n
church was extended and built up.

#3. The Raikes Movement.#[A]--The first seventeen centuries of the
Christian era witnessed, for the most part, a general decline in the
church and in Christian activity. During all this period, the church's
life increased or waned in proportion as it attended to or neglected
the religious instruction of the young. The seventeenth century, and
much of the eighteenth century were dark days for the church. It was
toward the close of this period that God saw fit to connect the name
of Robert Raikes with the Sunday-school movement of the world. While
he was probably not the founder of the first Sunday-school, his name
is nevertheless inseparably connected with the beginnings of the
modern Sunday-school. In the city of Gloucester, England, July, 1780,
this man--the editor and proprietor of the Gloucester Journal--started
his first Sunday-school, in the kitchen of a dwelling-house. This room
was eleven feet long, eight feet wide, six and a half feet high. "The
children were to come soon after ten in the morning and stay till
twelve. They were to go home and stay till one, and after reading a
lesson, they were to be conducted to church. After church, they were
to be employed in repeating the catechism till half past five, and
then to be dismissed with an injunction to go home without making a
noise; and by no means to play in the street." Four women were
employed as teachers in this school, at a shilling a day. The early
Raikes schools were not connected with the church in any way.

[A] The statements in these paragraphs are taken in
substance from "YALE LECTURES ON THE SUNDAY SCHOOL"
(Trumbull).

#4. Sunday-school Extension.#--Sunday-schools soon became very
popular, and spread over Great Britain and into Europe. Sunday-schools
are known to have existed in the United States as early as 1786, and
probably much earlier than that (even in 1674). They found congenial
soil in the Western Hemisphere, and multiplied rapidly. There are now
more than a quarter of a million Sunday-schools in the world,
enrolling more than twenty-five millions of people. More than one-half
of this vast army is in North America.

#5. The Sunday School Union of London.#--This organization was
effected in 1803 in Surrey Chapel, London, and is the oldest
expression of organized Sunday-school work. It is local only in name.
Its auxiliaries are to be found in all parts of the United Kingdom,
Continental Eu