windows in the tyme of public worship." ^
Meanwhile the children, panting and pent in,
were not really inattentive. Their minds were
active and all their senses quick. We ourselves
may remember no word of any sermon ever
preached in our hearing in those tender years, but
shall we ever forget the peculiar odor of the sanc-
tuary — the church smell ; a mixture of mildew and
moth and rust, with a fair proportion of last Sun-
day's atmosphere carried forward to this, in the
one place where air seemed to be as changeless
and incapable of change as eternity itself ? The
boy longing, as he afterward confesses, for the
sounding board pendent above the pulpit, to fall
and put an end to the preacher and his sermon,
studying the knots and veins in the woodwork,
following the beetle's droning flight, and surren-
dering himself to the fascinating machinations of
the universal spider, is himself the best vindication
* Earle, **New England Sabbaths," pp. 59, 61.
THE MINISTER AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE 1 33
of his intelligence. All he asks for is for some-
thing to observe, to be interested in, to do. It is
our duty to meet this demand.^
Having brought the child to the church, let us
make him a special object of study. Let us feed
him with food convenient for him. Throughout
the service there should, I venture to think, be
more variety and change. The congregation should
rise and sing every hymn, and there should be a
responsive reading. Our service is often open to
the criticism that when not triste it is unmeaning
and even frivolous. The reading of the Scriptures
should be a matter of very careful study. En-
courage the use of Bibles in the pew. It is a good
suggestion that "an effort should be made to
form this habit in our juvenile assemblies.'* If
necessary during the reading, by a word or two
well chosen, explain what to the young and inex-
perienced may be perplexing.
Never fail to remember the family in your
prayer. Are there boys and girls away from home
at school } Are there others now, for the first
time, engaging in business } Has some social stage
been reached t Are there wedding bells in the
air, or the cry of the first-born, or has some little
grave been dug in the cemetery } Do not fail to
make tender reference to all these.
^LucyLarcom, **ANew England Girlhood.**
134 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
The singing should always attract the young
people, and much can be said in favor of the plan,
often carried out, I understand, in the north of
England, of introducing in some part of the service
a children's hymn, to be sung by the children
alone, and for which due preparation must be made
through the Sunday-school.
Now as to the sermon. If our reliance is placed
upon the ordinary discourse, then we should en-
deavor to have something in it which will attract
the children, and arrest the attention of the young
people. This was the practice of Philip Dod-
dridge and John Wesley.^ To revert for a moment
to a point on which I have already touched, think
how the sermon appears to the younger members
of the congregation. Mr. Beecher says that he
does not believe that he ever understood a single
thing that his father preached about, till he was
ten years old.^ To Lucy Larcom, the preacher
"seemed to be trying to explain the Bible by put-
ting it into long words." ^ These are no doubt good
samples of the impression which even superior ser-
mons made upon superior children. From these
you may descend to the lowest point, where you
will find the young British plowboy, who frankly
confesses that when the text is announced " I puts
my feet up on the seat, and I thinks about naw-
1 Trumbull, $33- ' ** Yale Lectures," 189.
3 " A New England Girlhood," 55.
THE MINISTER AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE I35
thing at all." This humiliating consummation
preachers must determine to ward off by all legiti-
mate means. Even a child can be attracted, if not
held, by a descriptive or historical sermon. By
all means let us use concrete words, have illustra-
tions, nor be afraid of homely and familiar figures.
It is not at all necessary that our young hearer
should be able to understand all we say. Probably
no one does that. Possibly we do not ourselves.
But there should be hooks in every sermon to
which the young people can hang an idea ; and in
every green pasture of the pulpit, daisies, and even
dandelions, for the children to pick.
Of late years the plan of preceding the regular
sermon with a five-minute address to the children
in sermon form has been growing in favor. To it
there are only two serious objections, the first,
that many excellent preachers have no genius for
speaking to children ; the second, which is even
more weighty, that the sermon proper comes to be
looked at as no business of the children's. So
one of them remarked after a service of the kind
in London, ** It seems as if we ought to go when
our sermon is over." They could have found a
sufficiently strong precedent for doing so, since
the catechumens, in the early church, used to be
dismissed when their part of the public worship
was concluded. But if one has the art of address-
ing children it is probable that this second objec-
136 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
tion will not hold. The preacher who can do that
is not likely to preach any sermon in which there
are no points of interest to the child's mind.
Subjects for these five-minute sermons can be
found in the volumes into which some of the best
of them have been gathered and from the sugges-
tions of one's own reading and observation.
But apart altogether from these efforts there
should be now and then, and I think more fre-
quently than has been usual with us, a special
service for the children of the Sunday-school. In
the times of Robert Raikes and Hannah More the
custom was to bring the scholars to the church
and seat them by themselves under the care of
the teachers. Out of this probably came the
Sunday-school gallery, from which I in childhood,
looking up at it from the family pew in a country
meeting-house, formed my earliest conceptions of
the Spanish Inquisition. Especially do I recall
the almost fiendish cunning which the teacher by
long practice acquired in stinging the face of the
sleeping or restless boy by means of the pocket
handkerchief used as a whiplash. When this in-
strument of torture disappeared, to it succeeded, in
many cases, the separate service where the scholars
were addressed by their teachers, who had (or
thought they had) an aptitude for that exercise.
Much can be said in favor of this service, and
especially when from it the boy or girl passes in
THE MINISTER AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE 137
due time to the family seat and the ordinary wor-
ship of the congregation.
Where the separate service is held, whether as
an occasional or as a regular thing, there should
be preparation for it as careful and as thorough. as
that which is given to any other. For a few mo-
ments, therefore, let us consider the service and
the sermon.
Let the first aim be to put life into every part of
the service. Let the Bible be read, but not too
many verses. It should be explained as it is read.
The prayer should be simple and earnest and not
exposed to the comment of one long-suffering lad,
who complained that ** the minister had lost his
amen and could not find it again." When Thacke-
ray listened to the singing of the charity children
in St. Paul's Cathedral he declared, "It is the
finest thing in the world, finer than the Declara-
tion of Independence." ^ So it is, and so in its
own measure is the singing of the children any-
where. For this very reason let us make the
most of it. The tunes of many of our popular
hymns seem to be better than the hymns them-
selves. It must be confessed that they are often
halting in their metre, unreal in their emotion,
artificial in their sentiment, and in their doctrine
shallow or unsound. When a healthy boy sings
' ** Motley's Letters,'* I : 253.
138 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
with vigorous lungs, **I want to be an angel,"
nothing is further from his thoughts. Even the
exquisite child's hymn,
I think when I read the sweet story of old.
When Jesus was here among men,
has been criticised for giving the conception of an
absent Saviour, whereas he is as near to the chil-
dren now as when in Judea he held them in his
arms and gave to them his blessing. I venture to
think that some at least of Doctor Watts*s " Divine
Songs for Children," although written by a con-
firmed bachelor, are among the happiest that we
have, and certainly I should say that the hymns
which we love best in our ordinary service will in
many cases be popular with young people.
The sermon or address demands to be consid-
ered as our last point.
The importance of knowing how to preach to
children and of frequently doing so, needs to be
brought home to every minister's heart. " Spend
an hour," was Wesley's injunction to his preachers,
** spend an hour a week with the children in every
large town, whether you like it or not." ^ He may
have learned from Count Zinzendorf and the Mo-
ravians how useful a practice this was. The
count and his fellow-religionists preached directly
to the children, and a remarkable revival among
* Tyerman, ** Life of Wesley," 3 : 23.
THE MINISTER AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE I39
them had its rise in a discourse to girls by Zinzen^
dorf himself.* Let no one allow himself to think
that there is any condescension on his part in
doing this. At no other time in all one's ministry
will he be treading closer in the footprints of the
Master. And never will he be in better company.
Mr. Spurgeon declared that for himself he felt
that he could preach much more readily to the low
and groveling minds of grown-up people than to
the purer and sublimer minds of children, who
seemed to be nearer heaven, better and simpler.^
" We call it coming down,*' said Horace Bushnell,
" when we undertake the preaching to children ;
whereas it is coming up, rather, out of the subter-
ranean hills, darkness, intricacies, and dungeon-
like profundities of old, grown-up sin, to speak to
the bright daylight creatures of trust and sweet
affinitres and easy convictions." ^
It should be enough to recall the men who have
made a special practice of the sermon to children
to convince any one how honorable a work it is.
At the beginning of the Protestant revival of the
eighteenth century the leaders were active here.
The persuasive tones of Philip Doddridge, the in-
tense devotion of John Wesley, and Richard Cecil's
rare eloquence, were pressed into the service. The
succession, from that time to this, has never been
* Trumbull, p. 106. ^Ibid,^ p. 340.
»**Life,*»p. 504.
140 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
broken. In the earlier years of our century Alex-
ander Fletcher*s annual discourse to children was
one of the events of the year in the city of London.
John Todd did no better work in all his ministry
than when he preached his virile sermons to young
people and then gave them to the press. The
ministry of Dr. Stephen H. Tyng, in New York,
was in no small degree a ministry to the young ;
and, in Philadelphia, Dr. Richard Newton became
for his generation and for ours the model preacher
to children. It is remarkable how often the men
who have excelled in this enviable art have been
men rich in the spirit of St. John : Frederic
Denison Maurice, the remembrance of whose face
in Lincoln*s Inn Chapel is to me a constant bene-
diction ; the gentle Andrew Bonar ; William Arnot,
with a mind like a flower garden, as fragrant as it
was bright ; and John Cairns, of Berwick, whose
Strength was as the strength of ten,
Because his heart was pure.
Space will not allow me to add to the list. Enough
if I remind my readers that it contains the names
of men from all the churches whom the church
universal delights to honor.
To preach to children is not easy. '* My chil-
dren's sermons,*' said Doctor Newton, " cost me
more time and labor than any others I preach." ^
1 Trumbull, p. 389.
THE MINISTER AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE I4I
Nor is it given to every minister to excel here.
At a Sunday-school Convention held in Plymouth
Church, at the time when Mr. Beech er was in his
prime, he was called upon for an address. In the
course of his remarks he confessed that he never
felt at ease in addressing children. His mission
seemed to be to grown-up people, and he was
obliged to leave the children to others. Scarcely
had he said so when Dr. Stephen H. Tyng entered
the church and took his place on the platform.
Mr. Beecher went on to give a beautiful picture of
the work of a Sunday-school teacher. This part
Doctor Tyng heard, and when his turn came he
referred in the most flattering terms to the manner
in which Mr. Beecher had covered the whole
ground. He then went on to say, in the most
blissful ignorance of the personal application of his
words, that he always preferred in his choice of
pastoral work one child to two adults, adding :
'* It seems to me that the devil would never ask
anything more of a minister than to have him feel
that his mission was chiefly to the grown-up mem-
bers of his congregation, while some one else was
to look after the children.*' The crowded audience
shook with subdued mirth while Doctor Tyng,
wholly unconscious of the point of his remark,
continued, pointing to the door of the church.
" I can see the devil looking in at that door and
saying to the minister on this platform : ' Now you
142 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
just Stand there and fire away at the old folks and
ril go around and steal away the little ones.' "
The audience broke into a peal of laughter which
utterly astounded good Doctor Tyng. Yet as a
matter of fact both he and Mr. Beecher were right.
One star diff ereth from another star in service as
well as in glory.
Still, the qualifications on the part of the minis-
ter for preaching to children are just such as he
will need in all his pulpit work. He must be
earnest. He must be sympathetic. That is to
say, his aim must be not to amuse so much as to
make better, and he must put himself in the place
of his hearers, and first feel with, so that he may
also feel for them. It is difficult to see how this
could have been the case with a certain London
minister who took for his text, " Their houses shall
be full of doleful creatures,'*^ and for his theme,
** Disagreeable Children."
A good text will illustrate afresh the truth of
the proverb, "It is the first step that counts."
The text should be short, simple, and striking.^
"Talitha Cumi" is the text of one of Dean
Stanley's sermons in Westminster Abbey, where
he loved to meet the children and to talk to them.^
A little mystery, a challenge to the fancy of the
hearer, will often be useful in attracting attention.
*Isa. 13 : 21. * Trumbull, 351, 362.
*W. G. Blackie, " For the Work of the Ministry/' p. 196.
THE MINISTER AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE I43
Nowhere can better texts be found than in the
great green book of nature, to which Jesus turned
when he said, ** Consider the lilies, how they grow.*'
Equally important is the subject of the address.
It is not at all necessary that it be childish. The
popular book with boys is the book which is heroic ;
and I am afraid they prefer the prodigal son who
went so far afield, to the brother who stayed at
home and never gave his father any trouble, nor
gave him, for the matter of that, much of anything
else.
What is essential in your theme is the human
element. The young hearer, as much as the Ro-
man actor, counts nothing that is human foreign
to him. For this reason, Joseph and David and
Daniel are favorites forever. Dean Stanley could
put life into an old legend ; and his story of the
dying match-boy has passed into a classic.
As to the treatment of the sermon, I should say
that one idea is, as a rule, enough. Of older peo-
ple, even, is this not also true t If you can do it
skillfully, bring that one idea out of the text by
means of question and answer. To do this well is
great art. It is wise sometimes to introduce your-
self by a question ; but be on your guard when
you do this. The answer may not always be much
to your mind. "What would you do,'* inquired
one preacher, "if you were compelled to stand
here before so many bright boys and girls, and had
144 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
nothing to say ? " And the irrepressible small boy
replied, without a moment's hesitation, ** Vd keep
quiet."
Dr. A. A. Bonar, one Sunday evening in June,
appeared at a school in Edinburgh. It was the
fifth school that he had addressed that day ; and
some of the scholars had previously heard him
more than once, being lured to this unusual effort
of self-sacrifice by the prospect of the impending
school-treats. They were ready to vote early and
often. That day the good doctor had used to ex-
cellent effect his famous children's address from
the text, " Like as a hen gathereth her chickens
under her wing." It began with the question
" Did any of you, dear little boys or girls, ever see
a hen i " But even of a good thing it is possible
to have too much, and so when the usual intro-
ductory question was launched, the repeaters in
that evening school, being primed for the purpose,
answered, " No, sir, no ! We never saw a hen —
never one of us ever saw a hen ! '*
The tone of the address should be bright, with-
out being frivolous. Do not misrepresent the feel-
ing of our heavenly Father toward children.
"Thou God seest me," is a good text to preach
from, but remember that it has in it no terrifying
thought of God detecting and punishing sin. ** It
occurs in one of the most beautiful and pathetic
of Scripture stories, telling of Divine compassion
THE MINISTER AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE I45
for those who have found man's tender mercies
cruel," and it commemorates the simple faith of
the outcast Hagar, when for her, under the present
care of God, " the desert rejoiced and blossomed
as the rose." * The harrowing and horrible should,
as a rule, be avoided, and it is no longer desirable
in the interests of good citizenship or sound life
insurance that all the good should die young, even
though that might be the fashion in New England
in the days of Cotton Mather.
The moral, — and to every successful sermon to
children there must be a moral, uttered or unex-
pressed, — may very well be distributed throughout
the address rather than concentrated at the close.
Put there, it runs a chance of being entirely neg-
lected. When Doctor Robertson, of Irvine, preach-
ing to the street Arabs of Glasgow, finished his
story and began to apply it, one of them bade him
shut up with his moral and give them another
story. " I learned from that rascal," said he, "to
wrap the moral well in the heart of the story ; not
to put it as a sting into the tail." In the same
spirit as this street waif, a little girl in a much
more genteel circle of society confided to her
mother that she liked their new minister — " because
he has no morals."
Yet I must add, with the accent of conviction.
* Mrs. Carus- Wilson, "Unseal the Book," p. 69.
K
146 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
that in every address to children the element of
instruction should be found. An English bishop
has lately been pleading for " teaching sermons,"
and one reason why men are not more attracted to
the churches is probably to be found in a neglect
of this truth that we must educate the minds of
our congregation as well as their hearts. The
same holds true with younger audiences.
As to the manner and spirit of the sermon, our
first and last insistence would frame itself into
the injunction. Be natural. Let us not affect sim-
plicity, let us not pretend to feelings which we do
not have, and never make the fatal blunder of
talking down to children. The simplicity which I
am commending is that of Reginald Heber, of
whom the little child said : " Oh, I like him very
much, and he told me a good many things, but I
don't think he knows much more than I do." To
speak like that is to recall Pascal's eulogy of the
. supremely good book, <* Every one thinks he could
have written it himself."
We shall do well to cultivate the art of speaking
in words which are short and concrete. The ad-
dress which began, " My dear children, I do not
propose, on the present occasion, to detain you
with any preliminary remarks of a recondite or
abstruse character," like the Chinese criminal,
carried its death sentence written on its forefront.
On the other hand, John Wesley, the greatest
THE MINISTER AND THE YOUNG PEOPLE 1 4/
ecclesiastical general in the Protestant church,
prepared a sermon to children in which he used
no word having more than two syllables, and many
other preachers distinguished in the annals of the
pulpit have done the same. There is no better
example as to style than that of Dr. Samuel Cox,
who found, in revising his sermons to children,
" clusters of twenty and thirty, or even forty and
fifty words of one syllable," and who commends
the simplest and most colloquial English.*'
So much has been written of late on the subject
of preaching to children that it looks as though at
length the church were indeed waking up to its
neglected opportunity. The published volumes of
sermons preached to young people form a little
library of themselves. The counsels and direc-
tions on the subject in homiletical text-books are
wise and weighty, and no doubt, in common with
the counsels and directions for all homiletical
work, alternately inspire us with emulation and
overshadow us with despair.
But, after all, it is at the feet of the one perfect
Model that each one of us must sit and listen and
learn. Not only the soldiers, impotent to arrest
him, but equally the little children held willing
captives in his arms, bid us acknowledge that
"never man spake like this man."
V
THE MINISTER AND THE SUNDAY-
SCHOOL
A comparison of the Sunday-school of the earlier times
and the present day. The minister must adjust his relation
to the Sunday-school. His relation to the school as a
whole. The minister is the pastor of the school. His
relation to the officers of the school. He must advise. and
supervise. His relation to the teachers of the school. An
intellectual influence a. spiritual power. Benefit of the
work to himself.
THE MINISTER AND THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
How shall we define the Sunday-school ? A
century of experience has changed our conception
of the Sunday-school so radically that to-day we
scarcely recognize it as the same thing that it was
when Robert Raikes and Hannah More began
their philanthropic work in the lanes of Gloucester
and the villages of Somersetshire. Where can
you find, in England or America, a parallel to the
picture of the opening of the school at Blagden,
in the west of England, which we have in Hannah
More's ** Mendip Annals " ? ^
In the beginning of October, 1795, we opened one of the
largest, most affecting, and interesting schools we had yet
encountered, composed of a hundred and seventy young
people, the greater part from eleven to twenty years of age.
It was an affecting sight Several of the grown-up youths
had been tried at the last assizes. There were the children
of a person lately condemned to be hanged, many thieves,
all ignorant, profane, and vicious beyond belief. Not one
out of the one hundred and seventy could make any reply
to the question, * * Who made you ? * '
To-day v/e have reached the opposite extreme,
1 Pp. 168, 169.
151
152 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
and it is to be feared that some of our Sunday-
schools are cheerful and sociable children's clubs
for the promotion of pleasant intercourse, the cir-
culation of popular literature, the cultivation of
kindly feeling among the families of the congrega-
tion, and, incidentally, the study, not of the Bible,
but of lesson notes more or less connected with it.
