# Our New Departure (Brooks)/Chapter 15

A great change has taken place in the general sentiment of our body touching the Sunday-school. In consequence of that reaction from the methods as well as the doctrines of the old churches, which has been several times referred to in the progress of these pages—and without a constant recognition of which no person can to much purpose study our history, because missing one of the most important keys to it—there was a time when Sunday-schools were energetically opposed among us. They were regarded as a priestly and sectarian device to stay the progress of more rational and Scriptural opinions, and to fasten the chains of 'orthodoxy' upon the children and youth of the land:—objectionable in principle, because designed unwarrantably to bias the thought of those under their influence, and especially objectionable in practice, because a portion of the plot to create 'a religious party' in our politics. This opposition, however, on various grounds, gradually gave way—at first, mainly on the ground of expediency, that we might checkmate 'our opposers' by keeping our children out of their hands; and since then, as juster estimates have prevailed, we have had numerous new departures in respect to the subject, until now no Church is more appreciative than ours of the intrinsic importance of the Sunday-school, or of the soundness of the principle on which it rests,—or more zealous to use it,—or more earnest in discussing the question of methods,—or more occupied with the effort to make the school in the highest degree effective. Nowhere, probably, can there be found a change so marked,—nowhere, certainly, a change more marked or more favorable, in the growth of right thinking and feeling in these regards, than we thus exhibit.
Under these circumstances, it would be only a waste of ​words to use room here to set forth the history of the Sunday-school, or to speak of its importance and great possible usefulness, or to dwell on the necessity of availing ourselves of every possible instrumentality towards making the most of it. All these, and others of a kindred nature, are points concerning which so much has been said that none of those into whose hands this book is likely to fall need information or suggestion concerning them. Nor is there now such special occasion as when this work was planned, to urge as a New Departure the particular recommendation to which this chapter is to be devoted. It has, fortunately, already arrested considerable attention, and has commanded, during the two years past, earnest pens and tongues, so that what I have to say on this point must be regarded as a humble contribution to help on a tendency of thought and labor which has already begun, rather than an initiation of it.
The one thought here to be presented concerns the purpose of Sunday-school instruction,—the paramount, absorbing end to which the school, and all it has, and all it can be made, should be devoted. Preliminary to this, however, there are two other points concerning which many years of observation incline me to offer some hints.
1. Our venerable and good Father Balfour, though finally in favor of Sunday-schools on the ground of expediency which has been spoken of,—i. e., as a means of self-protection, was never, I think, an advocate of them, in themselves, and always regarded them with some misgivings, for the reason that he feared their effect in inclining parents to neglect the religious instruction of their children at home. And who that has considered the subject will hesitate to say that he had good reason for his fears? That altogether too many parents do permit the Sunday-school to take the place of their personal labors, contenting themselves with feeling that, since their children 'go every Sunday to Sunday-school,' there is little occasion for them to concern themselves about their moral, and especially their religious, training, is known to us all. Herein—if I may so say—is the great possible mischief of the Sunday-school:—for that anything which serves to render parents less keenly alive to ​their own obligations to 'bring up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord,' or to lessen, no matter how slightly, their sense of responsibility in this respect, is,—in this, and so far as it does it—mischievous, no one with any becoming conception of parental duty will dispute.
On some accounts, the parental are the most solemn and—in a sense—most appalling of all the obligations that can rest upon us. For, consider what a child is as it comes fresh from the hand of God,—an immortal soul, with so much depending for itself and others on what it becomes, and with issues so tremendous, stretching out, we know not how widely,—stretching on, we know not how far, as the consequences of its life, and then think how serious a thing it is to take it for education and guidance,—to give it impress and direction, to form its tastes, to determine its habits, to shape its character, and so, under God, in a large degree, to decide what shall be its experience and temporal destiny, and to what purpose of good or ill it shall be in the world! One may well tremble, and ask God's special grace and help, in assuming such a trust. And yet, how few seem to have any due comprehension of it! How lightly, how thoughtlessly, with what total carelessness and unconcern, most to whom it is given take it upon themselves! It is one of the saddest things in the world that it is so; and seeing to what unreflective arms children commonly come, and how they are accepted and trifled with, we have occasion only to wonder that more lives are not perverted, and more souls spoiled and lost.
