IV. THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL: ITS PRESENT PERIL.

IN the issue of the Review of Reviews for December, 1896, appears an article from the pen of President Walter E. Hervey, of the Teachers' College, New York, entitled "The Sunday-schools: Their Shortcomings and their Great Opportunity." The eminent position of the writer; his prominence as a leader in the movement known as the "new education" in the secular schools; the timeliness of the topic selected, and the conspicuousness of advertisement of the article in advance, calling attention to it as one of the leading attractions of the forthcoming number of the Review, all combined to awaken expectation and to excite the hope that we should have an unusually valuable contribution to the question of efficient Sabbath-school instruction.

If any conscientious Sunday-school superintendent or teacher, full of soul-hunger for the spiritual edification and salvation of the children and youth committed to his charge, has had recourse to this article, hoping to have some new light thrown upon his path, he must have come away with a painful sense of disappoint

ment.

He must have been disappointed, in the first place, with the air of extreme pessimism with which, in the very first paragraph, the whole work of the church and the Christian family in the training of children is discredited, and the lofty superciliousness with which the whole work of the Sunday-school up to the present time is ridiculed as a "clear case of parturiunt montes." Certainly the "view-point," as he calls it, of this writer is so intensely pessimistic that if we sympathized with him we should be ready to throw up our hands in despair and quit.

A second element of disappointment will be found in the writer's manifest want of acquaintance with the subject he proposes to discuss. No man can be expected to be at home on all subjects. President Hervey is, no doubt, an authority on the subject of pedagogy and of the "new education" in the secular

schools. When he speaks on these subjects we are ready to listen to him with docility. All that he says in this article on the subject of the study of child-life, and on the adaptation of instruction to the developing faculties of childhood, deserves at the hand of our Sunday-school teachers and others the most considerate and thoughtful attention. Lest he should apply to me the same proverb that I am soon to apply to him, I will venture no criticism upon this part of his article further than modestly to suggest that the "new education" is scarcely yet out of its kilts. The results of its new methods are yet to be tested. When, for instance, President Hervey tells us, as one of the great advances made by the new methods over the old, that "the old dogma [when one of these advanced theory' men wants to damn a thing, he always labels it dogma] of formal discipline, whereby the child's mind was conceived of as composed of distinct powers, each of which must be whetted, and the curriculum was conceived of as composed of studies, each one of which would serve as a whetstone for a special power, has been discredited"; when he tells us that "the function of the curriculum is primarily to furnish nutrition, and secondarily to provide formal discipline"; when he tells us that the "new education" "relegates the three R's to a subordinate place," giving the chief place to "the fresh, interesting human study of literature," and when he proposes to substitute for the timehonored birch-rod, with its demand of "instant and unquestioning obedience," the milder forms of moral suasion, we, of the laity in these matters of pedagogy, must be excused if we are a little skeptical as to whether the result of this homoeopathic educational treatment will be the production of minds of a higher order than those of Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, Chief Justice Marshall and others who were trained under the old régime.

But we may say of these matters of pedagogy, as a celebrated English critic represents old John Owen as saying in his commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews whenever he reaches a knotty point of exegesis in which his reader specially needs his help, "however, this is not our concernment." We are not concerned with pedagogical training, but with Sabbath-school instruction,

which is a very different thing. It is on this subject, and in view of the fact that President Hervey has made it his pleasure to subject its methods to such indiscriminate and withering criticism, that we feel constrained to meet the eminent critic with the memorable words of Apelles to the shoemaker: "Ne sutor ultra crepidam."

Our first criticism upon the article of President Hervey is that he has not been at pains to inform himself as he should have done before making such a tirade upon our present Sunday-school men and methods. He has not made a study of the genesis of the Sunday-school movement. Let us hear him on this point. Under the caption "Sunday-school Pioneering," he says: "Just when the Sunday-school idea originated is not known, but we have the record of an interesting school of Bible study which was held at Jerusalem not far from two thousand three

hundred and forty-two years ago. The superintendent was a minister named Ezra, and he had a staff of thirteen assistant superintendents and thirteen trained teachers, all of whom were paid, besides other teachers, regarding whom we do not know whether they were trained and paid or not. The pupils were 'all the people,' both men and women, and all that could hear with understanding. On the occasion described, the school lasted from daylight to midday, and notwithstanding the long session, and the fact that the people stood from the beginning to the end, we are told that the ears of all the people were attentive. The reason of this attention is not far to seek: 'The teachers read in the book of the law of God distinctly, and they gave the sense so that they (the pupils) understood the reading."