These extremes have certainly one thing in
common. The Sunday-school of Hannah More
was strictly parochial, and the Sunday-school of
to-day is the same in the sense that it keeps largely
within the bounds of the separate congregations.
Free though we may be, if we live in America,
from the parochial divisions which the State marks
out in the old country, yet our own congregational
bounds are of the same nature, and, while every
aggressive Sunday-school by its agencies reaches
out beyond these bounds, still it remains sub-
stantially true that " the Sunday-school may be
defined as the church and congregation, especially
children, meeting on Sunday for the study of the
Scriptures.** ^
When it is faithful to its office the Sunday-
school is much more like the early Christian
assemblages, as they are described by Justin Mar-
tyr, for instance, than is our modem congrega-
tional gathering for public worship. Its keynote
* Judson, "The Institutional Church,** p. 104.
THE MINISTER AND THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 1 53
is instruction. No limit of age, of understanding,
or of condition, should for one moment be recog-
nized.
The Sunday-school, then, is not so much a
branch of congregational work as it is the congre-
gation itself. And the minister stands in just the
same relation to it as he does to the congregation,
understanding by the word ** congregation " the
whole number of those who regularly come under
his spiritual influence.
How this truth has been obscured, lost sight of,
finally denied altogether, history bears melan-
choly witness. The struggling and scattered
church of the first days was, as Doctor Trum-
bull says : ^
Unafcle to enforce a uniform church-school system in all
communities alike with carefully graded instruction from
the primary class to the divinity schooL The best that it
could do was to provide in every local church gathering for
the catechetical instruction of the young, including the
children of all believers and all other children who could
be brought under its care. . . Individual Christians were
forward and active in efforts to reach and to teach the
young whenever and wherever they might do so.
But the growth of the hierarchy in numbers,
power, and assumption gradually changed the sim-
plicity of the early church. The ministry claimed
the exclusive right to instruct and then failed to
» "Yale Lectures," p. 48.
^54 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
do it. Romanist and Protestant, State Church-
man and Nonconformist alike, lay under the male-
diction of the Master, " Woe unto you, lawyers !
for ye have taken away the key of knowledge : ye
entered not in yourselves, and them that were
entering in ye hindered." ^
Confining ourselves to the area covered by the
modern Sunday-school movement, we find abun-
dant proof in Great Britain and America that the
woe was well deserved. The opposition of the
British clergy to that movement in its early days
was often undisguised and fierce. "Sunday-
schools," says Sir Charles Reed, "were attacked
by prelates in the pulpit. The Bishop of Roches-
ter notably denounced the movement and urged
the clergy not to support it, and the Archbisitiop
of Canterbury was the first man in that day to call
the bishops together to consider whether some-
thing could not be done to stop this great enter-
prise." ^ " Later the Presbyterians of Scotland and
the Congregationalists of New England were rep-
resented among the opponents of the Sunday-
school as it battled its way into deserved honor."
The clerical mind, here as in other matters, was
slow to change. There were from the first illus-
trious exceptions to the dislike or distrust with
which the Sunday-school was regarded, but the
^Luke II : 52. 'Trumbull, pp. 114, 115.
THE MINISTER AND THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 1 55
average clergyman, when he ceased to persecute,
did what is little if anything better, he patronized.
" Within this month/' wrote Mr. Raikes in 1787,^
" the minister of my parish has at last conde-
scended to give me assistance in this laborious
work, which I have now carried on for six years
with little or no support. He chooses that the
children should come to church both morning and
evening." The Bishop of Gloucester, at his visita-
tion in July, 1786, ventured so far as to say, with
genuine episcopal caution, that " he doubted not,
with proper management and under the inspection
of the parochial clergy, Sunday-schools might be
productive of great good among the children of
the poor throughout the diocese.'* Such a man
would have patronized the angels of the Advent
and faintly approved of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, always, of course, " under the inspection
of the parochial clergy." The flutter in the eccle-
siastical dovecots may be imagined when one of
the most liberal and devoted of the Mendip clergy
needed to write :
I beg to state that the plans for instructing the children
and their older relations are circumscribed by every pre-
caution which appears to me needful or practicable in order
to guard against the smallest abuse or irregularity. The
whole economy of the school is under my direction and
' Gregory, ** Robert Raikes, Journalist and Philanthropist,*' p.
136.
156 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
control, and nothing is done but what I, with my whole
heart and to the best of my dispassionate judgment, ap-
prove.^
So, although with dignified deliberativeness, the
clergy came to acquiesce in the Sunday-school
movement. No doubt this was owing in part to
the fact that the queen herself sent for Raikes to
hear from his own lips " by what accident a thought
which promised so much benefit to the lower order
of people as the institution of Sunday-schools was
suggested to his mind." At Windsor, under the
shadow of the royal castle, " the ladies of fashion
passed their Sundays in teaching the poorest chil-
dren." There was a fair prospect that Sunday-
schools, as the eighteenth century wore to its
close, would become as popular with the aristocracy
as in our own times slumming has been. The
vagaries of fashion sometimes carry even her to
the limits of serious usefulness.
The British clergy were loyal to the royal ex-
ample. The name of Mr. Raikes became "a name
that every clergyman should highly reverence."
He was eulogized as a patriotic and virtuous citi-
zen to whom the present generation should " raise a
monument of gratitude." He was compared with
Jenner, who had recently benefited the whole
nation by introducing vaccination. The clergy
might now safely praise the man who basked in
1 n
Mendip Annals,*' p. 188.
THE MINISTER AND THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 1 57
the sunshine of the royal approval and who was
put side by side with the physician who had warded
off the small-pox.
In America, the progress of the Sunday-school
movement was almost as difficult, and from sub-
stantially the same causes. The birth of the Amer-
ican Sunday-school Union was probably under very
humble circumstances. A colored woman, in 1793,
started a Sunday-school in New York. Visitors
to the schools of Robert Raikes gave shape to this
and other voluntary enterprises. A minister from
London put enthusiasm into the work in Philadel-
phia. But even at this time a young girl who
dared to gather a little school in the galleries of
her home church in Norwich Town, Connecticut,
was forbidden to desecrate the day or the place by
her unsanctioned experiment. She was driven
even from the schoolhouse to which she had with-
drawn, and compelled at last to take refuge on the
church steps. From her baffled but victorious
endeavor sprang a school which has already sent
out twenty-six ministers and missionaries, several
of them members of her own family.^ And of the
Sunday-school institution at large it can be said
that "from an aggregate membership of a few
hundred at the beginning of this century, it has
come to include, within the evangelical Protestant
1 Trumbull, p. 128.
158 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
bodies alone, from eight to ten millions, or nearly
one- fifth of the entire population of the United
States." '
In an earlier chapter we traced the idea of Chris-
tian nurture through the apostolic age to the earlier
years of synagogue instruction, and still farther
back to the founding of the Hebrew theocracy, and
thence to the tent of Abram and the cradle of re-
sponsible family life.
We are now able to claim for the Sunday-school
(which is so powerful a means of Christian nur-
ture), that it lies, in germ, in the church of the
first days. Clouded, obscured, ignored, opposed,
without doubt it has kept an existence ever since.
It is the glory of our own times that this stream
has been cleared of its overgrowth of weeds, that
its channel has been well defined, and that, as its
waters have broadened and deepened, and gained
in volume and speed, the old prophetic words have
received a fresh fulfillment : " And everything
shall live whither the river cometh." * Our pres-
ent position, you will note, is that the Sunday-
school is a part of the local church, essential to its
completeness and inseparable from its successful
existence. You can have the school without the
church better than you can have the church with-
out the school. Old age is not so necessary to
^Trumbull, p. 131. * Ezek. 47 : 9.
THE MINISTER AND THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 1 59
continued life as youth, and we shall part with the
grave at less cost than with the cradle. Among
the first things that we have to do, therefore, if
we are ministers of Jesus Christ, is to adjust our
relations to the Sunday-school. To a considera-
tion of this subject we will now turn.
And, first, the minister must settle just what is
his relation to the school as a whole. I began this
chapter, with the definition of the Sunday-school
as the church and congregation meeting for the
study of the Bible ; and I did so because it is only
too easy to lose sight of this close connection be-
tween the church and the school.
In England, as we have seen, the school came
into existence as an independent movement. The
layman rather than the minister fathered it. Only
after much active opposition or cool patronage did
the church recognize in the Sunday-school one of
her children. In America, on the other hand, the
birth of the local school — and this is especially
true in the West — has, oftener than not, preceded
the birth of the local church. The mother in the
one case has been the daughter in the other ; and
the child has literally been father to the man.
Now let us understand that back of these acci-
dents of origin, the Sunday-school is one distinct
phase of the church, and therefore never independ-
ent of pastoral care and supervision. Here is the
local school, meeting under the roof of the local
l6o THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
church. Who is responsible for its management
and control ? Who shall answer for its condition,
commend it for its prosperity, or censure it for its
ill success ? I answer : The local church ; and,
as the representative of the church, the minister.
I confess to a jealousy of Mr. Beecher's state-
ment, except indeed as a telling bit of rhetoric :
" I think that Sunday-schools are the young peo-
ple's church." This is to banish the cradle to an
outhouse, to have the nursery removed to a sepa-
rate dwelling. It is to encourage the error, al-
ready too general, that the young people are to
have their own establishment and to receive their
visitors, have their own separate circle, create and
carry on their own interests, entirely indifferent
to their elders. It is the boarding-house parlor
and not the family sitting room that is set up as
our model here. And I protest against it. The
Sunday-school is not the children's church. The
church where their parents worship is none too
good for them, and it ought to be none too formal
or too old. The forest trees are better for having
the forest undergrowth. Give the children their
place in the family circle of the church, as it sur-
rounds the sacred table or gathers with psalms and
hymns and spiritual songs to sing and make mel-
ody to the Lord.^ My church shall be the church
> Eph. 5 : 19.
THE MINISTER AND THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL i6t
of my children ; and their Sunday-school shall be
mine as well.
The responsibility of the pastor for the Sunday-
school is not optional. It is obligatory. Every de-
partment of work and worship has been committed
to the minister, this among the rest.
The connection between church and school will
be kept all the closer if the church sustain the
school financially. A gentleman active in the
public school system of Toronto says : ^
I would like to see Sunday-schools placed on the same
footing financially with relation to the church that public
schools hold toward the municipalities and the State. Does
not the Simday-school bear even a closer relation to the
church than the public school does to the State ? Is it not
literally a department, aye, and an important department,
of the church ? Why then should it not have its place in
the church estimates ?
Whatever money is collected in the classes
should go to beneficence, not to the support of
the school, not to the paying of a church debt, not
to defray the expenses of school festivals and pic-
nics, but exclusively to good works. Let the
school support, in whole or in part, a missionary
abroad or on the home field ; let it have its bed in
the local hospital, its share in the fresh-air fund,
its contribution to the relief of the famine or the
* Mr. James Hughes, Inspector of Public Schools, Crafts, ** The
Bible,** etc., p. 70.
L
1 62 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
fire. And let the funds be allotted under the di-
rection of a committee elected by the whole school,
with the approval of the church. The officers of
the school — perhaps even the teachers — should be
nominated at the annual election held for the pur-
pose, and voted upon, always subject to the ap-
proval of the church.
To the quickened sense of pastoral responsi-
bility we owe it that the local church is gathering
about it so many organizations for Christian en-
deavor, for manual or mental training, for asso-
ciations of young men and young women, which
fifty years ago would have been started each upon
its independent basis. It is little to the credit of
the church that in the eighteenth century she suf-
fered the Sunday-school to be begun by laymen,
and for years held the most valuable of her aux-
iliaries at arm's length. That the Christian Asso-
ciations for young men and young women have
been launched very much in the same way is little
to the credit of the church in the nineteenth cen-
tury.
I think that what has already been said settles
the minister's relation to his Sunday-school. He
is as much the pastor of the school as he is of
the fellowship. He is as much interested in the
choice of a superintendent as he is in the choice
of a deacon or an elder.
THE MINISTER AND THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 1 63
I venture to counsel that from the first the
minister be very watchful over himself in this
matter. Let him avoid, by all means, assuming a
hostile position toward the officers of the school
or its management. Let the superintendent be
his close ally. It has sometimes been whispered
that the relations between the president and vice-
president in the republic are apt to be strained.
The officer who comes next to you in rank is the
one for whom unconsciously to yourself feelings
of petty jealousy may creep into your heart. The
superintendent of the Sunday-school is like the
general in the field, the pastor is rather the minis-
ter of war. There is always danger of friction.
Let the minister be on his guard against it. Let
him make the superintendent his personal friend
and his official confidant. Let him be his asso-
ciate, not in any sense his rival.
I trust that I need not warn any minister against
falling into a condition of indifference to the
school. A farmer might as well be indifferent to
his spring wheat. It is of the first importance
that he keep in close touch with every teacher in
his class and with every officer at his work. The
secret of the success of the late A. T. Stewart,
the drygoods merchant of New York, was said to
be that he was always in the store himself, and
that no single salesman was long out of his sight.
The care of all the churches was that which daily
164 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
came upon the apostle/ and the care of all the
interests of the school should equally come upon
the minister.
And yet, at the same time, if he is prudent he
will not allow himself to be meddlesome. The
clerical weakness of omniscience is one to which
a minister easily yields. Many of us are credited
with so much more wisdom than we really possess
that it is not a very difficult matter for us to be-
lieve that, like Lord John Russell in Sydney
Smith's playful satire, we could take command of
the channel fleet, build St. Peter's, and perform
the most delicate surgical operation at an hour's
notice. The ability of the minister is seen, not in
doing ten men's work, but in setting ten men to
do it for themselves.
If the minister makes the best of his relation to
the school he will find that nowhere is there a
nobler field for the cultivation of that rare pastoral
gift which Doctor Chalmers in his stately rhetoric
was wont to call " the prosperous management of
human nature."
Having said so much as to the minister and
the school, it is easy to pass on to consider what
should be his relation to its officers.
The old Greek said, " He is the best shoemaker
who, out of the leather that he has nearest to his
*2 Cor. II : 28.
THE MINISTER AND THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL l6S
hand, makes the best pair of shoes." I think
there is nothing more foolish in a minister than to
quarrel with his materials. The despondent tone
is fatal to success. " If any one attempts to haul
down the American flag, shoot him on the spot,"
wired General Dix on the eve of the Civil War,
and the whole North promptly waked up to the
certainty of success. Never haul down your flag ;
never even fly it at half-mast, as though there
were a funeral aboard. Make the officers and
teachers hopeful by your confident air. The
'' gently complaining and fatigued spirit " which
Mr. Galton finds in the majority of clergymen is
an insult to God and to his world. The minister
who adopts it deserves the same fate — in a par-
liamentary sense, of course — as the man who
hauls down the American flag.
Let us honor our teachers. Let us discover
their virtues and excellencies. The church just
now is not crying out for critics, but for helpers.
The way to get better teachers is to make the
very best of those we already have.
I think what has to be said on this part of our
subject may fall under two divisions. The min-
ister must advise his teachers and he must super-
vise them.
First. He must advise.
The school, as a whole, is only one of a vast
number of similar organizations. Upon no branch
1 66 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
of Christian work is so much thought expended.
By all means let the minister keep himself posted,
through the various excellent Sunday-school pub-
lications, in every advance which the army of
schools is making. Without showing himself
eager to advise the adoption of every new method
that is being discussed, let him never allow his
mind to fossilize. A school which is growing
must devise fresh plans for further increase. Can
you canvass the neighborhood ? Can you make
each class a recruiting agency ? Can you use the
press to better advantage i Is there an advance
all along the line ? To debate such matters, let
the teachers be met every now and then, and let
these and other questions be open for free dis-
cussion.
It is of the first importance that the minister
advise, without dictating, as to the men in office
in the school. Let him find which way the current
is turning and wisely direct it. If it is possible
to have as his assistant in the pastorate a man
qualified to superintend the school, this is in many
respects a model arrangement. The work which
has been done by our volunteer superintendents,
while busy through the week in their daily avoca-
tions, has been beyond all praise. It is so still.
But when a Sunday-school is well up in the hun-
dreds, and is situated in a neighborhood favorable
to growth, it almost becomes a necessity that one
THE MINISTER AND THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 1 6/
man, in addition to the minister, should give his
exclusive attention to it. The trouble with many
of our churches seems to be that, unlike some
armies we have heard of, even if adequately
manned, they are insufficiently officered.
Let the minister advise with his teachers as to
the size and character of the classes and as to
every permanent addition to the teaching force.
The band of regular teachers is a kind of cabinet ;
and the more he takes it into his counsels the more
likely will it be that the whole school will pull
unitedly in the right way. All this will require to
be done by him judiciously. He need not preside
at teachers* meetings, although he will do well to be
generally present at them ; but the teachers should
instinctively feel that his mind is to be sought
whenever the interests of the school are under dis-
cussion.
More pronounced will be the minister's influence
in the supervision of the school. The teaching
band first demands his attention. In the opening
days of this movement, the teachers were many of
them paid. The present disposition to engage a
superintendent, well trained for that specific work,
and to pay him as one of the salaried officers of
the church, is practically a return to an early
method. There are instances — but they are rare —
in which even teachers are paid. As a rule, the
whole work of Sunday-school instruction is volun-
l68 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
tary. And the volunteer Sunday-school corps,
like the volunteer choir in the church, labors under
this disadvantage, that it seems ungracious to find
any fault with it. When the illiterate Indian
preacher told a passing traveler that his salary was
five dollars a year and a fish pole, the traveler
naturally replied that this was " mighty poor pay,"
and the Indian grunted back that it was also
"mighty poor preach." I have no inclination to
apply that story very closely ; but we cannot shut
our eyes to the fact that, take the country over,
the teaching in our Sunday-schools is not what it
might be. I should not say so much as this —
knowing how dangerous it is to indulge in glitter-
ing generalities — were it not that I wish to fasten
not a little of the responsibility for the sort of
teachers to be found in the Sunday-school upon
the minister. Far more care should be exercised
in their appointment. And, which is a point on
which I would lay the utmost stress, when ap-
pointed the pastor should see to it that week by
week the lesson for the next Sunday is intelligently
studied. One of the best ways to freeze out an
incompetent teacher is to raise the intellectual
tone of the whole school. The scholars will soon
find out his incapacity, and in time even the
teacher may have sufficient grace to find it out
himself.
I would earnestly counsel that the minister en-
THE MINISTER AND THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 1 69
courage in his school not the multiplication of
classes, so much as their efficiency. If ever it
should fall to his lot to build a school, let him re-
member that he can scarcely have too many class-
rooms. In the hall where all meet there should
be scarcely any teaching done. We have been
aiming at the impossible in trying to find in a
church of, say, four hundred members, a teaching
staff of forty. Each class may be allowed to be-
come just as numerous as its teacher can make it,
and the influence of some masters of the art of
popular Bible exposition with present-day applica-
tion, is to be seen in the multitudes that flock to
their class-rooms.
