change I speak of.
Originally the institution was a Sunday-school, and not very respectable
either. I should hate to think any of my dear young friends were in the
habit of attending such a low-class affair as Robert Raikes conducted.
Sunday-schools were for "little ragamuffins," as he called them, who
worked such long hours on week-days (from five in the morning until nine
at night) that if they were to learn the common branches at all it had
to be on a Sunday. A ragged school was bad enough in itself, putting
foolish notions into the heads of gutter-brats and making them
discontented and unhappy in their lot; but to teach a ragged school
on Sunday was a little too much. So Robert Raikes encountered the most
violent opposition, although from that beginning dates popular education
in England.

To be able to read is no Longer a sign that Pa can afford to do without
the young ones' wages on a Saturday night, and can even pay for
their schooling. It is no longer a mark of wealth or even of hard-won
privilege, but the common fate of all; to know the three R's, and Sunday
is not now set apart for secular instruction. So good and wholesome an
institution as the Sunday-school was not permitted to perish, but was
changed to suit the environment. It is now become the Sabbath-school for
the study of the Bible, a Christian recrudescence of the synagogue.
For some eighteen centuries it was supposed that a regularly ordained
minister should have exclusive charge of this work. At rare intervals
nowadays a clergyman may be found to maintain that because a man has
been to college and to the theological seminary, and has made the study
of the Scriptures his life-work (moved to that decision after careful
self-examination) that therefore he is better fitted to that ministry
than Miss Susie Goldrick, who teaches a class in Sabbath-school very
acceptably. Miss Goldrick is in the second year in the High School, and
last Friday afternoon read a composition on English Literatoor, in which
she spoke in terms of high praise of John Bunion, the well-known author
of "Progress and Poverty." Miss Goldrick is very conscientious,
and always keeps her thumbnail against the questions printed on the
lesson-leaf, so as not to ask twice, "What did the disciples then do?"

It were a grave error to suppose that no secular learning is acquired in
the modern Sabbath-school. I remember once, when quite young, speaking
to my teacher, in the interval between t