Were it, then, a necessity of the Sunday-school, in however remote a degree, that parents should transfer to it their duty, and that it should thus foster an unconcern and neglect of which there is already, by so vast a sum, too much, not only should we be justified in Father Balfour's misgivings concerning it, but the number, I think, would be small who would not, with intense emphasis, unite to say, Away with it utterly as it now exists, and let us have parental fidelity instead. In such a case, those who have no virtuous homes and no parents to instruct them, and whose only opportunity for religious training is that which the Sunday-school supplies, would somehow have to be otherwise provided for; ​but as now constituted, the Sunday-school would be no more. Happily, however, the Sunday-school in no way necessitates such parental neglect,—only furnishes the occasion for increased thoughtfulness and more systematic attention; and the father or mother who, instead of accepting its help, permits it to become a substitute, and so to induce carelessness and neglect, is not simply recreant to duty, but is further responsible for abusing instead of using a beneficent means of Christian education. Every parent making any pretence to conscience or Christian faith,—above all, every Universalist parent should count it a privilege as well as an obligation to sit down, some time each week, with the child, or children, God has given, and talk about the lesson of the Sundays past and that of the Sunday to come—making it a point to see that every lesson is perfectly committed, and that each child, having been helped to understand and feel the instruction which the lesson is designed to convey, is ready to ask the teacher such questions as it suggests, and thus prepared to appropriate whatever the teacher or the school may further supply. Would all parents but do this, what a work would be achieved! It is one of the chief hinderances and discouragements of faithful teachers that it is not done. Let not those who fail to do it be surprised if, in after years, the bitter cup of children's waywardness and irreligion be put to their lips.
Shall we not have more thought among our parents touching this subject? Far too many of our children and our schools are suffering from the neglect and the substitution to which I refer. Must they,—shall they continue to suffer? Will not our parents resolve on a New Departure in this particular? Napoleon said that France most of all needed mothers; and the great need of this country and the world, to-day and always, is the right kind of homes. And considering our own children, and their relation to the future of our Church, were I called to specify what, for their sake, and the Church's sake, and the world's sake, we most need, I should say, A profounder consciousness of the meaning of fatherhood and motherhood; a keener sense of the solemnity and almost awfulness of parental responsibility; and a more earnest and prayerful endeavor to make ​Home as the nursery of character what it ought to be. Home is the chief power, after all. In vain, comparatively, our Sunday-schools and our Churches, if we have not Homes sanctified to God and the Saviour, and made fragrant by daily religious living.
Nor is this all. Not only, our parents should consider, is any child irretrievably the loser so far as it is denied—shall we not rather say, defrauded of?—the helps to a good life which its home should give, but it is impossible that our Sunday-schools shall ever be what they may be, until our parents heartily enlist with our pastors and teachers in the effort to give them their due character and power. "The teacher must have the coincidence of the parents," said a certain Major Malaprop, some years ago, making the customary committee-man's address at the annual examination of a public school, not many miles from Boston. He meant co-operation. And what he wished to enforce, and what all friends of education agree must be enforced, as a condition of the highest usefulness of our common schools, needs no less to be enforced in respect to our Sunday-schools. Only as parent, teacher and school work together are the best results possible; and so far as any parent withholds the needed co-operation in careful home instruction, or fails, because of the Sunday-school, to give a child the religious guidance and training which the parental office implies, not only does the child suffer and is God defied and nature outraged, but a course is pursued which—supposing the duty would be performed if there were no Sunday-school—renders the existence of the Sunday-school a calamity instead of a blessing.