Take the utmost care in the selection of teach-
ers for the kindergarten department. Here from
the ages of three to seven gather the little chil-
dren, too young as yet to be admitted into the
public schools, but not too young to receive im-
pressions that will be more enduring than many
lessons later learned. The large church may well
" employ a devout and trained kindergartner, who
shall not only educate the child's mind and body
with the charming symbolic exercises of the kin-
dergarten, but also tell the story of the life of
Christ, and teach the child Christian prayers and
hymns." ^ If equal to doing so, the kindergarten
^ Judson, p. 172.
I/O THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
should be established as a weekday institution in
the church, but often this will not be possible.
What I am now pleading for is : The teacher of
little children will learn, as well as her scholars.
She will be more and more impressed with the
beauty as well as with the mystery of infancy, and
will sympathize with Jean Paul Richter when he
says : " A single child upon the earth would seem
to us a wonderful angel, come from some distant
home, who, unaccustomed to our strange language,
manners, and air, looks at us speechless and in-
quisitive."
As a final word upon this subject of the teach-
ing force, let me beg all to remember that, in this
business of religious instruction, character is of
the utmost moment. A frivolous teacher, a teacher
loving the world more than the church, a teacher
mentally equipped but morally defective, should
be discouraged from further teaching. I have
known a teacher of very moderate ability who so
impressed his moral personality upon his class that
he became to many of his scholars the most power-
ful influence for good through all their after lives.
" Character is capital '' in the ministry, and scarcely
less is this true also in the case of the teacher.
To him I may venture to apply the words of Dr.
Austin Phelps : " Call him what you will, dress
him as you please, put him where you choose, he
is practically a minister of the gospel."
THE MINISTER AND THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL I7I
Of late years we have grasped more firmly than
at first the wider mission of the Sunday-school.
We have made it central to a network of organi-
zations. Without it the Christian Endeavor So-
ciety, the gymnasium, the band of hope, the junior
missionary bands, the boys* orchestra, the young
people's literary society, the church sociable, and
a dozen other institutions, could scarcely exist.
The parish house, in one form or another, has risen
as a necessary adjunct to the church building. All
this is well. Still, the minister will need to be
watchful over these various interests. Let him
not multiply them without good reason. Let him
not allow the thin end of the wedge of rivalry,
frivolity, or roughness to get a chance. The wise
direction of the church sociable is no easy matter.
Let the minister as soon as possible add a good
stereopticon to his plant. Let him introduce his
young people, by means of it, to the wonders of
the world, to the great scenes of history, to the
masterpieces of art. Let him not condescend to
enter the field, as many churches have done, in
competition with the music hall or the variety
theatre. The mission of the church is not to
amuse, it is to elevate. Yet, keeping the idea of
the family, the minister can shed through the
school an atmosphere of good cheer ; and he can
make it the center of light and sweetness, draw-
ing to it the young life of the community.
1/2 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
A word as to another valuable adjunct to the
school. I mean the library. Care should be
taken to have an intelligent committee to select
books for it. It will be well that the pastor serve
upon this committee himself. There are two ex-
tremes to be avoided in a Sunday-school library^
books that will not get read and books that ought
not to get read. A glance at the shelves will very
likely give a sample of the first of these. Books
** as good as new/' which means good for little or
nothing ; black-bound, well printed, with no weak
pandering to the fancy by illustrations other than an
occasional portrait : " The Memoir of the Rev-
erend Ahasuerus Brittle, d. d." ; " The Early Bud
Blighted *' ; " The Chronological Tables of the
Kings of Judah and Israel"; a "Treatise on
Predestination," and "A Life of Joseph in Words
of One Syllable." A healthy boy to read any of
these must be reduced to the extremity of intel-
lectual starvation ; he must be where the besieged
army is when the soldiers eat their shoe soles.
On the other hand, there are books which are
popular and eagerly sought for, but which have no
true place in the Sunday-school library. We have
advanced far beyond the point at which our
fathers drew the line. We no longer discuss the
mission of fiction. We recognize the good work
that it can do. But the Sunday-school library
may be the only avenue open to many children for
THE MINISTER AND THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 1/3
gaining access to the better kinds of readable
literature and of fiction among the rest. Miss
Yonge and George Macdonald, Tom Hughes and
Charles Kingsley, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Miss
Mulock, and so on down to the books of Mrs. Wig-
gins and Ralph Connor and Mrs. Mason, how
they have enriched the shelves dear to boys and
girls. More serious works will find readers too.
The success of John G. Paton*s books of mission-
ary adventure showed conclusively that a true man
can always command his audience when he has
something to say and knows how to say it. I
need only urge two points in passing : first, that
we remember how poor and worthless, and often
how demoralizing, is the literature in the home,
with its Sunday paper and dime novel ; and sec-
ondly, that we believe in the intelligence of our
scholars. A Sunday-school lesson may be made
to suggest reading in Jewish antiquities ; in the
geography, manners, customs, and present condi-
tion of Bible lands ; in the history of the time
and the great leaders living in other parts of the
world, which will reveal the slumbering faculty and
give to many a scholar a healthful intellectual im-
pulse of great value to his whole after career.
What has been said here as to pastoral super-
vision has been little more than by way of sug-
gestion. But it may have opened up the in-
creased and loftier sense of a pastor's responsi-
174 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
bility which comes to the man who gratefully
accepts the view of the minister's relation to the
school and to its officers which I am pressing
home in this chapter.
I have reserved to the last the discussion of
what is in many respects the most important
branch of our subject, namely, the minister's rela-
tion to the teachers of the school.
Among them he must be alike an intellectual and
a spiritual force. These are the points which re-
main to be considered.
And, first, he should be intellectually powerful
in the teaching corps of his school.
If our view of the magnitude of Sunday-school
work be correct, then the minister is fully war-
ranted in giving a good share of his time and
thought to it. Should it seem that I am laying a
burden too heavy upon the minister in what I am
about to recommend, I can only answer that I am
speaking from personal experience when I urge
him to be in the widest sense of the term a
teacher of teachers. There is no branch of minis-
terial labor, I believe, which will more richly repay
him than this.
Occasionally, then, once in so many years, it
will be well for him to form a normal class and
teach it himself. A series of ten or fifteen studies
under the guidance of a simple handbook will be
sufficient. The months of the spring or of the
THE MINISTER AND THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 1 75
fall will be a good time for the exercise. Let it be
kept to one hour, on an evening free from all
other church engagements, and let the platform
be furnished with a blackboard and maps.
The two ends to aim at in a normal class are
instructing in the art of teaching and instructing
in the things that have to be taught. One has not
in this exercise to expound the lesson for the next
Sunday, but rather to show the teacher how to
handle his Bible, how to master its contents, and
how best to explain and apply the truths which it
sets forth.
The minister's first duty is to instruct in the art
of teaching. So few Sunday-school teachers know
anything about this that sometimes there is no
sight more pitiful than the teacher on the verge of
the half-hour given to instructing his class. You
have a strong inclination to call in the humane
society as to a case of cruelty to animals or to
send for the fire brigade and have that teacher put
out, like a conflagration. You instinctively envy
the promptitude of the editor who, when the fresh
hand, nibbling his pen, inquired, " What shall I
write about ? " answered, " Right about face,** and
showed him to the door. "And yet show I you
a more excellent way " with the teacher. Let us
help him to teach. He has had no training. His
work through the week, in store or office, has not
done much for him. It is our duty to take him in
1/6 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
hand. " On the manner of teaching/* says Doctor
Channing/ ** how much depends ! I fear it is not
sufficiently studied by Sunday-school instructors.
They meet generally, and ought regularly to meet,
to prepare themselves for their tasks. But their
object commonly is to learn what they are to
teach rather than how to teach it, but the last
requires equal attention with the first, I had almost
said more.*' It will be wise if the pastor occa-
sionally turn the band of teachers into a class, or
make a selection from the number for the purpose,
and so give an object-lesson in how best a lesson
may be taught. This need not be done frequently.
Always, however, he will need to keep plainly be-
fore the minds of the teachers the fact that three
things are essential in a good instructor : First, to
study the truth of the lesson as authoritative ;
secondly, to arrive at clear ideas as to just what
the lesson means ; and, thirdly, to get the best
possible way of expressing it. Teaching, let us
remember, is the teacher*s first duty ; not counsel,
or appeal, or story-telling. The teaching should
not be too scholastic. It is not of the first im-
portance that the scholar knows the distance from
Jerusalem to Jericho or the specific gravity of the
Dead Sea. A casual hearer of Dean Stanley's, at
Westminster Abbey, came away from the service
1 "Works,'* p. 366.
THE MINISTER AND THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL \^^
saying, " I went to hear about the way to heaven ;
I heard only about the way to Palestine." Yet it
is well to remember that the teacher is to learn
how to set forth truth to intelligent creatures.
" Children love knowledge," * says Henry Ward
Beecher; "treat them as rational human beings.
Believe that the foundation element in them is
curiosity, as you call it ; that is, the nascent form
of philosophical feeling, the knowing states of
mind that are to be developed in them." It was
when the nineteenth century was yet young, and,
shall I say, foolish ? that an American religious
magazine discussed the ' question, **Can Children
Reason t " and now, when its successor is yet
young, one wonders whether those learned dis-
putants were sworn to eternal celibacy, or whether
the American children have developed since then
a new faculty under the impulse of evolution.
Certainly they are as rational as their elders, and
possibly not more unreasonable than they.
The normal class will further be of service for
instructing the teachers in the things to be taught.
" Present Bibles ! " is the direction of the superin-
tendent in a Chicago Sunday-school, just before
the reading of the morning lesson ; and every
teacher and scholar holds up a copy of the Bible.
This is excellent, and suggests that what the
1 "Yale Lectures," II., 185.
M
178 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
teacher has to learn is how to teach the Bible. I
am told that in the Sunday-school of the future
the normal class will include a course in mental
and moral philosophy, pedagogics, child-mind, and
kindergarten.^ Such an announcement reconciles
one to the approach of old age, and adds another
charm to the prospect of the grave. Meanwhile,
the Bible will probably suffice for people of ordi-
nary intelligence and leisure. It was the early
text book in the Jewish schools and among the
first Christians as they gathered their children for-
religious instruction.^ In it the Albigenses, the
Lollards, the Wycliffites, and the followers of John
Huss, trained their families ; and at this hour it
is the basis of the admirable teaching given in their
schools by the Waldenses, who thereby maintain
the noble traditions of a thousand years.^
The course of instruction which is given in the
normal class should embrace Bible history, and the
history of the Bible ; the growth of the canon and
the order of the books ; the geography, national
history, and leading characteristics of the lands of
the Bible; and, finally, a consideration of the prin-
cipal truths with which the book deals. To this
normal class study all may be invited who wish
^ Mead, ** Modern Methods in Church Work," p. 241.
*Edersheim, "Sketches," etc., p. 125. Trumbull, p. 63.
' ^^Quelques Explications pour aider V Etude de la Bible,*'
Toni Petrie, 1898.
THE MINISTER AND THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 1 79
to come ; and from it there may be found a sup-
ply of teachers in an emergency.
The normal class, as I have said, may be needed
only once in so many years. And if the pastor is
fortunate in his association with brother ministers,
the burden of it may easily be shared with others.
But it should not be allowed to pass into incapable
hands. Not every man has the necessary equip-
ment of studiousness, mental alacrity, popular ad-
dress, good temper, and devotion to his work to do
it well.
There is another class which, in my judgment,
the pastor had better conduct himself. I mean
the preparation class, in which the following Sun-
day's lesson is carefully studied. One evening in
the week should be given up entirely to this en-
gagement. Writing to me on the subject. Dr. A.
F. Schauffler, of New York, an expert in conduct-
ing such a class, says :
Might I venture to ask you to put very special emphasis
on the influence which a pastor ought to exercise as the
teacher of his teachers ? The whole question of the leader-
ship of teachers' meetings is one of very great importance,
and ministers in any city who develop the power of leading
a union teachers* meeting, have a field opened to them sec-
ond perhaps to none other in the world.
I am afraid that it is with good reason that
Doctor Schauffler adds :
Multitudes of ministers are graduated from our seminaries
l80 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
who have no faintest conception of the field of usefulness
thus open to them. They think so litUe of teachers* meet-
ings that they pay no attention to the subject
An experience of many years in conducting this
meeting — which I always threw open to all, from
any school or congregation, who desired to attend
it — confirms me in my hearty approval of these
words.
Let the minister take the lesson exposition him-
self. Let him prepare for it as thoroughly as he
would for a sermon. Short of making the att«id-
ance of his own teachers obhgatory let him do all
in his power to have them there regularly. The
task is not an easy one, but it will pay a hundred
fold. The two foes to teaching among ministers,
from the beginning, have been preaching and
ritual. This exercise may go a long way toward
teaching them how to teach in their sermon work.
It may break up the parson-tone into v^^ich the
enemy so readily beguiles many good men. It will
certainly furnish many a rich text and useful theme
for the pulpit.
The instruction of the hour may take one of two
forms. It may be cast in the mold of a running
exposition, with blackboard accompaniment, and
opportunity, either by word of mouth or in writing,
for any who wish to ask questions at the close.
Or — which it is no doubt preferable when a capa-
ble leader conducts it — the lesson may be taken
THE MINISTER AND THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL l8l
up by means of questions and answers. " The
object is not merely to give instruction, but to put
it into a communicable form, so that in learning
the hearers may be prepared to teach. Questions
should be asked by the conductor of the class as
to the leading points of the lesson. . . Better still,
questions should be invited from the members of
the class, that their own difficulties may be fairly
stated, and that the mental needs of the scholars
whom they represent may be adequately given." ^
It remains that in this chapter I glance, much
more briefly than the subject deserves, at the
minister's spiritual power among his teachers.
What the moral influence — the higher personality
— of a principal is in the public school, that should
the religious influence — the highest personality —
of the minister be in the Sunday-school.
The great danger of Sunday-schools, as Doctor
Channing said, "is that they will fall into a course
of mechanical teaching, that they will give religion
as a lifeless tradition, and not as a quickening
reality. To wake up the soul to a clear, affection-
ate perception of the reality and truth and great-
ness of religion, is the great end of teaching."
I think that at least once every month the pas-
tor should meet the officers and teachers of the
school for prayer and conference — and for nothing
^S. G. Green, "Christiaii Ministry," etc., p. 187.
1 82 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOl-
else. The promotion of the spiritual life of this
body is of immense importance. Among the second-
ary blessings of such a meeting (as well as of class
prayer meetings, which he can also hold occasion-
ally), will be the development of spiritual efficiency
among the teachers. They will learn to pray in
public to edification. They will become accus-
tomed to hear their own voices in the statement
of religious experience.
At this meeting also, which need not be pro-
longed beyond half an hour at the most, the min-
ister may give his teachers valuable suggestions as
to how to do evangelistic work with their scholars.
On this point Rev. W. F. Crafts says :
It would be an excellent practice to devote fifteen min-
utes at each weekly teachers* meeting to the use of the
Bible with inquirers. Let the superintendent or pastor
state some difficulty, such as is presented by those who are
seeking Christ, and ask from the teacher the appropriate
passages to cancel the difficulty. *
More will need to be said on this important
jsubject in our next chapter, when we propose to
carry the minister into the school itself. What I
,now urge upon him in his ministry is, in a word,
to regard the teachers in his Sunday-school as
assistant pastors. So Dr. Edward Judson puts
the matter :
1 *♦ The Bible in the Sunday-school,*' p. 55.
THE MINISTER AND THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 1 83
Let the pastor commit to the care of his teachers the
families represented in their classes. Let the teachers call
upon these families regularly and report their condition to
the pastor. . . Strangers will be visited, because families
arc in the habit of throwing their children out as feelers.
The sick will not be overlooked. The whole church will
become a compact social organism. *
I wonder, in bringing this chapter to a close,
whether it has seemed to any one as though I
were laying a good deal on the minister ? He has
so much to do already! With reference to not a
little the pastor does or seems to do — the " busy
idleness " which eats into his time — I am disposed
to think that both he and the church may dispense
with it sooner than with this fine discipline of
mind and soul to which I am urging him. And
let me say that, whether these Sunday-school en-
gagements — a regular preparation class for his
teachers once a week, an occasional normal class,
gatherings at stated or special intervals for directly
religious conference and prayer — whether these
prove irksome or refreshing will depend very
largely on himself. It is inexpressibly good to be
working in the nurseries of life with the young
plants and saplings. They said that on into her
old age, Rosa Bonheur, the greatest animal painter
of the last century, carried the charm of an eighteen-
year-old girl because she loved so enthusiastically
1 **The Institutional Church,** p. io6.
1 84 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
the cattle and deer of her forest at Fontainebleau.
It is even better, more invigorating, and more in-
spiring, to live among the children and to live for
them. The minister should be more than a teacher
of teachers ; yes, more, and better. He should be
their atmosphere, " to teach them the fundamental
truths of Christianity without neglecting their spir-
itual affections and religious feelings, and to make
them love each other, and love the church, and
associate with the whole round of religion the
most joyous thoughts and feelings." ^ Under such
a conviction as this the minister will find his
reward for every hour of preparatory study which
he may give to the exposition of the Sunday-school
lesson and for all the pains he may expend in
advising and supervising the devoted band of
teachers that he will be sure to gather about him.
Here, as in many other branches of pastoral
service, finding it a joyful toil, he will come to
prove the truth of Macbeth's words.
The labor we delight in physics pain.
iBeecher, "Yale Lectures," III., i88.
"V
VI
THE MINISTER IN THE SUNDAY-
SCHOOL
Beginning of the Sunday-school in England and America.
Three watchwords : Reformation, information, regenera-
tion. There must be a power to reform. The Sunday-
school must also educate. Bible study. Occasional serv-
ices conducted by the minister. Memorizing Scripture.
The catechism. Should the minister be a teacher ? The
regenerating mission of the Sunday-school. The minister
should be well known by the scholars. He must take the
lead in special efforts for their spiritual welfare. The sub-
ject of religious decision to be made prominent A child's
religion. The minister a unifying influence between home
and school and church and schooL
VI
THE MINISTER IN THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
On the Thames Embankment, in London, the
people of England have raised a statue in honor
of Robert Raikes, the Gloucester printer, to whom,
more than to any other one man, Sunday-schools
owe their birth. The site of the statue is well
chosen, beside the noble river which, rising in the
county where Raikes was born, is now moving
swiftly toward the sea. It suggests the great
enterprise which from very humble beginnings
has swept on in its beneficent course until the
whole world is the better for it. Dean Farrar
gives voice to a feeling which we all share with
him when he says that he never passes that statue
without a sense of pleasure.
Raikes tells us, after seeing the ragged children rioting
about on Sunday in the streets of Gloucester : " As I asked,
* Can nothing be done?* a voice answered, *Try.* I did
try," he says, " and see what God hath wrought" There
are now Sunday-school teachers by tens of thousands all
over the world, but, humanly speaking, they all owe their
origin to that one word, *' try," so softly whispered by some
voice divine to the loving and tender conscience of Robert
Raikes a hundred years ago. The echoes of that word
might be prolonged by millions of grateful children who
187
1 88 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
have been taught for generation after generation by loving
teachers in Sunday-schools.