Now, if it were some enthusiastic Sunday-school worker, or some popular lecturer on the Sunday-school, who thus spoke of Ezra as a Sunday-school superintendent, and of the congregation assembled to listen to the reading and exposition of the Scriptures as a Bible school, we could readily pardon the rhetorical liberty taken. But for a teacher like President Hervey to speak of that as a school in which there was no text-book, except the copy of the Scriptures in the hands of Ezra, and where, as is plain from the face of the record, no questions were propounded either

by the teachers to the pupils, or by the pupils to the teachers, is certainly remarkable. The plain facts of the case are that the "Book of the Law" was in Hebrew; the people, whose vernacular tongue was the Chaldee, the language of their captivity, were not familiar with the Hebrew, and so, as Ezra read distinctly the words of the Hebrew original, the Levites who assisted him gave the people the meaning in a language with which they were familiar, no doubt accompanying the translation with such expository remarks as might enable them to understand fully what was to them practically a foreign tongue. Ezra's work that day was, therefore, that of an interpreter, and to some extent that of an expository preacher, but very far from that of a superintendent of a Bible school. President Hervey has evidently followed blindly in the lead of one of those Sunday-school enthusiasts who go to make up the ridiculus mus of his trenchant criticism.

Still more at sea is he in reference to the history of the modern Sunday-school. I quote from him again. Under the caption, "Birth of the Modern Sunday-school," he says: "The modern Sunday-school was born a little more than a century ago. Familiar to most of us is the story of Robert Raikes, of Gloucester; how, moved by the wretched ignorance of the poor children of his own city, he organized a mission Sunday-school for them, having a staff of paid teachers, and a curriculum which included reading (not a bad idea for many Sunday-schools to-day) as well as the elementary truths of religion; how, as Mr. A. Caswell Ellis points out (Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1896), within four years there were a quarter of a million of pupils in the Sunday-schools of the United Kingdom alone, and how, within twenty years after the announcement of Raikes' school, Bible and tract societies had been organized, and a powerful impulse given even to the work in foreign fields. So much vitality is there in the spirit of social service applied in the work of religious instruction.

"In due process of time, however, there came about the old transition from interest to habit. The question book laid its dead hand on teachers and pupils, and the rivalries of denominations and of publishers produced so intense a system of local option as

to destroy the little warmth that might have come from coöperation."

We have not called attention to this paragraph for the purpose of detracting from the well-deserved eulogium on Robert Raikes, although it is very questionable whether the work of Raikes was not simply one development of a great and widespread movement which found expression in the various societies for the publication of the Scriptures, the dissemination of tracts and the establishment of missions in foreign fields, rather than, as Mr. Ellis would claim, the direct incentive to them. But that to which we call attention is the ignorance of the history of the Sunday school work as implied in the statement that "the question book laid its dead hand on teachers and pupils." Reading this in its connection, one naturally infers that the Sunday-school, as established by Robert Raikes, and as maintained by those who received their inspiration from him, was entirely free from what President Hervey calls "the dead hand of the question book," and that only at a later period, when the "old transition from interest to habit" had taken place, did the question book, as a blighting influence, come in, along with the contention for orthodoxy, which, as he tells us in another place, "becomes, rather than pure and undefiled religion, the end of instruction, and the memorizing of dogmas and the catechism the chief means of instruction."

It is quite amusing after reading this to turn to any authentic account of the work of Robert Raikes, and find that almost the only religious instruction given by his teachers was by means of the catechism for which President Hervey seems to have about the same affinities that a certain individual is said to have for holy water. Thus, in the article on Raikes in the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopædia, we are told that "his work consisted partly of secular teaching and partly of the teaching of the catechism," whilst in the article under the same caption in the McClintock and Strong Encyclopædia is quoted a letter from Raikes, explaining fully his methods, from which we make the following extract:

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children were to come soon after ten in the morning and stay till twelve; they were then to go home and return at one, and after reading a lesson they were to be conducted to church.