2. The Sunday-school is simply one of the auxiliaries of the Church,—one of the means through which the Church works, or through which its members or friends work to church-ends. Of course, then, it should be supported and used accordingly. But who of us does not know that it is not so supported and used? On the one hand, far too many in our congregations and churches treat it as if it were in no way a general concern, but something outside,—a separate affair, on whose meetings, or anniversaries, they are not to be expected to attend; something to be maintained by such ​'young people' and others as are disposed so to use their time, and that must pay its own way, and get help as it can, with no right as an integral part of the parish or church to look to it for support. On the other hand—and to a considerable extent, in consequence of the state of feeling just described, there are those connected with our schools, who conduct them on much the same assumption. The idea of unity and identity is lost. The school is managed as if it were in itself an end, and as if it and the church or the parish were—not one, but independent and rival organizations. I have heard of superintendents, whose aim was to get up Sunday-school cliques, or factions, for the furtherance of special Sunday-school projects, with little or no regard to the common welfare. I have heard of teachers, who habitually absented themselves from public worship, saying, "O, I don't care for the church or the congregation; my interest is in the Sunday-school." To the same effect, children are, in many places, taught to consider the Sunday-school as their church, and are given to understand that, when its sessions are closed, the church-services have nothing for them, and that they are at liberty to go home. And in still other cases, I have known the Sunday-school to become so far a 'hobby,' and so to absorb the leading thought and energy of a congregation, that, while its affairs were looked after with great discretion and earnestness, all parish business and interests were left mainly to take care of themselves, and so of course to come to serious harm.
Can it be necessary to say that all this, whether on one side or the other, is wrong and tends only to evil? If the Sunday-school has a right to exist at all, it clearly has a right to demand the sympathy and support needful that it may exist to best effect,—and this not simply from one, or a few, but from all. But the claim to these is all that it has a right to assert. It should know its place, and keep it. It is an appendage, an instrument, and this only. It is a means, not an end. Attempting to be more than this, it is an intrusion and an impertinence. It has no independent existence. It is not a church for children, or anybody else—and false impressions are made, and harm is done, ​when, for any purpose, it is so represented. It is in no sense a distinct, or separate, interest—and whoever undertakes to administer or to serve it as if it were, not only exhibits a culpable ignorance as to its true office, but is false to every purpose for which it has a right to be, no less than to the broader concerns to which it is subordinate. As a religious institution, the Sunday-school is nothing of itself. The church alone makes it legitimate, and gives it significance. The church is the parent; the Sunday-school is the child. The church is the fountain; the Sunday-school is one of its streams,—or, if we liken the church to the ocean, Sunday-schools are some of the rivers flowing into it. It is altogether subsidiary and dependent, designed to serve the church, and having any claim upon the church only because its office is to serve it.
Our Sunday-schools can never be most useful until these things are severally understood and properly acted upon. Why can they not be so understood and acted upon in reference to all our schools, as they already are in the case of some of them? No words can exaggerate the possible power of the Sunday-school. For this reason, it should be made a regular department of the parish or church work. It should every year, no less than the minister or the choir, be financially provided for, and so be saved the shifts and expedients to which it is now so frequently compelled to resort. It should, as much as the rental of pews, be looked after by some Advisory Committee of the parish or the church. It should never appeal in vain to the members of the congregation for teachers or workers, or for their attendance on any occasion when its claims are to be presented, its reports submitted, or its work discussed; and last, but not least, it should by common consent be understood to have a right to insist on the attendance of every child in the parish, old enough to attend, and no less, of every youth, and of every adult who can possibly arrange to participate in its lessons:—for the Sunday-school will never realize its true ideal so long as it is supposed to exist only for children, and fails to be regarded as a School of Christian Instruction, designed equally for all who can learn, however mature or aged. In a word, the Sunday-school should be taken ​close to the hearts of all our people as one of the most important of our church-instrumentalities, and should receive every practicable sign of an appreciative sympathy from all who can, in any way, contribute to its numbers or usefulness. Whoever fails to give it what it thus deserves and demands, fails of duty in respect to one of the most vital conditions of our increasing hold upon the world.