How it all came about Robert Raikes often told
his friends :
The utility of an establishment of this sort was first sug>
gested by a group of miserable little wretches whom I ob-
served one day in the street where many people employed
in the pin manufactory reside. I was expressing my con*
cem to one at their forlorn and neglected state, and was
told that if I were to pass through that street upon Sundays
it would shock me indeed to see the crowds of children who
were spending that sacred day in noise and riot, to the
extreme annoyance of all decent people. I immediately
determined to make some little effort to remedy the evil ^
Reformation, then, was the first thought in the
Sunday-school system. But another followed, of
necessity. In the same letter from which I have
been quoting Raikes sounds a still higher note. In
these schools " children may be received,*' he says,
"upon the Sunday, and then engaged in learning
to read and to repeat their catechism or an)rthing
else that may be deemed proper to open their
minds to a knowledge of their duty to God, to
their neighbors, and themselves." Reformation
was to go hand in hand with information. These,
however, were not enough. Within a year or two
John Wesley, with characteristic devotion to the
true purpose of being, writes : " I find these schools
* Gregory's ** Raikes/' p. 60.
THE MINISTER IN THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 1 89
springing up wherever I go. Perhaps God may
have a deeper end therein than men are aware of.
Who knows but some of these schools may become
nurseries of Christians.^*' To his mind it is
evident that reformation and information were
incomplete unless they led to transformation.
In America the Sunday-school system, while it
did not spring directly from the movement in the
mother country, was so radical in its action that,
although it may have grown out of the catechetical
practice in the churches, it really amounted to a
revolution.^ No doubt the shocking condition of
morals in England in the last century — when even
in a cathedral city such as Gloucester, abounding
in clergymen, ** the streets swarmed with rogues
and vagabonds, who were flogged through the city
weekly by scores," and where George Whitefield
was known only as a dirty little rascal who robbed
his mother's till and tried to quiet his conscience
by giving part of the plunder to the poor, — made
the movement more reformatory in its character
than in the happier districts of New England;
but there was need of moral dynamite every-
where. And this the Sunday-school movement
gave. The minister, as he comes to his Sunday-
school to take his share in this important branch
of Christian work, will do well to keep in mind the
1 ** Life of Dr. Jeter," p. 26.
190 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
three impelling forces — reformation, information,
transformation — v/ith which the young enterprise
was started a hundred and twenty years ago.
First, then, let him remember that there must
be in the Sunday-school a power to reform, a moral
influence. This lay at the root of the Jewish
school system. " The grand object of the teacher
was moral as well as intellectual training. To
keep children from all intercourse with the vicious ;
to suppress all feelings of bitterness, even though
wrong had been done to one*s parents ; to punish
all wrong-doing ; rather to show sin in its repulsive-
ness than to predict what punishment would fol-
low, either in this or the next world, so as not to
* discourage ' the child — such are some of the rules
laid down ** in the Talmud.^
The minister may well use the school for incul-
cating by example some of the minor moralities
— courtesy, for instance, and considerateness — ^to
which slight attention is paid in many, homes.
Much will depend upon him in these matters.
The aim of the parochial system was to put a gen-
tleman in every parish, and, whether it succeeded
or not, it was a true and noble aim. On the part
of the minister, grace of manner, politeness, and
instinctive respect for the teacher — ^keeping him
from intruding and from interrupting him in his
^Edersheim, "Sketches," etc., p. 135.
THE MINISTER IN THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL I9I
work, a careful regard for the office of superin-
tendent, and a public recognition on every occasion
of him who fills the office — will impress the scholars
with the beauty of courtesy.
The Sunday-school never stops with itself. The
home must feel its power. Some of the first
schools were held in private houses.^ It was in a
weaver's cottage in Lancashire that a school was
gathered to the clanging of an old brass pestle and
mortar by a poor bobbin winder some years before
Raikes began his work. And nowhere, I suppose,
more than in this same English county has the
Sunday-school reached the home with such prac-
tical organizations as beneficiary and sick and
burial clubs.^
Of the late R. W. Dale, of Birmingham, his
biographer says that "he never forgot that of
most children it may be said that if they have no
church in the home they have no home in the
church." But, judged by this criterion, how
many homes are no homes. The school alone, of
all the agencies of the church, is likely to reach
them with its saving message. From it, there-
fore, the minister will do well to launch any move-
ment — such as the ** Pleasant Sunday Afternoons "
— for the bettering and brightening of the common
lot of the men and women all about him. From
1 Gregory, p. 47.
«Mead, ** Modem Methods," etc.. Chap. XXXVII.
192 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
the school he can carry the news of every such
organization to the homes of the scholars. I do
not mean that the church is to be known in the
neighborhood as a place of entertainment. Such
it is not. With Dr. A. J. Gordon I say : " The
rage for church amusement which the last few
years have witnessed has filled me with sincere
alarm. No reader of history can be ignorant of
the fact that it was precisely this process by which
the apostasy and corruption of Christianity were
originally accomplished." And, with him, I be-
lieve that the Society of Christian Endeavor "has
turned the energy and activity of our young peo-
ple into a better channel." It is well that the
school should be known in the home by the various
ministries of that society, but it is not well — it is
shameful and humiliating — that it should be known
by degrading the scholars into touts and ticket
agents for what has been called, not too severely,
** the devil's mission of amusement."
Widening our circle, we remark that the minis-
ter may, through the instruction given to the
scholars and the example set them, do something
to promote civic purity. It would be interesting,
were there space to do so, to trace this in some
concrete example,— in Birmingham, England, for
instance, which has been called the best governed
city in the world, and which has become so in the
last forty years, mainly because a body of young
THE MINISTER IN THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 193
men, ministers and Sunday-school teachers chiefly,
gave themselves with self-sacrificing ardor to the
good of the community.
Nor need we stay here. The Sunday-school
has exerted a national influence. The work of
Robert Raikes was scarcely six years old when
the Gloucestershire magistrates passed a unani-
mous vote to the effect that "the benefit of
Sunday-schools to the morals of the rising genera-
tion is too evident not to merit the recognition of
this bench and the thanks of the community to
the gentlemen instrumental in promoting them.*' ^
Indeed, it was the dreadful condition of the prisons,
making him write "could unhappy wretches see
the misery that awaits them in a crowded gaol
they would surely relinquish the gratifications that
reduce them to such a state of wretchedness," and
" the thought of the convict ships carrying out about
one thousand miserable creatures who might have
lived, perhaps happily, in this country had they
been early taught good principles,'* that led Raikes
to begin his schools. And, even after he had
gathered his scholars in classes and brought them
into some kind of order, how much of the criminal
element remained we may judge from the words
of an eye-witness : " There were always bad *uns
coming in. I know the parents of one or two of
* Gregory, p. 8i.
N
194 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
them used to walk them to school with fourteen-
pound weights tied to their legs to keep them
from running away. Other boys would come
with wood tied to their ankles/* So bad were
they that Raikes, at times, had to take them home
to their parents to be "walloped/* and he used to
stop and see it done. Sometimes the boys would
be " belted '' or strapped all the way to school. No
one would take any notice of punishment being
inflicted in Sunday-schools when they were first
started. The only sense that would appeal to the
boys who were first got together was the sense of
pain. Corporal punishment only very slowly died
out of the discipline of the Sunday-schools in
Great Britain. Possibly it is not wholly dead yet.
In New England the catechism (which was the
Sunday-school in germ) was certainly a powerful
agent in repressing evil and promoting good citi-
zenship, and one of the eulogists of that old-
fashioned instrument for the welfare of the parish,
challenges his audience with the questions, " Did
you ever know any man who was brought up on
the catechism who did not vote on rainy days, and
vote right too ? No. Did you ever know a de-
faulter, or a communist, or a profane swearer, or a
bulldozer, who was brought up on the catechism ?
No.'* ^ This is, no doubt, the testimony of a par-
* Dorus Clarke, "Saying the Catechism," pp. 38, 39.
THE MINISTER IN THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 1 95
tial witness ; but without any question the effect
of the training in the Sunday-school on the home,
the neighborhood, and the whole community was
very marked. "The mere fact,'* it has been said,
"that children attend the Sunday-school brings
the subject of religion, week after week, before
the minds of the parents, and is a standing ad-
monition that the fear of the Lord should be the
law of the household." ^ After twenty-five years*
experience of Sunday-schools in Ireland, the par-
liamentary report testified to their influence on
the moral character and in promoting deference to
the laws ; while in Wales, the Royal Education
Commission, by the mouth of one of its officials,
declared that " in little more than half a century
the Sunday-school has been the main agency in
effecting that change in the moral and social popu-
lation of the country, to which a parallel can
scarcely be found in history." ^
The minister has yet to understand his office
who does not view himself as an influence on the
community. He is called upon to deal with men
and women in their social, their civic, and their
national relations. It is the homes of the coming
years that are about him in the school, it is the
citizens who soon will cast their ballots, it is the
factors for weal or woe of the century, at whose
* Trumbull, pp. 162, 163. "^Jbid,,-^, 165.
196 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
doors we stand. " The twig will become a tree,"
as the son of William the Silent said, called so
early by the assassin's bullet to take his father's
place. That is what you need to remember. " He
who helps a child," to quote the words of Phillips
Brooks, "helps humanity with a distinctiveness,
with an immediateness, which no other help given
to human creatures in any other stage of their
human life can possibly give again. The thing
that made the divine Master indignant as he stood
there in Jerusalem was that he dreamed of seeing
before him a man who had harmed some of these
little ones, and he said of any such ruffian, * It
were better for him that he never had been born.'
It is such an awful thing to hurt a child's life ; to
aid a child's life is beautiful." *
How much the Sunday-school has changed in
its character will be evident if I have been fol-
lowed thus far. The well-to-do and the reputable
have taken possession of the organization which
was intended at first only for the poor and unfor-
tunate. As has so often happened in the history
of the world, Pharaoh's dream has been reversed,
and the seven rank and full ears have devoured
the seven thin ears, blasted with the East wind.
Robert Raikes was an old man, when in his re-
tirement there came to visit him a young Quaker
* Phillips Brooks, " Essays and Addresses,** pp. 506, 507.
THE MINISTER IN THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL I97
named Joseph Lancaster, who was then absorbed
in the plan, which afterward made his name famous
in the annals of popular education, for giving
week-day instruction to the children of the poor.
Leaning on the arm of his visitor, Raikes led him
through the thoroughfares of Gloucester to the
spot in a back street where the first school was
held. " Pause here," said the old man. Uncov-
ering his head and closing his eyes, he stood for a
moment in silent prayer. Then turning toward
his friend, while the tears rolled down his cheeks,
he said, " This is the spot on which I stood when
I saw the destitution of the children and the
desecration of the Sabbath by the inhabitants of
the city.'* And then he added, referring to the
incident mentioned in the first sentences of this
chapter, "As I asked, 'Can nothing be done.^' a
voice answered, *Try.* I did try, and see what
God has wrought. I can never pass by this spot,
where the word * try ' came so powerfully into my
mind, without lifting up my hands and heart
to heaven in gratitude to God for having put
such a thought into my heart.'* The meeting on
that memorable spot of the two men who did so
much, the one for sacred and the other for secular
schools, seems to me a subject fit for a painter.
Already the time had come when the Sunday-
school could hope to keep itself to its own true
vocation. At first, perforce, a great part of its
198 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
work had been to teach reading and writing. I
myself was once granted the use of a vacant ware-
house for a Sunday-school in a poor and crowded
district of an English city on condition that we
taught not reading and writing only, but arithme-
tic as well. All this is now changed ; the public
school takes its moral and religious character from
the Sunday-school, and the minister must remem-
ber in his dealings with his scholars of how much
moment this is. Aim, by all means, to make the
Sunday-school not the young people's church, but
the place where the whole congregation meets to
study the Bible. " The righteous," said the rab-
bis, " go from the synagogues to the school ; from
the place of prayer to the place of study." ^ En-
tering the synagogue Bible-school at six years old,
"the Jewish scholar never came to an age for
graduation from that school." The way to keep
the young people in the school is for the older
people to remain in it ; and first of all, for the
minister to do so.
We may begin, therefore, by laying it down as
the duty of the minister to be found in the Sun-
day-school every Sunday. Occasionally, but not as
a matter of course, let him offer prayer at the open-
ing or closing of the exercises. Let him be ready
to review the last Sunday's lesson before the les-
^ Trumbull, p. 16.
THE MINISTER IN THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 1 99
son for the day is taken up. Or, he may review,
briefly and with spirit, the lesson just taught, be-
fore the school is dismissed. Let him not, in
either case, spend more than a few minutes over
his review. He should have a blackboard and
learn, for it is an art, to use it deftly and to good
purpose.
Anyhow, let the minister be there. He needs
to learn that it is really not necessary in order to
exert an influence that he be always talking. He
can talk too much and be heard too often. His
silence may do as much good as his speech, possi-
bly sometimes even more. To be seen there,
ready for service or suggestion, is what must, first
of all, be expected of him.
I think much may be said in favor of a brief
exercise, say of five minutes, in which the pastor
drills the school in memorizing Scripture. JLet
none misunderstand me. The parrot method is,
of course, to be condemned. In its feeblest and
most tyrannical days, the "Catechism of the West-
minster Assembly" was taught thus, but so it was
never intended to be taught. Learning by rote is
not really learning at all. The understanding is
not called into play. But with this word of warn-
ing, I heartily commend the practice of learning
the very words of Scripture. There is certainly
known to me one compendium of "Treasure Texts "
for youthful memories which might be used with
200 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
advantage occasionally in our schools, and very
likely there are more.^
Shall we venture a step farther and remind our
readers how powerful an agent in religious education
the catechism has been ? " A boy/' said Lord Bacon,
"can preach, but a man only can catechise." Per-
haps the prevalence of preaching and the paucity
of catechetical instruction is, in part at least, ex-
plained here. Among the Jews, and in the early
church, one suspects that Lord Bacon's words
would have called forth hearty assent. You re-
member that our Lord's public life^ may almost
be said to lie between the scene in the temple,
when he is found among the doctors hearing them
and asking them questions, and that other scene,
not long before the end, when, put to shame and
silence by his words, the lawyers *' durst not from
that day forth ask him any more questions."*
The buildings of the early church were constructed
in part with a special view to the catechumen,*
and the frequent questions in the sermons of the
greatest of the preachers of the first days, notably
Chrysostom, were not alone for rhetorical effect.*
They were, in part certainly, survivals of the golden
time when the pew not only might, but must an-
swer back to the pulpit. The catechisms of the
^ ** Treasure Texts.** Boston : The Pilgrim Press.
* Luke 2 : 46. ' Matt. 22 : 46.
* Trumbull, p. 51. * Ibid,^ p. 60.
THE MINISTER IN THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 20I
great churches of Christendom are standing proofs
of the importance which, in past centuries, has been
attached to this exercise, and among the rules
printed by Raikes for use in some of the earliest
of his Sunday-schools, I find this one, that the
scholars " shall assemble at church on the second
evening of every month, at six o'clock, to be ex-
amined and to bear a plain exposition of the cate-
chism, which the minister will endeavor to give
them."* How powerfully the catechism which
formed part of the *'New England Primer" influ-
enced the first settlers in the eastern part of
America, I need only remind you. It was taught
in the day-schools and as regularly recited there,
down to times comparatively modern, "as Web-
ster's Spelling Book or Murray's English Gram-
mar."* On the Sunday afternoons appointed for
saying the catechism, the meeting-house would be
crowded with anxious parents and sympathizing
friends, while the minister, standing in the pulpit,
put out the questions to the children in order, and
each one, when the question came to him, was
expected to wheel out of the line of scholars into
the broad aisle and face the minister and make his
very best obeisance and answer the question put
to him without the slightest mistake.^
It is easy to see how the use of the catechism
* Gregory, p. 151. ' Dorus Clarke, p. 18. ' Ibid., p. 17.
202 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
would be first abused and would then decline, how
it would become formal and meaningless when the
fire was dying out at the heart of the church ; but
I think that it would be hard to show any substi-
tute for it which is worthy of taking its place.
The Assembly's catechism still seems to me to
remain peerless, and after careful examination of
many of its forerunners and successors, down to
the " Evangelical Free Church Catechism,** pub-
lished by a kind of ecclesiastical syndicate in Great
Britain, there is no other compendium of Bible
truth which appears to be at all comparable with
it. Admitting, as it does, of ready modification to
meet the needs of the age, I believe that if a
catechism is to be used in our schools at all, it
will be on the lines of this historic manual.
Were a catechism introduced, it would be the
minister who would have to teach it. To do so
would form part of his work in the Sunday-school.
A few minutes each Sunday, or a monthly exercise
of perhaps a quarter of an hour, would suffice.
Everything would depend on the way in which he
carried the exercise through. If well done, he and
the people committed to his care might come to
agree with John Owen, the Puritan, when he says :
" More knowledge is ordinarily diffused, especially
among the young and ignorant, by one hour's
catechetical exercise than by many hours* con-
tinual discourse.**
THE MINISTER IN THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 203
Before leaving this part of our subject, I may
be allowed to suggest that at all events the min-
ister will do well now and then to offer prizes to
the scholars who pass the best examinations, oral
or written, in the lessons of a given period. This
plan has been successfully adopted in England
and much can be said in its favor. Certainly it is
to be regretted that our elaborate system of Sun-
day-school lessons does not oftener cumulate at
some visible point and show some appreciable
achievement.
We now come to a question of no little moment
to the minister in the Sunday-school. Should he
himself teach } The ancient teaching, we must
remember, was all based on the catechism and it
was conducted by the priest or pastor. Now that
we have wisely distributed the teaching office and
enlarged it so materially, is the minister to have
no part in it ? Luther, in common with others of
the Reformers, was emphatic in his insistence on
the duty of the preacher to be a teacher also. He
held that a bishop ought to give proof before 6ein^
a bishop that he had aptness to teach. Many of
the popes have served this same apprenticeship,
and the present Archbishop of Canterbury was
famous in his earlier years as the greatest suc-
cessor to Thomas Arnold in the head-mastership
of Rugby School.
Yet I should be inclined to say that, with one
204 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
exception, to which I am about to allude, the min-
ister had better not have a class in the Sunday-
school. His exposition of the lesson in the previ-
ous week will have fitted him to teach, and it will
be well for him to be ready to fill the vacant chair
of some absent teacher, — to carry, in fact, a roving
commission, which will allow him to become ac-
quainted with every part of his school.
The exception, the only exception, that I make
to this, is in favor of a Bible class for young men.