And not less should those actively connected with our schools be mindful of what is demanded of them. Appreciating the real relations and work of the Sunday-school, they should diligently seek to make it tributary to the growth of the congregation, to the increase of an interest in public worship, and thus to the enlargement of the church. Regarding it as their first duty to make their instructions as profitable as possible to those under their charge, they should feel that they are the servants of the church, and that the one question for them is, not how to build up a distinct or partisan school-feeling, or how to make the most of the school, as if it were or could be the rival of the parish or church, or as if it were in itself something to work for, but how most perfectly to identify the school with the common work and welfare of the parish and the church, and how to make the most of it for parish and church ends. Can we not have these things earnestly and practically recognized alike by those outside and by those inside our schools, and thus see our Sunday-schools everywhere becoming what, as helpers and auxiliaries of the parish and the church, they might and ought to be?
But these observations have outrun my design. They are, as I said, only preliminary. The question to which I wish here particularly to direct attention is, What is the final purpose of the Sunday-school?
Whatever may have been true of exceptional minds, thinking of what the Sunday-school ought to be, it is to be doubted whether there has been, until recently, any clear idea in answer to this question in the minds of those who have done our Sunday-school work; and it is quite as much to be doubted whether any considerable number of those who are even now doing it would be found to have concep​tions at all definite upon the subject. It is well to have Sunday-schools, the idea has been and quite too commonly still is, because they have come to be recognized as very proper things, and because it is really desirable that our children should know something about God, and the Bible, and the truths and places and events and people and duties of which the Bible speaks. And so, as was intimated in our second chapter, we have for years been teaching, in a very mixed and miscellaneous way, Scripture Geography and Biography and Archæology and Doctrine and Duty, and have accepted as teachers any tolerably worthy young persons who were willing, or who, by persistent solicitation, could be coaxed, to enlist in the work, whether they were in the church, or out,—whether they had any clear and intelligent views of doctrine and duty, or not. And all to what effect? It would doubtless be too much to intimate that no good has thus been done. But it is not too much to say that, as the rule, our scholars have failed to derive any religious benefit from what has thus been given them, beyond the moral impression which the singing and general exercises have made.
I have had three children as scholars in our Sunday-schools—one or more of them in three different schools; and as I have talked with them since they in their turn became Sunday-school workers, their testimony has agreed in this—viz., that, except in the case of one or two teachers, they never gathered anything from the Sunday-school, save in the way of these general impressions, and as the lessons were occasions of their learning something at home; and one of them was for months taken from a Sunday-school of which I was pastor, because the class of which he was a member was, beyond any remedy of mine, so left to itself after the merest parrotry of the words of the catechism, that, in the class, he was getting much injury and no good. And these children were by no means specially unfortunate. On the contrary, their teachers were, most of them, among the best in the several schools. Their experience, therefore, only illustrates the rule. The state of things it illustrates was never, perhaps, peculiar to us; but it has existed among us to a greater extent than in the ​schools of other churches, because we have at no time been so advanced as to methods, and especially because we have failed of any such distinct idea as they have had as to the end which Sunday-school instruction should be made to answer. We have been improving in this department of our labor as in others. Probably it would not now be possible to find superintendents or teachers employed so utterly without regard to religious character and conditions as they were twenty, or even a less number of years ago—particularly in any of our older and better schools. But even now, to what extent would a careful census of our schools, not excepting our oldest and best, show their instructions to be directed to any purpose more specific than this—viz., to give the pupils some useful information about the Bible and the places, the people and the events, it records, and to help them to some intelligent conceptions of truth and duty as Christianity expounds them?
But is this, or any part of it, at all as it should be? Was it for any such teaching that Christ died, or that the Gospel was given? To what end does the Bible teach? In his letter to the Colossians (i. 28), speaking of 'Christ in them, the hope of glory,' Paul says, "Whom we preach, warning every man, and teaching every man, that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus." And who of us does not know that this sums up the burden of the whole New Testament as to the purpose of all Christian instruction? Seed is sown for harvests. Leaven is hid in meal for results. So, not less, all teaching in the name of Christ, whether in the pulpit, the home, or the Sunday-school, is, or should be, with sole final reference to religious character. Christianity is a ministry of spiritual quickening and redemption; and we have no right, in whatever capacity we serve as teachers, to use Christ's name anywhere, or to do anything professedly under the auspices of his religion, except with these results definitely in view.
Here, then, is something for us to think about,—a New Departure to which, with one consent, all our Sunday-schools should at once commit themselves. Our Sunday-school instruction should henceforth aim at the specific spiritual results which it is the distinctive purpose of Christianity to ​secure. In this, as in many other things, our 'evangelical' friends set us an example well worth our following. Their guns are always aimed at one mark. Their business, under God, they believe, is to save souls; and conversion is the process through which, as they hold, salvation is to be reached. To convert souls, therefore, is their one engrossing purpose, whatever they do—their purpose in the Sunday-school, as in everything else. Hence their Sunday-school reports, whether for a term, a year, or a series of years, always mention the number of scholars who have been 'hopefully converted;' and whatever else they may have to report, no matter how favorable as to new scholars, or punctuality, or perfect lessons, or successful 'excursions,' 'concerts,' 'exhibitions,' 'festivals,' or 'good social times,' they regard their record as seriously incomplete, and feel that they have lamentably come short of their real work, unless they are able to say that some of their scholars have been religiously awakened, and thus have been converted, and led to give themselves to God and the Saviour in the Church.
And what they thus seek, according to their conception of Christian truth, is precisely what we should seek, according to ours. Why should we be less interested in such results, or seek them less earnestly than they? True, as was said in the chapter on the subject, we have no faith in their theory of conversion, and see no necessity for any such rescue as they mean by salvation. But, as was shown in the chapter referred to, we do not the less believe in conversion. Irreligion, worldliness, sin, is not a state with which we have any more reason than they to be content. An awakened spiritual consciousness, harmony with God, the sweet sense of acceptance with Him, is not a thing to be any less desired by us than by them. Nor do we the less recognize the reality or the necessity of Christ's saving work. On the contrary, to none are Christ and his awakening and redeeming offices so much, as related to the intrinsic need of the soul, as to us, and those in agreement with us. None have reason to insist with such strenuousness as we on what these two words, Conversion and Salvation, really mean, and to the faith or apprehension of none others are ​the processes they signify so actual, so vital, so absolutely and eternally indispensable, as the conditions of highest spiritual welfare. As we have heretofore seen, there is no entrance into the best life but through the gate, or experience, which the Bible calls Conversion; and anywhere, only spiritual darkness, insensibility, and death are possible to any soul except as Christ quickens and saves it. What, then, shall we do? These being the facts, are they facts to be forgotten or disregarded, especially where the plastic nature of childhood is committed to our hands? Are we pardonable if we do not specifically and anxiously labor for the ends which we profess to regard as so essential? Or, can any Sunday-school, ostensibly representing these facts as the solemn verities they are in our theory of Religion, be justified before God, or at the judgment-seat of Christ, or at the bar even of serious and earnest public opinion, in giving them no attention, or in failing to make them the inspiration and basis of such special labor as they suggest and demand?