With the utmost advantage he may gather about
him, if he be equal to doing so, those to whom
the poet's words apply — "Shades of the prison-
house begin to close upon the growing boy." The
most serious trouble with our Sunday-school sys-
tem is that it does not prove more successful in
retaining the older scholars, and especially the
lads who openly boast that they are no longer
boys and yet secretly fear that they are not quite
men. The leakage between the school and the
church is heaviest here. From eighteen to twenty-
eight, is, as Doctor Cuyler says, the golden age of
opportunity. It is commonly the decisive decade
also. " If a young man reaches thirty without
giving his heart to Christ, he has missed his best
time, and from that date onward the chances of
conversion (humanly speaking), diminish in a geo-
metric ratio." Then, very often comes the time
when the growing boy, begins to lose his interest
THE MINISTER IN THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 20$
in the school. If he is taught in the main room
this is especially the case. And unless something is
done, within a few months he may be drifting
away. It is of him that Mr. Spurgeon is thinking
when he says, " A link must be found between
the senior scholars and the public means of grace,
or else Sunday-school work will be pouring water
into a leaking bucket.** On the other hand, the
boys of fifteen or sixteen, if retained, interested
and brought to religious decision, will be the very
life-blood of the church twenty years hence. I
shall be forgiven if I say that I am now speaking
from personal experience. A young men*s Bible
class which I began and maintained in one of our
Eastern cities, teaching it in a separate room im-
mediately after the morning service, was more
productive of good than any other one feature in
my ministry there. It grew in numbers and was
organized as a society, and when last I heard of it
it was flourishing still. Numbers of its members
were added to the church. It became a power in
the community, and business men in search of
young men to fill places in their offices or stores
often turned to that class first of all " It would
be impossible," the minister wrote a few years
since, " even to name all the advantages which
have come to our own church, to other churches,
and to the young men of the city, through the
agency of the society."
206 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
The minister should have such a class in his
school. Rather than let it fall into incompetent
hands, he should teach it himself. The actual
teaching need be all that he does. The president
and other oflScers of the class should be chosen by
popular vote. But as a teacher he must bring him-
self face to face with his young men. He must be
considerate, sympathetic, and perfectly honest. He
will find that his scholars often break upon him
** with very tough questions, questions that wear a
considerable looking toward infidelity.'* ^ He may
well teach his lips to say, " I do not know." Any
assumption of the dogmatist will close the mouth
of some young questioner, but it will not convince
his mind. It will only alienate his heart. Yet the
pastor will do well to remember the golden words
which Dr. Marcus Dods once spoke to just such
a class which he taught after his Sunday afternoon
service in Glasgow. "The Bible was given more
for our edification than for polemical purposes."
So one aim should be never lost sight of. I
mean the religious decision of each young man in
the class. Having won their confidence, the min-
ister may readily find an occasion to talk with
those who are not already Christians, and discuss
with them their difficulties, explain the matters
which may perpleic them, and so win them to the
, f ' ' ,^ . . ^ . ■ . ■ • '
1 Bushnell, p. 378.
THE MINISTER IN THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 20/
Saviour. He may (if hef is wise he will) get the
Christian young men in his class to help him in
this important matter. The remarkable success
of the " Young Men's Baraca Union of America/'
which sprang into existence from the conversation
of four members of a Bible class for young men
with their teacher when he was concerned at the
few conversions for the large amount of work ex-
pended, is proof how much can be done here.
That teacher writes to me : ^ ** The Baraca now
numbers three hundred classes in thirty-four
States and Canada, and is growing rapidly. One
hundred and fifteen of my own class have joined
my church.'* I would advise every student for
the Christian ministry to obtain the literature in
reference to this very interesting organization, and
even at the risk of adding another society to his
list, to associate himself with it.
So much then for the work which the minister
may do in his school as a channel for information.
Let him not fear lest this interest in the young
people of his charge should prove too heavy a
tax. On the contrary, it will keep him vigorous
and young himself. He will find his enthusiasm
a tonic. The preparation class of the week will
furnish him the material for the Bible class on
the Sunday. The fellowship of young and ardent
* W." A. Hudson; 200 Coinslock Ave., S)rracuse, N. Y., June,
1899. Comp. "The Standard,'* June 1889, p. n.
208 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
hearts will do him good ; the fresh angles, some-
time very acute and sometimes very obtuse, at
which truth is seen will cause him to understand
how much, and how little too, there often is to the
human mind ; and the growth of his church in the
stalwart and energetic blood of the coming genera-
tion will round out to its completion the great
aspiration of the psalmist : " Both young men and
maidens, old men and children, let them praise the
name of the Lord." ^
At this point I wish to recall the fine prophetic
phrase of John Wesley when he beheld in the
Sunday-school of the coming era " nurseries for
Christians.*' No prophecy has ever received richer
fulfillment. Of no other enterprise of the Chris-
tian church has it been more true to say, " This
and that man was born in her ; and the Highest
himself shall establish her." The moral and the
intellectual influences of the Sunday-school fall
short of their noblest end, they fail to touch the
high-water mark of their fullest power, unless some
distinct effort be made to crown each life with
complete consecration to Christ. The Sunday-
school is a reforming and informing agency ; but,
more than this, it is under God a transforming
power. And here it is that the minister should
do his best work.
1 P». 148 1 12.
THE MINISTER IN THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 209
I have already counseled the minister to be in
the Sunday-school every Sunday. ** Frequently,"
said Mr. Spurgeon to one of his students, ** visit
your Sabbath-schools, if it is only to walk through
them/** Of a devoted English clergyman, his
friend writes : " I remember hearing him say in the
Sunday-school that, during the whole of six and
twenty years, except when away on his oflScial
duties at Chester Cathedral, he had only twice
failed to be present in the school by at least two
minutes before the regular hour for opening on
Sunday morning." ^ I make this point again, and
in this place, because of what has to be said about
the minister as a spiritual force in the life of the
school. If he is rarely seen there, his occasional
presence will either be passed over with indiffer-
ence, or associated in the minds of teachers and
scholars with a kind of officialism. He will have
come only to do his duty, or perhaps to make a
formal attack on their souls.
Let the minister be there regularly, and he will
be what every minister should aim to be, namely,
the pastor of the school. Dr. S. G. Green, in his
lectures on ** Christian Ministry to the Young," ^
speaks of one pastor who ** conducted the opening
service of the school weekly for many years. The
teachers and children knew they would meet their
^ " Reminiscences of C. H. Spurgeon," by W. Williams, p. 194.
^ Davies, "Successful Preachers,*' p. 278. ' Green, p. 182.
O
2IO THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
minister there at nine on Sunday morning, and the
consequence was a regularity and fullness of at-
tendance hardly to be paralleled under ordinary
circumstances."
Without going the length of Dr. Stephen Tyng,
of New York, who believed in the minister " tak-
ing the pastoral charge and superintendence of his
own school," I should say with him that it is the
minister's duty " to give his mind and time and
presence and actual labor, to the work of saving
and teaching the children of his flock." ^
I mention three essentials to success in this
work.
The first is pastoral sympathy. The minister
must be there as the mother is in her nursery,
because he loves to be, and indeed cannot stay
away. No doubt there are men to whom this
comes more easily than it does to others. Dogs
and children, it is said, make few mistakes in their
judgment of people. There are ministers and
men, not only of great eloquence, but of genuine
kindness of heart too, who are not at home among
children. But they are the exceptions. There
are others again of whom it is true to say that
they seem never to have been children themselves.
They were born old, and swaddled in buckram.
To them a healthy, vigorous, demonstrative boy is
^ "Forty Years* Experience,'* etc., p. 196.
THE MINISTER IN THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 211
like a Fourth of July every day, no one can tell
when he will go off, or what mischief he will do
when he explodes. Such men may have their
place in the ministry, alas, who has not ? but not
in the Sunday-school. The first qualification for
pastoral success among the young is for the pastor
to be himself young at heart.
The second is, pastoral knowledge. Let the
minister cultivate the art of remembering names.
His visits to the homes will help him here. And
when he fails, a little tact may be used to bring
him the information he needs. Jonathan Edwards
might be allowed to ask the same boy his name
twice in the course of an hour, receiving in re-
sponse to his question, put a second time, " Whose
boy are you.^" the answer, "Noah Holmes' boy,
sir, the same boy that I was an hour ago '* ; but it
is not allowed to many of us to forget and to be
forgiven as was he. It will gain ready access to
the hearts of our young people if we know their
names, their homes, and some point in the life or
tastes of each which shall particularize every case,
and make each one stand, if not on his own merits,
which might be an insufficient footing for many of
them, at all events on his own individuality.
To pastoral sympathy and pastoral knowledge,
it is natural to add pastoral oversight. Doctor
Tyng, looking in at the door of his main Sunday-
school room at St. George's, New York, could say
212 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
with honest pride, as his glance swept over all the
classes of that busy throng : " Every teacher in
that room started under my eye as a scholar in
the infant class. I have trained them all myself ;
and I know them all ; and they know me. They
are my children in the faith." This is a rare case,
of course, and yet measurably it may be true of
the minister that by his presence, his sympathy,
his careful attention to his school, he may gain a
power over it which shall make him the overseer,
the bishop indeed. In one direction, certainly,
he will need to be vigilant. Around the Sunday-
school, as around the outer courts about the tem-
ple at Jerusalem, grow up organizations of many
kinds. Boys' Brigades, in which Henry Drum-
mond placed more faith than most of us do ;
church guilds, for more purposes than I have
time to enumerate; Baraca bands; prayer circles;
Bible reading alliances ; these and many others
have trained themselves about the parent trunk
until sometimes you cannot see the tree for leaves.
My present contention is that none of these should
be allowed to grow away from the minister's over-
sight. He will need, if he watches for souls as one
that must give account, to use each of them as a
channel of spiritual influence.
The man who in his early ministry won for him-
self the title of "the model preacher of Con-
necticut," and who later achieved as honorable a
THE MINISTER IN THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 213
success in St. Louis, I mean Dr. Constans L.
Goodell, was the ideal Sunday-school pastor. Few
left hi3 church after the morning service, almost
the whole congregation, with additions from the
younger children, took part in the after hour of
Bible study. He says : ^ " The pastor will reach
the children through the Bible-school. That is
not the children's church, but it is the church and
pastor mingling with the children, and laying out
all their experience and wisdom and spiritual
power on them for their instruction in righteous-
ness. The pastor is always in the Bible-school.
He thus brings the adults and youth together, re-
taining the older scholars in the school ... all
bound together by mutual interest. The Sabbath-
school becomes a constant feeder of the church,
and the church becomes a garden enclosed about
the children. Is not this God's order.?"
This was the man who won the children's
hearts as Jesus did, not with treats and presents
and cheap pleasantries, but with the gracious and
sympathetic spirit of the kingdom of heaven it-
self. And we do not wonder when his biographer
tells us that " when Doctor Goodell died, a little
boy of another church and Sunday-school, ran
home and said to his mother, ' Oh, mamma, the
children's friend is dead ! ' "
1 "The Advance," May 24, 1888.
214 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
We have now reached the key to the situation,
and must condense, on the minister putting forth
all his influence in the school for the spiritual
welfare of the scholars.
The first essential is that between the pastor
and the teachers in the school there should be the
heartiest sympathy in this matter; I am almost
tempted to say that the one thing needful in a
Sunday-school teacher is that he should be "a
Christian, and a Christian of a pronounced type ;
not one whose conduct belies his doctrine, for God,
looking through the eyes of a little child, will be
quick to detect that ; not one who is perfunctory
in his attendance, considering it a tax or a conde-
scension ; but one who acts from the highest mo-
tives. It is a mistake to think any one will do
for a Sunday-school teacher. He ought to be
selected from the saintliest and best and wisest of
the church." *
Paul writing to Philemon sends greeting "to
the church in thy house." That teacher is happy
who has a church in his class, and who meeting
with those who have made a religious decision
unites with them in prayer and conference for the
conversion of the rest. Now and then the pastor
also will do wisely to meet with them. Let him
feel the pulse of each class.
^ Rev. George Short, B. A.
THE MINISTER IN THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 21$
"The Society of Christian Endeavor," or its
equivalent, in the church, should be kept in close
touch with the spiritual condition of the school.
That organization, however new and original in its
title and machinery, is in spirit one with organiza-
tions which have long been in healthful operation
in many of our British and New England churches.^
They are the safest nurseries for Christian culture.
It matters little what name they bear, or what is
the special apparatus with which they work ; badges
and buttons are sometimes foolish enough ; the
weeds of laws and by-laws may, if mistaken for the
essentials, spring up and choke the free and health-
ful growth of the good seed of the kingdom ; but
the society of young people banded together for a
vigorous and persistent endeavor after the divine
life, is necessary to the highest welfare of the
church and the school. The pastor should be
present, rather however to suggest than to con-
trol at the religious meetings of his young people.
It is these gatherings that are likely to register
the rise of spiritual fervor, the tides of the Spirit,
which taken at the flood carry him and his people
out into the deep seas of religious prosperity.
The Sunday-school in which the minister keeps
the subject of religious decision prominent in
private conversation and in public appeals, will be
* Trumbull, p. 293.
2l6 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
the school best prepared for such special efforts as
ought occasionally to be made for the conversion
of the unconverted in the classes. It will be borne
in upon him at certain times, or it will become the
conviction of the most earnest and devoted of his
teachers, or perhaps the solicitude of a mother for
the conversion of her boy may be the single in-
centive to it, but in one or another way he will be-
come impressed with the feeling that the school is
ripening for a harvest.
The history of religious revivals is closely con-
nected with the history of Sunday-schools. The
spiritual dearth of the middle of the eighteenth
century was broken up by the great religious
awakening in New England and Great Britain. At
once the heart of the church was moved to solic-
itude for the conversion of children. There were
obstacles of traditionalism to be met and swept
away, of course. But with clear and open vision
the master minds, from John Wesley to Lyman
Beecher, saw in that widespread quickening their
opportunity, and with an intense and unabated
passion drove toward it.^ To the loving nature of
Wesley, the Sunday-school seemed "one of the
noblest specimens of charity which has been set on
foot since the Norman conquest " ; and that hero
of a hundred revivals, Doctor Lyman Beecher, lived
1 Tyerman's "Wesley," Vol. III., p. 522.
THE MINISTER IN THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 2\^
to see the prophecies of his earlier years as to
Sabbath-schools more than realized/ In Scotland,
among a people excessively conservative of ances-
tral faith and traditional practice, Thomas Chal-
mers, perhaps the greatest of all her reformers,
beheld in the Sunday-school the new power which
would stem the woful degeneracy going on in the
religious habit and character of the country, and
he challenged the parents of his native land "to
regard a well-conducted Sabbath-school in any
other light than as a blessing and an acquisition to
their children." *
Without adding to their testimonies, I need only
appeal to our own experience. Is it not true that
the Sunday-school in every large and vigorous
Christian church has at intervals a time of special
religious revival } And on the conduct of the serv-
ices at such seasons, does not the future, not of the
school alone but also of the church itself, largely
depend ? Pastoral responsibility is never a reality
more serious than now. I urge upon the minis-
ter respect for "the soul of the child." In the
special services which you hold with the scholars
dread nothing more than injuring the natural deli-
cacy of a young faith. " Let the preacher," says
Dr. S. G. Green, "beware of arousing emotions
and demonstrations after which almost anything
* Trumbull, p. 124. * Md,^ p. 162.
2l8 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
must be an anti-climax *' ; and he cautions us
against such exhibitions as impair the modesty of
childhood, and minister either to thoughtlessness
or irreverence or both.^
What services in all the ministry of the word
call for greater delicacy of touch than these ? For
what does one need more the prepared heart,
the heart of the Christ of the children ? We are
to deal with the plastic nature of childhood, the
impressionable nature of youth. Already in some
hearts the hardening processes are going on.
Some are even now feeling the first dim fascina-
tion of the evils that are in the world. To win
the children for Christ has been the aim of the
wisest of men and women in the church universal
through all time. If St. Francis Xavier cries : ^
" Give me the children until they are seven years
old, and any one may take them afterward,"
none the less urgent is Luther's tone as he says :
"Young children and scholars are the seed and
the source of the church.'* We listen to Cardinal
Manning when he declares : " Give me the children
and England shall be Catholic in twenty years,"
only to draw from his words a still loftier courage as
sweeping a far wider area we dare assert : " Give the
children to Christ, and in twenty years the world
shall be Christian." A child's theology may not be
^ "Lectures on Sunday-school," p. l8i.
* Trumbull, pp. 67, 71.
THE MINISTER IN THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 219
the theology of the churches which embodies itself
in the creeds of Christendom, but we know little of
the child's heart until we have found that there is
in it the possibility of a consciousness of wrong-
doing, a sorrow for sin, a desire to change, and a
love for the Saviour quickened by the sense of a
need of him. The religion of the child is not en-
tirely emotional, and when boyhood and girlhood
are reached there is an ability to grasp and to ap-
ply the simple theology of the New Testament,
which is as real in its spirit and as clear in its
mental apprehension as that which comes in later
years. The little child is the ideal of the- believer,
and rises before us through all the centuries with
the arms of Jesus about him as the model for him
who would enter the kingdom of God ; and we
know that that kingdom is "righteousness and
peace and joy in the Holy Ghost." In what we
have to say, therefore, during a time of special
spiritual interest in the Sunday-school, let us not
deal only in the anecdotal. Illustrate truth by all
means, but first make quite plain the truth we
propose to illustrate.
The beginning of these special efforts for the
conversion of the scholars should be as quiet and
natural as possible. Some Sunday morning or
afternoon when the signs are favorable, having
previously obtained the consent of the superin-
tendent, let the regular exercises of the school be
220 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
SO arranged that thq last ten minutes can be given
to the pastor. Let him talk at once, directly, with
great plainness and earnestness, upon the need
for personal salvation and the opportunity for it.
Let him call for manifestations of religious de-
cision. Methods will vary, but the thing itself is
what is aimed at. Let this meeting lead to
others, still more distinctly evangelistic in their
character. I think that a gathering of those whose
hearts are touched may be appointed for that same
Sunday, in the afternoon, or let them come to th€^
meeting of the young people in the evening.
Have two or three meetings in the week. Keep
them clear of all formality, and in all let there
be a wise but vigorous drawing of the net.
Let none underrate the importance of such a
time of religious awakening. It cannot be sum-
moned at will. It cannot be got up at the bidding
of a peripatetic evangelist. It has as little in
common with the mechanical artifices of the
worked-up revival as the natural motions of the
human body have with the wooden gestures of a
painter's dummy. Let the pastor take the work
very seriously, for is it not his ? As truly as any
scholar in the school he can pray for himself :
Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
Look upon a little child ;
Pity my simplicity.
Suffer me to come to thee.
THE MINISTER IN THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 221
With as genuine a humility as Solomon's can he
plead : '* O Lord, my God, thou hast made thy
servant king : . . and I am but a little child : I know
not how to go out or come in." ^ The conscious-
ness of ignorance is a good sympton in teacher as
well as in scholar. It is the first step toward
enlightenment. Margaret Fuller was always
cheered when any of her pupils wrote to her say-
ing that they felt their ignorance. She would
label such letters " under conviction."
Now, if ever, the familiar saying, *' The Sunday-
school is the nursery of the church," will take on
a very solemn and inspiring purport. The minis-
ter will repeat it to himself in this new atmosphere
of experiences, and in the clear, resonant air it will
carry a pressure of meaning bordering on the sub-
lime. Should he be so happy as to remain with
one church for many years, or at any rate to keep
track of it, he will as time goes on see the fruitage
of efforts which, when he put them forth, seemed
just as natural as breathing, and the contrast will
come home to him between the simple letting fall
of the seed from the hand of the sower, and the
golden glory of the harvest, by and by. I shall
not be chargeable with exaggeration if I say that
to the Sunday-school and to the honest work of
teachers and pastor for the religious decision of
1 1 Kings 3 : 7.