This is a subject on which I will not presume to speak for others. But, for myself, I cannot but hold it solemn and inexcusable trifling, to gather our children and youth for what is called 'Sunday-school instruction,' Sunday after Sunday, and year after year, to dribble into their minds smatterings of various superficial and non-essential knowledge, with little thought and no effort in the direction of that particular result which the New Testament everywhere presents as the grand purpose for which Christ came into the world, and without which any soul, whatever else it may have, fails of the experience into which it is the sole ultimate design of the Gospel to lead it. Christianity means the instruction and awakening of souls, that the life of God may flow into them; and this definitive purpose of Christianity determines what should be the purpose of every Sunday-school, and the prayerful effort of every Sunday-school teacher. Every child, every youth, every person, of whatever age, connected with a Sunday-school is a soul to be awakened and saved, to be made conscious of sin, and helped to penitence and the resources and joys of the regenerate life,—or, if awakened, is a soul to be helped and encouraged into higher ​and clearer views of truth and duty, into a deeper experience, into a more perfect union with Christ, into a sweeter communion with God. I hold, therefore, that no session of a Sunday-school should pass, whatever else may be in hand, without some effort on the part of every teacher, and of all whose office it is to give tone to the service, to further this work of religious awakening, or help, in the hearts of the scholars. Instruction is good. Well-recited lessons and pleasant talk about them are good. Good singing is good. Anything that legitimately helps to give interest and life to a school is good. But all these are simply incidental. Not for any one, nor for all, of these does the Sunday-school, as a school of Christ, exist. It exists to convert and save souls. It exists spiritually to kindle and arouse those who can be brought within its influence; to impress them with a becoming sense of God's love and of Christ's self-sacrifice; to move them by the lessons and appeals of the Cross; to teach them not only to understand the theory of conversion and salvation, but to feel the necessity of being themselves converted, and of asking with solicitous concern, realizing how much is at stake on their right action, "What must I do to be saved?" It thus exists that it may make its pupils spiritually wiser; stimulate them to prayer, and the reading of the Bible, and attendance on public worship; aid them to self-mastery and self-denial; induce them to cultivate an amiable, genial, kindly spirit in their homes, and in all their relations and intercourse; and so help them to be live, earnest, consecrated men and women in Christ Jesus.
Nothing among us has for a long time seemed to me more gratifying in itself, or more promising as an indication of our growing religious development, than the 'Young People's Prayer Meetings,' in which the religious life of some of our parishes has of late found nutriment and expression. And the thought, aspiration, and purpose which have come to fruit in these meetings show us, as I conceive, precisely the product which, on the experimental and emotional side, our Sunday-schools should bear, as, on their practical side, they should come to fruit—and can be of any real Christian service only as they do come to fruit—in rightly-poised and high-toned character and devout and holy living. They ​are our spiritual nurseries, designed to send out those who, as men and women, shall enrich the world with the graces and virtues of a sanctified character, while eager to do its righteous work under the leadership of Christ in covenant with God in the Church.
Taking this view of the Sunday-school, it hardly needs to be said what should be taught or done in it, or what its libraries, or papers, or entertainments should be. The test question with respect to these things, as of everything else connected with the school, is, What is their religious influence? or, What bearing have they on the religious purpose which the school must be made to answer? What the verdict must be, in an application of this test, as to the kind of teaching which our schools have usually furnished, is clear. We have had much discussion of late concerning the 'One Lesson System.' As a system, I have no doubt that alike the argument and the testimony of experience are on its side. But as to the point before us, the 'system' is a matter of no consequence. If the same themes and lines of instruction are to be continued, the 'One Lesson System' will avail no more to answer the real purpose of our schools than the incongruous system which we have heretofore had. If Scripture History, Geography and Biography and similar topics are to furnish the staple of our teaching, with a little spice of doctrine and morals mixed in, however the teaching may be given, the lack of religious point and result will be the same. In their place, indeed, these things are unquestionably important; but the place for them is not the Sunday-school, except as they are made incidental and tributary to its main business. As well might one apprenticed to a house-builder or a carriage-painter be taught about the history of forests and all the processes of their growth, or about the old painters and their subjects, and be led through all the fields of knowledge, however indirectly related to these callings, while the house or the carriage was entirely neglected. In the case of such an apprentice, as he leaves his master, the important question is not, how many other things has he learned, but, what kind of a workman has he been helped to be. Equally, the inquiry of chief interest concerning a Sunday-school, as its pupils go out from its ​classes, is, not how much ground of Bible knowledge has it led them over, but, what has it done to convert and save them, and how far has it helped to impress them with the importance of Religion, and led them, as quickened and consecrated souls, into the discipleship of Christ. And any Sunday-school which has no such results to show, however large or prosperous, whatever else it may have done, or however numerous the pleasant social purposes it may have served, though it may have done some good, and so may deserve not to be condemned as a cumberer of the ground, is a grievous failure so far as the sole final purpose of a Sunday-school is concerned.