222 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
the scholars, we are indebted for the devoted lives
of many of the very best who are serving the
church of Christ to-day. Our elders and deacons
and office-bearers, our wisest superintendents, and
our most earnest and intelligent teachers, were
born again in the Sunday-school. They have given
back to her what she first gave them, good measure
pressed down and running over. And what shall
I say as to the service which the Sunday-school
has rendered to the Christian ministry.? What
need that I say anything when the ranks of every
theological seminary, the record of every pulpit,
the annals of every mission field are ready with
their witnesses } Professor Drummond found, as
the result of his inquiries of a number of mission-
aries, that the average age at which they began
to think of the foreign field was when they were
thirteen years old ; and had his inquiries been
pushed farther and carried over a still wider range,
I believe the result would have confirmed the con-
viction, which has grown in my mind to a cer-
tainty, that the Sunday-school is the place where
first the future minister or missionary hears the
voice of the Lord, and where earliest comes the
response, ^' Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth."
I would close what has been said on this subject
with two words of counsel. First, let none be
hasty in bringing the scholars into the church.
There should be some equivalent in every denom-
THE MINISTER IN THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 223
ination for the primitive catechumen class, for the
confirmation class of the Episcopalian Church, and
for the probationary training given in other com-
munions. The main thing for us is to make good
work. Once a week, for some time, let the pastor
meet the candidates for church-membership from
among the scholars, and have personal conversa-
tion with them one by one. The annual loss from
our church lists is, I am persuaded, due in a large
measure to the lack of careful preparatory train-
ing.
It is due also to the absence of after training,
and so I would further advise that the pastor meet
the young members of the church for brief courses
on such subjects as the elements of religion, the
meaning of the Christian ordinances, the history
of the religious denomination to which they have
attached themselves, and their duties and priv-
ileges as members of a local church, " Precept
must be upon precept, precept upon precept ;
line upon line, line upon line ; here a little, and
there a little.*' It is hard to clear the minister of
responsibility for very much of the defection in
the ranks of church-membership when we reflect
how remiss he has been here. To bring into the
church is good ; but to keep in the church is
better ; and yet in his eagerness to swell the num-
bers of the fellowship how often the minister over-
looks the other end of the procession, and fails to
224 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
notice that the untrained and the ill-fed are falling
away as fast ks the new recruits are coming in.
Christian nurture is a minister's duty as well as
converting zeal. "Take heed therefore unto all
the flock over which the Holy Ghost hath made
you overseers, to feed the church of God, which
he hath purchased with his own blood/'
Between the home and the school there will be
no rivalry if the pastor's interests are given to the
one as much as to the other. They are but sepa-
rate rooms in one house. The early practice, as
we have seen, was for the father to be priest as
well as patriarch in his own household. And in
theory the belief lingered into our own century
that parents spent some time, certainly, on Sun-
day, in instructing their children. How sincere
the objection to the Sunday-school on the ground
that it usurped this parental duty and left the in-
fant Moses to the mercies of the Nile it is not
necessary for us to determine. It was heard most
loudly in an age of general parental neglect, and
sometimes it was raised by the clergy who were
jealous lest the office of the sponsor and of the
minister should be set aside. Yet it is in evi-
dence that the Sunday-school was forced into ex-
istence by parental and priestly neglect. Alike
the home instruction and the parochial system had
failed in the cities of England, as Raikes found
when he was appalled at the profligacy of the chil-
THE MINISTER IN THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 22$
dren in Gloucester, and in the rural districts as
Hannah More discovered when the rich farmer in
one village assured her that "religion would be
the ruin of agriculture, that it was a very danger-
ous thing, and had produced much mischief ever
since it was introduced by the monks down at
Glastonbury." ^ I have little belief in the honesty
of this sudden access of parental virtue which had
to be met in Scotland, for example, by the fervid
eloquence of Chalmers arguing that the alterna-
tive was "not whether the rising generation should
be trained to Christianity in schools or trained to
it under the roof of their fathers ; but whether
they shall be trained to it in schools or not trained
at all." ' I say I have little belief in the honesty
of this objection to Sunday-schools when I learn
that, at the time when they were founded, in Scot-
land the immorality in the homes of the upper
classes and the wretchedness of the hovels of the
poor defied description ; that in Ireland even the
children of Protestants were "no better than
heathen " ; that in England, William Wilberforce
was shocked at finding that within three miles of
a cathedral city every house in one village, and
that a sample of all the rest, was a scene of the
greatest ignorance and vice ; and that in America,
while skepticism was as much the fashion in the
^ **Mendip Annals," p. 14. * Trumbull, pp. 160-162.
P
226 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
colleges as though it had been a species of ath-
letics, among the descendants of the Pilgrims, re-
ligious instruction in the family and in the church
had so far declined that Lyman Beecher declared
that " the result was a band of infidels and here-
tics and profligates." ^ The fact is, that the Sun-
day-school, so far from usurping the place of home,^
has made it in many instances sweet home, and
has restored to it the sanctities and endearments
of which irreligion had threatened to despoil it.
And if the Sunday-school has not put itself in
rivalry with the home, equally true is it to assert
that it has not put itself in rivalry with the church.
Occasionally some champion of the exclusive spir-
itual prerogative of the clergy — a survival of the
Dark Ages — raises his voice in honest but bigoted
warning. The Sunday-school is arraigned because
of " incompetence of the teachers to give religious
instruction, because it is destructive of church-
going, and because it has done much to destroy
parental responsibility and priestly obligation." ^
And all the time the Roman Catholic hierarchy
declares that it is the divinely constituted guardian
of faith and morals. Against those claims, which
are as dangerous to civil liberty as they are to
religious progress, the Sunday-school may build
an effectual barrier.*
^ Trumbull, p. 167.
« 1899. » Dr. R. W. Dale's ** Life,'' p. 286.
THE MINISTER IN THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL 22/
In the Old World, as every reader of the his-
tory of the eighteenth century knows, the Sunday-
school has been one of the most powerful agencies
for reviving the church. It has kindled the zeal
of both the clergy and the laity. It has made re-
ligion, as it is embodied in a visible fellowship, a
necessary element in the life of the people. And
in America the Sunday-school has led in the west-
ward march of emigration, and the Sunday-school
Union alone for three-quarters of a century has
been organizing neighborhood Sunday-schools at the
average rate of three every day.^ From the school
has grown the church, and the one has as truly been
the precursor of the other, as Caxton's printing
press was the precursor of Tyndale's English Bible.
How much the school has done for the church
by renewing her youth I need not say. What the
author of " Alice in Wonderland '* — in whom "the
boy never quite left the man " — said of the world
at large we can say of thousands of vigorous and
prosperous churches : " It is the glory of the
world that there is a perpetual succession of
happy young life, given to pour fresh blood into
the sluggish veins of humanity and set its heart
beating again with that hopefulness which is God's
best gift. The heaviest curse which he could lay
upon us would be to keep us living on forever in
1 Trumbull, p. 189.
228 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
a world in which no new life was seen and to let
the human race grow older without sending young
faces to brighten its weary visions, and remind it
of its own childhood. We should get mad and
savage enough to devour each other at last, if the
children did not come to keep us sane and fill us
with gentler thoughts ; they give us something to
work for when we are tired of working for our-
selves ; they refurnish our world with new hopes
when all our dear old hopes are dead ; they make
us believe in God again when the sorrows of life
have driven us faithless ; and they help to keep us
in the better way for their sake, when if we
thought only of ourselves we might drift into the
evil way. What are they but his jewels of bright,
celestial worth ? What are they but ladders set
up from heaven to earth .^**^
I believe that it would be capable of proof that
the children have done fully as much for the
church as the church has done for the children.
If the school is the pioneer of the sanctuary in
many a wild Western settlement, equally is it, to
every Christian fellowship, the adjunct aiming to
introduce the entire congregation, young and old,
to systematic Bible study, and the feeder bringing
to it from the world about it the new blood by
which its life is to be sustained.
^ Lewis Carroll.
VII
THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL AND THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY
The Sunday-school must be in touch with the times.
Signs of dissatisfaction. Criticism. To keep abreast of
the new century the Sunday-school must (i) respond to its
inevitable demands — life centering in great cities, danger
of the Sunday-school growing away from the people ;
(2) fall in with the philanthropic sentiment of the century ;
(3) sympathize with the religious thought of the century —
the emphasis on the life that now is as determining the life
that is to come ; (4) avail itself of the progressive intelli-
gence of the century — the model school, the building, offi-
cers, new methods, teachers, classes, teaching.
Conclusion : The minister lives for the future in caring
for the young life of the congregation.
VII
THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL AND TWENTIETH CENTURY
Our study of the Sunday-school would not be
complete without a forward glance over the cen-
tury whose threshold we have so lately crossed.
To this we turn in conclusion. The modern Sun-
day-school is already more than a hundred years
old. Both the experimental stage and the stage
of reaction from the first enthusiasm have been
safely survived. From the beginning the move-
ment had in it elements which augured well for its
permanence. Its first leaders might be opposed,
but they could not be despised. An enterprise
which enlisted the active devotion of Raikes, with
his business sagacity, of Hannah More, with her
brilliant social charm, of Charles of Bala, with his
apostolic zeal, of William Wilberforce, the peer of
William Pitt for eloquence, and of John Wesley,
the foremost religious leader of the century, was
bound to succeed. Its founders were not fanatics
nor visionaries. They were eminently sane and
practical, and their intellects were as keen as their
affections were warm.
The closing years of the eighteenth century
231
232 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
saw the rise of the modern Sunday-school. The
first half of the nineteenth gave to it shape, unit-
ing its range, concentrating its powers, and organ-
izing its forces. To the second half of the nine-
teenth century fell the still harder task of im-
proving the teaching in the Sunday-school, and
here it was the Americans outstripped all others
and furnished Sunday-school literature which is
incomparably superior to that of any other coun-
try.
That the Sunday-school still falls short of what
it might be is evident enough. It must keep in
the full current of the century if it is to live and
to fulfill its high destiny. Perhaps it is a matter
for congratulation, rather than for complaint, that
the truest friends of the Sunday-school movement
are the frankest of its critics. No more than any
other institution is it secure against the tendency
to fossilize.
Many of the best and ablest leaders in the affairs of
God, says one writer, * are vigilant and vigorous in devising
and applying new ideas to the system as it is in vogue.
The process has been in the main one of graft upon an un-
pruned stock, and the result a rather elaborate and, per-
haps, not altogether homogeneous and healthy organism.
The feeling lives and grows that the institution not only is
imperfect, but is falling short of that degree of efficiency
which fairly should be looked for in an institution of so im-
portant professed mission. In the average Sunday-school
^ W. H. S. Demarest, **The Presbyterian Review,'* Jan. 7, 1901.
SUNDAY-SCHOOL AND TWENTIETH CENTURY 233
there are unquestioned defects in work and lack of re-
sults.
The Sunday-school of the twentieth century
must be kept abreast of the times. How shall this
be done ?
We answer, first, by responding to the inevita-
ble demands of the century. When Raikes first
drew public attention to the work which was being
done in his school he laid the chief stress on the
country and not on the city life, which it aimed to
reform.
Farmers and other inhabitants of the towns and villages
complain that they receive more injury in their property
on the Sabbath than all the week beside. This, in a great
measure, proceeds from the lawless state of the younger
class, who are allowed to run wild on that day, free fi-om
every restraint To remedy this evil, persons duly quali-
fied are employed to instruct those that cannot read ; and
those that may have learnt to read are taught the catechism
and conducted to church.^
Although his work began in a city, it was a
city of no great size, and England was still a rural
community. This is no longer the case in the
Old World, and still less is it the case in the New.
Human life is more and more centering in cities.
The Sunday-school of the time in which we live
must not be suffered to grow away from the
masses of the people. It must not yield to the
^ ** Gloucester Journal,'* Nov. 3, 1783.
234 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
temptation to which too many churches have
yielded and move off from the crowded courts and
congested tenements. It must march with the
wholesome impulse which is now working in uni-
versity settlements, and multiplying Christian
agencies in the machinery of what is not very hap-
pily termed the institutional church. We can-
not afford to lose sight of the class on whose be-
half Sunday-schools were first started in the lanes
of Gloucester and the hamlets of Cheddar, and
for whom Charles Dickens, half a century after,
so well pleaded when he raised his voice in favor
of what he was the first to call " Ragged Schools."
The Sunday-school must not be allowed to narrow
down to a club for the children of the congrega-
tion ; it must hold to its original democratic char-
acter, and welcome alike the rich and the poor, in
the conviction that the Lord is the Maker of them
all.
Then the Sunday-school must keep abreast of
the times by falling in with the prevailing senti-
ment of the century. There is a growing feeling,
the civilized world over, that we are part of a
great human brotherhood, that we are our brother's
keeper. Philanthropy, unless we misread the signs
of the times, is to be one of the distinctive fea-
tures of this new age. To it we are impelled by
the crowded city life in which the majority of men
and women pass their days, as well as by the in-
SUNDAY-SCHOOL AND TWENTIETH CENTURY 235
creasing acquaintance with the conditions of this
life, for which we are indebted to our newspapers
and periodical literature. It was a journalist, re-
member, who first established a Sunday-school,
and no ordained Christian pastor ever carried
within his breast a more sympathizing heart than
did he. Robert Raikes was full of love for the
bodies and minds and souls of the children of
Gloucester. In the very age which gave us mod-
ern missions he, in the true missionary spirit, gave
us Sunday-schools. To him, first of all, we owe it
that, as Dr. H. Clay Trumbull says, ** A child is a
great deal bigger than he was a century ago. He
has grown more than a hundred years since then.
Conspicuous among the features of progress in
this century is the recognition of the child in his
relative importance before the thinkers and doers
of the Christian church and of the outside world."
'* He had a good way with children," said an old
woman recalling Robert Raikes ; ** he had author-
ity with him, and yet they were not afraid." It
is impossible to calculate how much this one man
increased the sum of human happiness. The love
for the masses perishing in ignorance in England
which burned in the bosom of Wesley, and for the
millions dying in heathenism in India which glowed
in the heart of Carey, and for the thousands and
tens of thousands of prisoners mouldering in fetid
dungeons which mastered the soul of John How-
236 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
ard, the true philanthropy which, flow in what
channels it may, comes first of all from God, who
is its source, this it was which became the master
passion in the life of Robert Raikes. In the next
century it found its most illustrious champion in
Lord Shaftesbury, but he was only one of a band
of devoted men and women who gave themselves
up to the betterment of their kind. To-day this
philanthropy is not only pouring out its wealth as
never before, but better yet, it is following in the
very footsteps of Him who, not satisfied with
sending others, himself came to seek and to save
the lost. "The world for Christ in this century"
is the watchword of the new philanthropy, which
means also " Christ for the world.*' There is sig-
nificance in the fact that the work of the leading
evangelist of our times, as his course of useful-
ness drew to its close, more and more took on the
form of work for the young life of his country,
first building and endowing for it schools, and later
yet, reaching it in the colleges and inspiring it to
volunteer for missions to the uttermost parts of
the earth.
The Sunday-school must, still further, keep
abreast of the times by sympathizing with the re-
ligious thought of the century. It does not im-
ply that there has been any radical change in
theology because our age differs from that which
preceded it in the degree of emphasis which it
SUNDAY-SCHOOL AND TWENTIETH CENTURY 237
lays on certain truths. What Henry Melvill said
of the Tree of Life is also true of our Chris-
tian faith : " You cannot come out of season to it.
You may bring your season with you, and the tree
takes it, and bears another fruit." Each age finds
there the fruit best suited to your needs. Wisely
says the Talmud : ** Do not confine your children
to your own learning, for they were born in another
time." " Every age must have its own forms of
Christian language and thought. Our children's
children will not use the exact dialect in which
we speak one with another of eternal things.
Theological systems are the construction of the
age, and every generation may be left to build its
own."^ Each century is tolerably sure to give
prominence to those aspects of eternal truths
which specially meet its needs. When the hosts
of the enemy are still on the horizon, the be-
sieged garrison is on the ramparts, but when they
are swarming about the moat and drawbridge, the
battlements will not need to be manned so strongly
as the foundations. A hundred years ago the dis-
position was to emphasize the future life and the
need of salvation now for the sake of that ; and
to-day the disposition is to emphasize the present
life, and to urge men to " a new and larger con-
ception of what the salvation of a soul must
1 ** Christianity and the Child" ; W. Brock, in "The Ancient
Faith in Modern Light,** p. 350.
238 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
mean/* The Sunday-school teacher will be likely
to feel the influence of this shifted emphasis.
And so the present life of the scholar, his con-
duct and character, will become not less momen-
tous in his eyes than will his future destiny. He
cannot consent to separate the two. His experi-
ence in the school and in the world about him
bears witness that whatsoever a man soweth that
shall he also reap. The minister, also, in his work
in the Sunday-school, will do the same. How to
seize, retain, and mold the life which is maturing
in his school and congregation is one of the most
serious problems before the twentieth century
minister. All the more serious is it because the
age of compulsion in which Sunday-schools were
born is forever past. The old authority, which
counted for so much in the home of a hundred
years ago, in the Old Country, has scarcely a par-
allel among us to-day. He is no true pastor who
does not give himself with all his strength to re-
taining the young people in his congregation.
"The fact remains that a large proportion of Sun-
day-school children graduate themselves from its
halls and into life wholly separate from the church
at least, and perhaps set apart to do evil."^ It is
no exceptional case which is described in the fol-
lowing words : " In a certain city, the number of
^Demarest, p. 135
SUNDAY-SCHOOL AND TWENTIETH CENTURY 239
men in the churches and congregations was much
smaller than that of women. But in the Sunday-
schools of those same churches, the number of
boys was slightly in excess of the number of girls.
In other words, as many boys are brought under
church influence as girls ; but about the age of
twelve or thirteen, while the girls remain, the
boys, many of them, drop out of the religious
circle. It would seem, then, that the point at
which especial religious effort is to be directed is
the point at which the boy becomes the young
man. That period passed and the boy, now the
young man, still kept in the congregation, he may
be expected to remain in it all his life." Our
most faithful and able ministers are so impressed
with the momentous issues of this present life
that they are striving most earnestly to hold the
young men and women in their congregations
through this critical period. Robert Raikes, after
trying in vain to reform criminals in the jail for
thirty years, resolved that prevention must be not
only better but also likelier than cure. So he
began at the other end, and Sunday-schools were
the result. I have spoken at sufficient length of
the various ways in which ministers of Christ may
try to gain and keep their young people, but I
should counsel that they be quick to notice any
successful effort in the direction of forming closer
union between the session of the school and the
240 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
session of public worship.^ That by the working
of our present arrangement of services these two
are not only not mutually helpful, but often very
much the reverse, is to my mind an argument for
a more excellent way, if only one can be devised.
Finally, the Sunday-school must keep abreast
of the times by availing itself of the progressive
intelligence of the century. In nothing is this
intelligence showing itself more than in the matter
of education. The little red schoolhouse is a
memory now, not a model. The public schools of
America and the board schools of Great Britain
are planned with increasing care, and serve their
highest ends now as never before. Shall the
building in which the Sunday-school meets still
continue to recall the old familiar model of that
ancient makeshift at the country cross roads ?
The time may come when if the whole school
needs to meet for preliminary exercises — generally
needlessly prolonged — the main audience room of
the church will be used rather than sacrifice the
space in the schoolroom proper, which should be
divided so that classes can be taught without any
annoyance to one by another. Each class should
have its own room. The wonder is not that the
work has been poorly done under the present sys-
tem, but that it has been done at all.