How many Sunday-schools have we that are answering—or that are making it the one purpose of their existence to answer—this real end of their existence? Alas, how few! Do we not need, then,—shall we not have, the New Departure in this regard to which the highest welfare alike of our children, our Church, and the world is calling us? The hope of our Church is in its Christianized children—as the hope of the world is in the Christianized men and women that Sunday-schools and churches are putting into it. In some schools, by some teachers, it is our pleasure to say, this Departure has already been taken; and as I pen these words, there rises before my thought the class of one such teacher, whom it is my privilege to know, who is finely illustrating what this Departure is, and what it would do for us. He is a young man, himself penetrated to the quick of his being with the thought of God and living a life of prayer and of conscientious devotion to every duty. His class is large. When he took it, it was in some respects one of the least desirable classes in the school; but, coming to his work with his heart in it, he soon inoculated the class with a new life. His one business, he feels, is to lead his boys to the Saviour. Though going carefully over the letter of each day's lesson, therefore, he does it only to get at its spirit; and, gathering the heads and hearts of his scholars about his own as he talks, as bits of steel cluster about a magnet, whatever the topic, he makes it somehow suggestive of thought about God, or Christ, or goodness, about the perils of sin or the attractions of a religious life. He talks ​much about prayer and the importance of cultivating a sense of God's constant nearness. Inviting his scholars' confidence, he induces them to open their hearts and confess their faults to him, and thus obtains a familiarity with each one that enables him to see what the boy most needs, and how he can best adapt instruction to his case. He visits his scholars at their homes, so making the acquaintance, and enlisting the sympathy and, to some extent, the co-operation, of the parents. He seeks opportunities to converse privately with each scholar, that he may speak with the freedom and faithfulness which he counts it his duty to exercise. In every possible way, in school and out, he so identifies himself with his boys as to secure their affection, and then uses the power he thus acquires to direct their hearts to God, to pledge them to daily prayer, to awaken a love for the Saviour, and to educate them towards the Church. In these several ways, so far as he can, he seeks to advance them every Sabbath somewhat into that life of devout thought and purpose, in the ripening of which they will become the reflective, reverent, religiously consecrated young men that he feels himself charged of God, by His help, to make them. Who can estimate his power or the power of any such teacher, or compute what our schools would at once become if all our teachers were actuated by a like purpose, and were as carefully and prayerfully laboring to the same end? Some imagine that such religious teachers must repel their scholars. On the contrary, the rule is, as this young man illustrates, that such teachers most interest and attract. The school of which this one is a member has many faithful and excellent teachers; but into no other class is there such an anxiety to enter as there is to enter his.
Shall the lesson of this case, and of similar cases, be heeded? The Sunday-school, even with those among whom it has reached its best estate, is yet in its infancy. Its capacity for usefulness has only begun to be perceived. Its full possibilities nobody understands. Systems and methods are to be developed, of which even the wisest do not now dream, multiplying its resources and increasing its grasp and power. And as what is now potential becomes ​actual in it, it is more and more to place the world in its debt, because of what it will do for the churches that wisely use it, and for our Christian civilization as one of its mightiest and most beneficent factors. Out of it are to come—who can tell what ministers, what statesmen, what men and women of all ranks and orders of gift and character, to make life, home, business, politics, society witnesses of Christ's increasing presence in them? Is the Universalist Church among the churches which it is thus to feed, invigorate and bless? I trust in God that it is. I am sure that it is. With our simple, rational, satisfying faith, so fitted to the comprehension of the young, and so full of power, rightly administered, to stir all hearts, kindling them into religious life, it may be the means of blessing us, if we so will, beyond all others. But it can so bless us only as this New Departure is taken, and as, learning from our own experience and the experience of others what are the best methods, we make all methods and all instructions focalize in this one great end—the religious awakening, the conversion and salvation of souls. Then, growing constantly wiser, our schools will each year become larger in numbers, because more vital and enthusiastic in spirit, and more effective as a Christian influence, because possessed by a more definite Christian purpose—training each generation, in its turn, as fresh recruits for Christ, honorably and valiantly to bear the banner of the Cross, and, through their own conversion and salvation, to help on the conversion and salvation of the world.