^ Demarest, p. 142.
SUNDAY-SCHOOL AND TWENTIETH CENTURY 24I
And as the plan of the building is to be fol-
lowed, as far as may be, from that of the modern
public school, so as in the public school where
no inferior influences are suffered to interfere
with the rights of the people, the choice of offi-
cers is to be of the best. The president of Chi-
cago University is superintendent of the Sunday-
school of the church of which he is a member;
one of the ablest Greek scholars in the country
is director of the work of instruction ; a colleague
of his, as able as himself, is director of the be-
nevolent work ; while the spiritual work of the
school is under the direction of the minister of
the church. In this school, which has done fine
work in education, while the spiritual life of the
pupils has been roused and quickened by con-
stant conversions, " there are three main divi-
sions : the elementary, embracing the kindergar-
ten and the first four grades ; the secondary,
embracing eight grades ; and the adult division.
Each division has a principal, secretary, and one
or more superintendents in charge of instruction
in groups of classes, each of which, of course,
has its regular teacher.*' These better arrange-
ments will claim, where they do not create, new
methods of teaching. There is no higher honor
than to be found competent as a teacher in a Sun-
day-school. It was of teachers that John Wesley
was thinking when he wrote to his brother Charles,
Q
242 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
a few months before his death : " Nothing can
prevent the increase of the blessed work but the
neglect of the instruments ; therefore be sure to
watch over these with all care, that they may not
grow weary in well-doing.'* It was one of the
greatest schoolmasters of our time, Thring of Up-
pingham, who traced to his early experience in
teaching, when he was a curate in the very country
where, a century before, Sunday-schools were
born, what skill he afterward used as headmaster
of one of the most famous of English schools :
Never shall I forget those schools in the suburbs of Glou-
cester, and their little classroom, with its solemn problem
(no more difficult one in the world), how on earth the Cam-
bridge honor man, with his success and his brain work, was
to get at the minds of those little laborers' sons, with their
unfurnished heads and no time to give. They had to be
got at, or I had failed . . . There I learned the great secret
of St Augustine* s golden key, which, though it be of gold,
is useless unless it fits the wards of the lock. And I found
the wards I had to fit, the wards of my lock which had to
be opened, the minds of those little street boys very queer
and tortuous affairs ; and I had to set about cutting and
chipping myself in every way to make myself into the
wooden key which should have the one merit of a key,
however common it might look, the merit of fitting the lock
and unlocking the minds and opening the shut chambers of
the heart
The church is slowly waking up to her respon-
sibility in the matter of training teachers to teach.
The Sunday-school Commission of the Protestant
SUNDAY-SCHOOL AND TWENTIETH CENTURY 243
Episcopal Diocese, of New York, has taken the
lead in doing this ; ^ but the day cannot be far dis-
tant in which the best principles and methods of
teaching will be made the subject of careful and
intelligent drill in public classes for all teachers
who care to attend. Summer schools for this
purpose, and evening classes through the winter,
will be much more general than they have been.
From the public school also we may learn to
have fewer classes, larger in the number of schol-
ars enrolled in each, and better taught. The num-
ber of scholars in the public schools, according to
the United States Census, 1 890-1 891, was eight
million three hundred and twenty-nine thousand
two hundred and thirty-four, as against eight mil-
lion six hundred and forty-nine thousand one hun-
dred and thirty-one in Sunday-schools. But in
the case of the public schools three hundred and
sixty-eight thousand seven hundred and ninety-
one teachers sufficed, whereas, with only a slightly
larger number of scholars, the Sunday-schools
numbered one million one hundred and fifty-one
thousand three hundred and forty teachers.^ The
city of Rochester, N. Y., has more large Sunday-
school classes than any other city in the United
States. There are forty classes with a member-
ship which in 1900 ran up to between three thou-
1 "Outlook," Dec. 15, 19CX).
^Gulick, "The Growth of the Kingdom,'' p. 152.
244 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
sand and four thousand men, and the explanation
of this is that some of the most vigorous and com-
petent young men in the city have devoted them-
selves to this work. One of these, the Hon.
Walter Hubbell, alluding to the rapid growth of
his class during the nine years that he has taught
it, says :
We now number two hundred and fifty, and this year, so
far, we have had an average attendance of something like
one hundred and fifty. I hardly know what to say in an-
swer to the question about the methods employed in teach-
ing. We use the International series of lessons, and I en-
deavor to keep closely to the text I never discuss politics
or the ordinary international, national, or social questions
of the day. The class gives entertainments during the
winter. The treasurer's report shows that it costs about
one thousand dollars a year to run the class, including the
cost of the banquet and what we pay the male quartette,
which is unquestionably the best one in the city. A large
number of the men seem to be very much interested in the
class, and do a great deal of work, and to this fact I at-
tribute the success of the class. We have various commit-
tees who look after the membership, who call on the sick,
who attempt to find employment for the unemployed, who
take care of the social functions, and who look out for the
program of the general exercises on Sunday.
That the character of the teaching will rise
with the growing intelligence of the teachers,
goes without saying. The days of the uniform
lesson are, let us hope, numbered. Lessons must be
graded to the capacity of the scholars. The present
SUNDAY-SCHOOL AND TWENTIETH CENTURY 245
prospect is for three courses instead of one, fol-
lowing the classification of the school. There
may be a danger that in the revulsion from the
old hortatory methods of teaching we may go to
an opposite extreme and become too scholastic.
It was against this that so broad-minded and ac-
curate a scholar as Dr. John A. Broadus found it
necessary to protest : " The so-called inductive
method of study will answer for college students
and a few Bible classes, but most pupils and most
teachers will never make anything of it.** And
certainly the minute study of the words of Scrip-
ture, the finding of concealed or unobserved
truths by the close scrutiny of tenses and cases
which perplexed Phillips Brooks' mother in the
preaching of the new school of evangelicals of
her day, will perplex much more than it will profit
the ordinary scholar in a Sunday-school class. In
the Sunday-school we deal not with processes so
much as with results. The teacher's main aim
should be moral and spiritual rather than intel-
lectual. Not that any one of these should be
rigidly separated from the others. No such dis-
tinction exists in fact. Faith and practice are
complementary, the two sides of the same shield,
and the reason is never ignored in the arguments
and appeals of the Christian religion. The text-
•book in the Sunday-school is the Bible, and " the
ultimate aim of the teaching is the knowledge of
246 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHo6l
Christ, Christian experience, personal salvation." ^
The school stands or falls, not by the completeness
of its apparatus, its intellectual ability, the per-
fection of its organization, the popularity of its
teachers, the social position of its scholars ; no, but
by its yielding results which would have satisfied
Jesus himself ; by the measure in which it responds
to his command, "Suffer little children to come
unto me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven."
It was this distinctly religious purpose in the school
system of the Hebrews which constituted its
strength, giving so deep a meaning to the saying
of one of the rabbis : *' The Almighty prefers the
breath of children at school to the smoke rising
from the temple's altars." This it is also which has
made the catechism so important an element in
the national life of Scotland, of Germany, of New
England, and of many other lands. The chief
end of the catechism was not reached until the
soul was won for God. And just here it is that
the main work of the minister needs to be done.
He must sow with eternity in view. I have just
said that the text-book in the school has to be the
Bible. By this I mean the Bible, and not selec-
tions from it or notes upon it. The demand for
cheaper Bibles with which in its early years the
Sunday-school Union of England and Wales be-
Demarest, ** Presbyterian Review," 1901, p. 130.
SUNDAY-SCHOOL AND TWENTIETH CENTURY 247
sieged the Bible Society, is only to be understood
when we remember that a Bible was supposed to
be necessary to each scholar. In England this
was certainly the rule through the first half of the
nineteenth century. When by and by the lesson-
leaf was introduced it was considered a sign of
an ill-prepared teacher that he brought it with him
into the class. We have fallen on other times in
this respect, and the very perfection and beauty
of our Sunday-school notes, issuing from many
publishing houses and creating large vested pecu-
niary interests, has tended to let the comment
usurp the place of the book itself. A writer al-
ready quoted, in pleading for reconstruction in the
Sunday-school, does not put the wound thus in-
flicted on the Bible in the house of its friends too
strongly when he says : ^
The use of lesson leaves very generally so sets the Bible
itself in the background as seriously to prevent familiarity
with it as a whole, with the reference of its different parts
to one another, and with the immediate setting and signifi-
cance of the passage under study. * Not only is the Bible
itself thus too little in practical use, but the tearing of a
few verses from it inevitably forbids the mind* s emphasis
and remembrance of them in scriptural oneness. It would
be so in the study of any text-book.
The Bible must be restored to its place in the
school, and it must be given a chance to be heard.
^ Demarest, p. 1 901.
248 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
The charge is brought against the service of pub-
lic worship in many churches that it has ceased to
be scriptural in thought and expression. This is
much to be regretted. The question has lately
been raised whether to-day the Bible is as gener-
ally familiar to us as it was to the English people
in the days of Shakespeare. The vast number of
references in his plays, direct or indirect, to its
words and characters and incidents proves that
the great body of those who saw them performed
caught at once the allusions to the Bible in which
they abound. The study of the Bible itself, the
habit of committing its great passages to memory,
the practice of comparing scripture with scripture
by a ready use of parallel verses, all this needs to
be revived, and the Sunday-school is one place
where it can be done. Dr. John Clifford, of Lon-
don, sounds a note which, without creating a panic,
should certainly put us on our guard when he
says : ^
We must get our yoiyig people to understand the incal-
culable value of the Bible to the religious life and general
well-being of the nation, to its order and progress, to its
liberty aud greatness. The Bible has made us. Our Refor-
mation sprang out of that book. It was the Bible preached
by Wyclifife and his poor priests which inspired that re-
volt against papacy which isSued at length in our departure
from Rome and in the ascent of the British people to free-
^ ** Sacerdotalism and Sunday-schools,** p. 14.
SUNDAY-SCHOOL AND TWENTIETH CENTURY 249
dom of conscience and to sovereignty in the life of the
world.
What is true of England is certainly true of
America also. The discovery of childhood, it has
been affirmed, was the greatest discovery of the
nineteenth century. This is only a rhetorical way
of putting the truth which Dr. H. Clay Trumbull
sets before us more soberly when he says :
Jesus Qirist not only gave children a place in his king-
dom, he gave them the chief place. He did not say that
if a child grew up to manhood, having kept on improving,
he might come to understand God* s truth ; he did say that
the only way in which a mature man could understand this
truth was in getting back to his child way of thinking.
That this was not a mere figure of speech is shown by his
having a real flesh and blood child before him when he
said it This has been a hard saying for apostles and theo-
logians and preachers generally to realize the truth of ; but
they have been making a good start the past century. There
is hope of them — the most childlike.
Up to the close of the eighteenth century many Chris-
tian ministers really had the idea that the chief business
of the church, by the command of the Master, is to preach
to grown-up persons, instead of to teach pupils in the
church school, and they worked along in the line of that
erroneous idea. Even if, at that time, ministers occasion-
ally tried preaching to children, they usually failed to come
up to a child* s apprehension. Teaching children by proper
modes of teaching was hardly attempted on any exten-
sive scale.
No sweeping arraignment of the Sunday-school
250 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
can be just. To it, in the main, we owe it that
childhood has come to its own ; that the young
life of the community has been nurtured and
trained heavenward ; that the Young Men's Chris-
tian Associations have sprung into existence in
every civilized land ; and that in this country alone
half a million young men study the Bible in its
classes every year; that the Christian Endeavor
Societies belt the world ; that the life of the home,
the family, the community has been lifted heaven-
ward. This unpaid enterprise can be placed side
by side with any system of secular schools, and
not fear by the comparison. To-day it is the most
conspicuous triumph of the voluntary system in
the service of Christ and the church. For this
reason, and because what is good should always
aim to be better, the Sunday-school ought with
the new century to go up higher. If it is to keep
in touch with the era of thought and action on
which we have now entered, it must do so. No
words of mine can impress too strongly on the
minds of my readers, lay and ministerial, the
grandeur and the solemnity of the obligation
under which we live as servants of Jesus Christ
to the children of our church. The Talmud says :
" Jerusalem was destroyed because the instruction
of the young was neglected." A holier temple
than that which fell before the torch of Titus is
the shrine which we are to guard. The late Bishop
SUNDAY-SCHOOL AND TWENTIETH CENTURY 2$ I
Creighton, not thinking how near he was to the
close of his career, sang on the threshold of the
year in which he died :
Oh ! earlier shall the roses blow,
In after years, those happier years ;
And children weep, when we lie low.
Far fewer tears, far softer tears.
Oh ! true shall boyish laughter ring,
Like tinkling chimes in happier times ;
And merrier shall the maidens sing.
And I not there, and I not there.
The children's future became the thought of
all others most insistent in his mind. The greatest
contribution to the unborn years that a Christian
minister can make he considered to be this, to live
for the children who should so soon occupy our
place. Our best and strongest thoughts and words
fall into the hearts of the children and young
people who gather about us ; and because the boy
is very weak who dares entirely outgrow his boy-
hood when he comes to be a man, there they
remain, growing with his growth, strengthening
with his strength, safeguards, by God's blessing,
against evil, sources of inspiration, fountains of
water springing up into everlasting life, like " the
hymns of dear old Doctor Watts," of which in his
old age Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote : " They
thrilled me when a babe, and will mingle, I doubt
not, with my last wandering thoughts."
252 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
In bringing this discussion to a close, I desire
to do so on a note as broad as the theme itself,
when looked at in all its aspects, warrants. We
have seen that the roots of the Sunday-school lie
far back in the early years of the human family.
The work of Robert Raikes and his comrades was
a revival rather than a creation. From the tent
of Abraham beneath the oak at Mam re ; from the
divine recognition, earlier yet, of the family as the
center of all civil and religious life, sprang the
system of Christian nurture in which the Sunday-
school is only one factor. Never is this thought
of the divine sanction for the family relationship
absent from the heart of the patriarch, from the
song of the psalmist, from the promise of the seer,
or from the prayer of the patriot. Listen to it as
it welds together the training of the family with
the prosperity of the nation :' **That our sons may
be as plants grown up in their youth ; that our
daughters may be as cornerstones, polished after
the similitude of a palace : that our garners may
be full, affording all manner of store ; that there be
no complaining in our streets. Happy is that
people, that is in such a case : yea, happy is that
people, whose God is the Lord." The Hebrew
theocracy in its prime insisted on the religious
training of the young people, both at home and
1 Ps. 144 : 12.
SUNDAY-SCHOOL AND TWENTIETH CENTURY 253
in the school, and even when Jerusalem fell, tradi-
tion has preserved for us the number of schools
in the sacred city as four hundred and eighty.^
With more probability the most profound of Jew-
ish medieval scholars traces to the neglect of the
education of the children the decline and over-
throw of the theocracy itself. The lesson which
the reformers of the eighteenth century spelled
out from the slums of English cities and the shame
of English villages, is a lesson to which every ad-
vance in national education has only added new
emphasis. I mean that the religious training of
the children, whether under the monarchy or the
republic, is no business of the State, but must be
undertaken by the church of Christ. For this
training each minister is, within the sphere of his
own influence, responsible. It is not the will of
his Father in heaven that one of these little ones
should perish, that one should grow up without
the knowledge of his love and care. The same
pity which stirred in the manly heart of Robert
Raikes and in the gentle bosom of Hannah More
should stir within the soul of the Christian min-
ister.* The Sunday-school has ceased to be the
property of any one class, and now belongs, as
does the public school, to every family in the com-
munity. The note of the true democracy is
1 Edersheim, "Sketches/* p. 135.
2 Dale's *♦ Life," p. 235. P. Brooks' ♦* Addresses," p. 503.
254 THE MINISTRY OF THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL
sounded here as it ought to be. " The rich and
the poor meet together, and the Lord is the maker
of them all." ^
It has been asserted that the time in which we
live is specially the age of the young ; and Emer-
son quotes a witty physician who, remembering
the hardships of his own youth, said:^ "It is a
misfortune to have been born when children were
nothing and to live till men were nothing.** And yet
what the men shall be ten or fifteen years hence
depends on what the children are now. And the
children and the young people will be very largely
what we make them. Addressing myself espe-
cially to the rising ministry, I would say : Believe
me, brethren, standing on the threshold of your
Christian ministry, you can afford to neglect almost
anything sooner than the families of your congre-
gation and the classes in your school. Beside the
chair of the aged or the bed of the dying you will
touch the springs of memory, and there is a wealth
of experience to be gained in such ministries ; but
when you address yourself to this great task of
Christian nurture, you are surrounded by the
pleasures of hope. You "speak to the bright
daylight creatures of trust,** you face and influence
a future of untold possibilities, you lay a molding
hand on the slumbering forces of the new century
^ Prov. 22 : 2. * Emerson's ** Lectures," p. 307.
SUNDAY-SCHOOL AND TWENTIETH CENTURY 255
the like of which this world has never seen be-
fore.
Bliss is it in this dawn to be alive,
But to be young is very heaven.
To yourselves it will be a welcome relief, turn-
ing from the mingled experiences of the pastorate,
from the man old and hardened in sin, from the
man who bears
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world,
from these and so many others who sadden or
shadow your heart, to pass into the springtime of
hope and enthusiasm as you labor with the young
people in your congregation.
I offer congratulations on the prospect of this
ministry to the home circle and the Sunday-school.
About us as about the Master may the children
gather in instinctive love ; to us as to him may
the young man hasten to learn how to inherit eter-
nal life ; may we, as wag the Lord himself, be
encircled by a band of ardent and devoted souls
eager for work in the kingdom ; and when the last
account shall be made, may it be ours to rise with
many a star in the crown of our rejoicing and to
say, " Behold, here am I and the children whom
the Lord hath given me."
GENERAL INDEX
Alleine, Joseph, a forerunner of
the Sunday-school, 55.
America, Sunday-school in, 69, 157.
American Baptist Publication So-
ciety, its growth, <K).
American Sunday School Union,
its origin, 70, 89.
Arnold, Thomas, his influence on
boys, 42.
Authority, of Bible, 3.
Bacon, Francis (Lord), on value
of catechism, 200.
Baldwin : on early conversion, 39 ;
his custom of kissing children
after service, 110.
Baraca Union, 207.
Baptism, infant, 108.
Baxter, Richard, on value of teach-
ing, 45.
Beecher, H. W. : on value of influ-
ence, 112 ; on injudiciously in-
fluencing children, 126 ; on serv-
ices unattractive to children,
131, 134 ; and Doctor Tyng, 141 ;
on Sunday-schools, 141, 160; on
teaching children, 177 ; on influ-
ence of minister on children,
184.
Beecher, Lyman, on religious con-
dition of New England before
founding of Sunday-schools, 226.
Bell, Andrew, his pupil-teacher
system, 77.
Bible: and the child, 3-45; as
guide to minister, 3 : children
in, 3 ; a book of precepts as well
as examples, 12; lack of expo-
sition of, among Puritans, 34 ;
in the Sunday-school, 95, 177,
246: its purpose, 206. (See New
Testament: Old Testament.)
Bible-class, for young men. 204.
Bible-schools: among Jews, 14,
252; their Increase during the
Exile, 15. (See Sunday-school.)
Bonar, Dr. A. A., his experience
in addressing children, 144.
Books: for children, 118, 172. (See
New England Primer.)
Borromeo, Cardinal, his Sunday-
schools. 54.
British and Foreign Bible Society,
its origin, 64.
British and Foreign School So-
ciety, its origin, 78.
Broadus, Dr. J. A., against induc-
tive method of teaching, 245.
Brock, W., on change of religious
thought, 237.
Brooks, Phillips, on value of help-
ing children, 196.
Browning, Mrs., quoted, 112.
Bums, quoted, 6.
Bushnell, Horace: on family
unity, 10 ; on Christian nurture,
42 ; on infant baptism 108 ; on
teaching children empty formu-
las, 121: on preaching to chil-
dren, 139 : on questions of young
men, 206.
Carey, his influence on awakening
of eighteenth century, 52.
Carroll. Lewis, on children, 227.
Carus- Wilson, Mrs., on God's feel-
ing for children, 145.
Catechism : in medieval times, 23 ;
257
258
GENERAL INDEX
in New England, 29, 34, 35, 194,
201; its connection with relig-
ious life, 35, 5G ; in the Reforma-
tion, 56 ; its use in the Sunday-
school, 94, 200.
Chalmers, Thomas : his influence
on awakening of eighteenth
century, 52; quoted, 164; his
appreciation of the Sunday-
school, 217, 225.
Channing: on having faith in
children, ;<2 ; on teaching, 176 ;
on the danger of Sunday-schools,
181.
Character of Sunday-school teach-
ers, 170, 214, 241.
Charles. T., his work, 63.
Children: the Bible and, 3-45;
necessity of training, 5 ; Hebrew
training of 6-16, 107, 111, 115, 190,
198 : home training of, 6, 43, 107 ;
in New Testament, 16-22; love
of Jesus for, 17 ; medieval train-
ing of, 22, 131 ; Puritan training
of, 24-30; emotional life of, 30,
40 ; not naturally corrupt, 31 ;
conversion of, 32, 33, 36, 118;
nurture of, 39 ; their depravity
in eighteenth century, 50 ; rela-
tion of minister to, 109-147 :
stages in development of. 114;
consecration of, 115 ; books for,
118, 172 ; their training after con-
version, 122 ; their influence on
church elections, 123 ; as critics,
124 ; injudicious organization of,
126 ; should be brought to church
early, 129 ; unfitness of ordinary
church service to, 131 ; demand
variety in church service, 133;
special address for, 135 : service
for, 136 : sermon for, 138 : duty
of church to elevate, 171 ; their
love of knowledge, 177 ; impor-
tance of reaching, 218.
Church: influence of Sunday-
school on, 21, 34, 35, 158, 159, 221,
227 ; hymns for, 134 ; should sup-
port Sunday-school, 161 ; its re-
lation to home, 191.
Clarke, D., on value of catechism,
194.
Clifford, Dr. John, on study of
Bible. 248.
Consecration, of children, 115.
Conversion : of children, 32, 33,
36, 118 ; inadequacy of Puritan
conception of, 33.
Corruption, natural, of children,
31.
Cox, Dr. Samuel, his sermons for
children, 147.
Crafts, W. F., on teaching evangel-
istic methods, 182.
Creighton, Bishop, quoted, 251.
Criticism, of children, 124.
Cuyler, Doctor, on importance of
reaching young men, 204.
Dale, R. W.. on relation of church
and home, 191.
Demarest. W. H. S. : on Sunday-
school reform, 232 : on retaining
young people, 238; on the aim
of teaching, 245 ; on use of Bible
in Sunday-school, 247.
Doddridge, Philip: on teaching
children, 29 ; his attitude toward
revivals, 49; his influence on
awakening of eighteenth cen-
tury, 51.
Dods, Dr. Marcus, on the purpose
of the Bible, 206.
Drummond, Henry: on religion
of boys, 120; his inquiry con-
cerning early religious impres-
sions, 222.
Duty : of parent to child, 7, 43, 107 ;
of minister to Sunday-school
(see Minister).
Edersheim: on the essence of
Hebrew religion, 13 ; on training
of Hebrew children, 14, 15, 111,
190: on parental obligation in
Mosaic law, 107 : use of Bible in
Jewish schools, 178.
GENERAL INDEX
259
Education, secular: in England
in nineteenth century, 78; its
influence on Sunday-school, 79.
Edwards, Jonathan : on child con-
version, 33; his influence in
awakening of eighteenth cen-
tury, 51.
Eighteenth century : Sunday-
school in, 49-73 ; morality of, 49 ;
religious awakening in, 51.
Elections, church, unduly influ-
enced by children, 123.
Eliot, Geoige, quoted. 111.
Ezra, as a teacher, 43.
Family: history rooted in, 6; re-
ligious aspect of, 6.
Farrar, Dean, on influence of
Raikes, 187.
Frazer, Prof., on influence of min-
ister on young, 124.
Germany, Sunday-school in, 109.
Goldsmith, his picture of the vil-
lage pastor, 110.
Goodell, C. L., an ideal Sunday-
school pastor, 213.
Gordon, A. J., on church amuse-
ments, 192.
Granville, as an example of eigh-
teenth century morality, 50.
Green, J. R., on the awakening in
the eighteenth century, 52.
Green, S. G. : on conducting a
preparation class, 181; on the
minister in the Sunday-school,
209; on emotional excitement,
217.
Gulick : on growth of British Sun-
day-schools, 91 ; on present re-
ligious condition of collies, 98 ;
on size of Sunday-school classes,
243.
Guthrie, his childlikeness, 118.
Heber, his childlikeness, 146.
Hebrews, their training of chil-
dren, 6-16, 107, 111, 115, 190, 198.
Hill, Rowland, his Sunday-school,
63.
Hodder, on early nineteenth cen-
tury, 83.
Holmes, O. W., on Watts' hymns,
251.
Home: training of children in,
6. 43, 50, 107 ; influence of Sun-
day-school on, 191 ; its relation
to Sunday-school, 224. (See Fam-
ily.)
Horn-book, 98.
Howe, Julia Ward, her answer to
Sumner, 9.
Hubbell, W., on growth of his
men's Bible class, 244.
Hudson, M. A., on the Baraca
IJnion, 207.
Hymms : of Watts, 55, 61, 138, 251 ;
of church, 134 ; for Sunday-
school, 137.
Ireland, Sunday-school in, 71.
Jehoshaphat, his system of bibli-
cal instruction, 43.
Jesus : on the necessity of child-
likeness, 6; his childhood, 16;
his love for children, 17-20; a
model for the minister in his
relation to children, 19 ; his in-
fluence on children, 147.
Judson, Edward: on child con-
version, 36 : his definition of
Sunday-school, 152 ; on the khi-
dergarten, 169 : on pastoral work
of Sunday-school teachers, 183.
Kindergarten, in Sunday-school,
169.
Kirk, E. N., on former method of
training children, 25.
Lancaster, Joseph, his pupil-
teacher system, 78.
Larcom. Lucy, on sermons unin-
telligible to children, 134.
Lessons, uniform, 99.
Letter-box of minister, 127.
26o
GENERAL INDEX
Library of Sunday-school, 118, 172.
Lindsay, T., his Sunday-school, 55.
Longfellow, quoted, 40.
Luther, on influencing children,
218.
Manning, Cardiuul, on influen-
cing children, 218.
Mather, Cotton, his class for chil-
dren, 118.
Men. young: Bible class for, 204,
244 ; importance of reaching, 204 ;
their questions, 206; their Baruca
Union, 207.
Middle Ages, training of children
in, 22, 131.
Millet, influence of early training
on, 41.
Minister : his guide the Bible, 3 ;
his model, 19; his function in
medieval times, 22; must not
think children corrupt, 31 ; bis
view of child conversion, 85 ; his
lasting influence on children, 42;
his relation to his young people,
109-147; as friend of children,
109; as pastor of children, 115;
his visitation of the young, 116 ;
value of long pastorate to, 124 ;
his unconscious influence on
children, 121; should keep in
close touch with young con-
verts, 127, 223; his letter-box,
127; as preacher to children,
128, 134, 138 ; his public prayer,
133 ; his relation to the Sunday-
school, 153-184 ; as pastor of the
Sunday-school, 159 ; his relation
to Sunday-school oflScers, 163 ; as
adviser to teachers, 165; must
supervise teachers. 167 ; must ex-
ert an intellectual influence on
teachers, 174; his normal class,
174; his preparation class, 179;
his spiritual influence on teach-
ers, 181 ; should often meet offi-
cers and teachers, 181 ; benefit
of Sunday-school work to, 183;
in the Sunday-school, 187-228;
his moral influence in the
school, 190 ; may indirectly pro-
mote civic purity, 192 ; his influ-
ence on community, 195 ; should
attend Sunday-school, 198, 209;
his part in exercises of Sunday-
school, 198; should teach in
Sunday-school, 203 ; his class for
young men, 204, advantages of
Sunday-school teaching to, 207 ;
essentials to success in Sunday-
school work of, 210; must work
for spiritual welfare of Sunday-
school, 214; must keep promi-
nent the subject of religious
decision, 215; should teach can-
didates for church-membership,
223; a unifying influence be-
tween home and school, 224 ; a
unifying influence between
church and school, 226; must
sympathize with change of relig-
ious thought, 238 ; lives for the
future for caring for children,
251.
More, H. ; her influence on awak-
ening of eighteenth century,
52 ; and Macaulay, 53 ; her life
and work, 61-68 ; parochial char-
acter of Sunday-school of, 152.
Morley, J., on Puritan theocracy,
53.
New England Primer: its influ-
ence, 26 ; its Puritan character,
26-29 ; its view of sin, 27 ; ele-
ment of fear in teachings of, 27.
28 ; lack of emotional appeal in,
29 ; quoted, 26, 27, 28.
Newton, John, his influence on
awakening of eighteenth cen-
tury, 51.
Newton, Richard, on preaching
to children, 140.
Nineteenth century, Sunday-
school in, 77-104 ; secular educa-
tion in England in, 73.
GENERAL INDEX
261
Normal class, conducted by min-
ister, 174.
Nurture, Christian : origin of term,
39; banning of, 40; necessity
of, 41. (See Children ; Sunday-
school.)
Officers of Sunday-school: rela-
tion of minister to, 16S, 181 ; need
of good, 241.
Organization, of young people,
126.
Owen, John, on the catechism,
202.
Parent: his duty to children, 7,
43, 107 ; is always a teacher, 10 ;
mistaken ideas of obligation of,
31.
Pascal, on the supremely good
book, 146.
Pattison, S. R., on the religion of
children, 122.
Paul : on children, 20, 21, 40 ; his
public teaching, 21, 22.
Phelps, Austin : on lack of expo-
sition in early Sunday-schools,
34 ; on character, 170.
Phllo, on Jewish training of chil-
dren, 14, 111.
Prayer, public, of minister, 133.
Preparation class, conducted by
minister, 179.
Puritan training of children : in-
fluence of medieval teaching
upon, 23 ; its dictatorial nature,
24 ; its sternness, 25-30 : its influ-
ence on Sunday-school, 30.
Puritans: their training of chil-
dren (see above) ; their idea of
conversion, 33 ; their theocracy,
53.
Raikes, Robert: quoted, 15; his
influence on awakening of eigh-
teenth century, 51, 54 ; as origi-
nator of Sunday-school, 56, 188,
196 ; his life and work, 57-61 ; on
acquiescence of clergy in Sun-
day-school movement, 155 ; early
appreciation of, 156, 193; his
monument, 187; his handlmg
of children, 235.
Reed, Charles, on opposition to
early Sunday-schools, 154.
Reformation, Protestant : influ-
ence of medieval teaching re-
garding children upon, 23; its
Puritanism, 33 ; its appreciation
of the catechism, 56.
Religious Tract Society, its origin,
63.
Revivals, their evils largely due
to wrong methods, 36; connec-
tion of Sunday-school with, 216.
Richter, Jean Paul: on influence
of parents, 10 ; on the beauty of
childhood, 170.
Robertson, Dr., on application of
moral in story, 145.
Sabbath Evening School Society,
its origin, 70.
Schaufller, A. F., on training
teachers, 179.
Scotland, Sunday-school in, 70.
Sermon : should attract children,
134 ; for children, 138 ; instruct-
ive element in, 145.
Services, for children, 1.S6.
Short, Geo., on character of
teacher, 214.
Singing: should attract children,
134, 137. (See Hymns.)
Smith, Adam, on value of Sunday-
school, 71.
Society, American Baptist Publi-
cation, its growth, 80.
Society, British and Foreign Bible,
its origin, 64.
Society, British and Foreign
School, its origin, 78.
Society of Christian Endeavor:
its good influence, 192 ; its rela-
tion to Sunday-school, 215.
Society, Religious Tract, its origin,
63.
262
GENERAL INDEX
Society, Sabbath Eveuing School,
its origiu, 70.
Spui-geou: ou child conversion,
39 ; on keeping 3'oung men In
Sunday-school, 205 ; on the duty
of the minister to visit his Sun-
day-school, 209.
Stanley, Dean: human element
in preaching of, 143; criticism
of, 176.
Stock, Thomas, his Sunday-school
work, 61, 62.
Sumner, Charles, and Julia Ward
Howe, 9.
Sunday-school : among Hebrews,
14, 252 ; its increase during exile,
15; evolution of modern, 15;
during apostolic times, 21 ; as
the nursery of the church, 21,
159, 221, 227 ; in medieval times,
22, 23 ; opposition to. 33, 70, 154,
157, 226; lack of exposition in
New England, 34 ; its influence
on modern church, 31, 35, 158 ; its
aim, 43, 245 ; in eighteenth cen-
tury, 49-73 ; its inception, 54 ; ori-
gin of modern, 57; indifference
toward early, 62, 63 ; immediate
results of its establishment in
eighteenth century, 68-73; its
origin in America, 69, 157; in
Scotland, 70; in Ireland, 71;
influence of early, 71; its part
in religious awakening of eigh-
teenth century, 72: change
in character of, 73; in nine-
teenth century, 77-104 ; its de-
cline in early nineteenth cen-
tury, 79; its recognition by
Church of England, 80: effect
of decline of evangelical party
upon, 81 ; influence of industrial
growth upon, 83 ; beginning of
unpaid teaching in. 85 ; presents
in. 85, 86, 203; its revival in
Gloucester, 86; better organiza-
tion of, 87: first Convention of
workers in, 89; statistics con-
cerning, 91 ; improvement of
teaching in, 93, 168. 244 ; cate-
chism in, 94, 200; Bible in, 95,
177, 246 ; lesson series for, 99 ; its
influence on nineteenth century,
103 : its origin in Germany, 109 :
its library, 118, 172 ; defined, 151 ;
of earlier times compared with
that of to-day, 151, 196; the
modern, 153 ; relation of minis-
ter to, 153-184 ; its early simplic-
ity, 153; continuity of, 158;
not the children's church, 160;
should be supported by the
church, 161 ; efficacy better than
numbers in, 169; its kindergar-
ten, 169; importance of charac-
ter in teachei-s of, 170, 214, 241 ;
its wider mission, 171 : minister's
relation to, teachers, 174 ; prepa-
ration for teaching in, 189, 242 ;
its great danger, 181 ; monthly
meeting of teachers of, 181 ; the
minister in, 187-228; three im-
pelling f6rces of early, 188; its
reforming power, 190; its influ-
ence on the home, 191; its
influence on civic purity, 192;
its national influence, 193 ; pun-
ishment in, 194 ; young men's
Bible class of, 201; as a trans-
forming agency, 208 ; essentials
to success of minister in, 210;
its connection with revivals,
216; is not in rivalry with the
home, 224 ; is not in rivalry
with the church, 226; in the
twentieth century, 231-255 ; must
keep in touch with the times,
232; must respond to demands
upon it, 233; must agree with
prevailing sentiment, 234 ; must
sympathize with changing
thought, 236; must avail itself
of progressive intelligence, 240 ;
separate classrooms in. 210;
need of good officers in, 241 ;
new methods in, 241; size of
GENERAL INDEX
263
classes in, 243 ; its world iuflu-
ence, 249.
Sunday-school Union : its origin,
63, 87; its doctrinal limitation,
87 : its publications, 88.
Sunday-school Union, American,
its origin, 70, 89.
Talleyrand, his advice against
zeal, 49.
Talmud: on home training, 50;
its rules regarding training of
children, 190, 237 ; on national
importance of training chil-
dren, 250.
Teachers in Sunday-school :
wages paid to early, 84; begin-
ning of unpaid, 85; improve-
ment of, 93, 168, 214 ; importance
of character in, 170, 214. 241 ; re-
lation of minister to, 174; nor-
mal class for, 174 : three things
essential to, 176; preparation
class for, 179, 212; monthly
meeting of, 181 ; as assistant pas-
tors, 182 ; must sympathize with
changing thought, 238 ; need of
good, 241.
Tennyson, quoted, 128, 129.
Testament, New, on training chil-
dren, 16-22.
Testament, Old, on training chil-
dren, 6-16.
Thackeray, his appreciation of
singing of children, 137.
Thring, his debt to Sunday-school
teaching, 242.
Timothy, our first example of
Christian nurture, 20.
Training: See Children ; Teachers.
Trotter, Doctor, on English Sun-
day-schools in middle of nine-
teenth century, 97.
Trumbull : on Hebrew training of
children, 14, 15, 198 : on Jesus as
the model teacher, 19 ; on apos-
tolic teaching of children, 21,
24 ; on child-conversion, 32 ; on
the catechism, 35, 200; on re-
ligious character of early nine-
teenth century, 79 ; on Sunday-
schools in Germany, 109; on
good texts for sermons to chil-
dren, 142; on early Sunday-
schools, 153; on opposition to
early Sunday-schools, 154; on
growth of Sunday-school move-
ment, 157 ; on indirect influence
of Sunday-school, 195; on So-
ciety of Christian Endeavor,
215 ; on modern growth of regard
for children, 235 ; on importance
of childlikeness, 249.
Twentieth century, Sunday-school
in, 231-255.
Tyiig, Stephen : and Beecher, 141 ;
on value of Sunday-school work,
141 ; on relation of minister to
Sunday-school, 210 ; his Sunday-
school, 211.
Visitation of children by minis-
ter, 116.
Waldenses, use of Bible by, 178.
Walpole, R.. his maxim, 49.
Watchwords of Sunday-school
movement, 188.
Watts, Isaac, his hymns, 55, 61,
138, 251.
Wellington, Duke of, on duty, 3.
Wesley, John : his influence on
awakening of eighteenth cen-
tury, 51 : on child conversion,
52; on talking .with children,
117; on associating with chil-
dren, 138; his sermon for chil-
dren, 147 ; on growth and value
of Sunday -schools, 188, 216; on
Sunday-school teachers. 241.
White, Gilbert, as an example of
morality of eighteenth century,
50.
Whitefield, his influence on awak-
ening of eighteenth century, 51.
Wilberforce: his influence on
264
GENERAL INDEX
awakening of eighteenth cen-
tury, 52 ; on English village life
before founding of Sunday-
school, 225.
Wordsworth, quoted, 113, 204, 255.
Xavier, on influencing cliildren,
218.
Zinzendorf, as a preacher to chil-
dren, 138.
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