The ministry of the Sunday School

Front matter

jHE ]V\!N1STRY

OF

[HE Sunday_School

Preface

This book has grown out of the " Ridley Lectures " 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 somewhat, 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 distinct and definite purpose in the book, even though

Vlll PREFACE

it now addresses itself to a wider and more varied audience than that for which it was originally intended.

I wish to express my grateful appreciation of the help which I 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 American Baptist Publication Society; and Rev. Carey Bonner, general secretary of the Sunday-school Union of London.

The literature of the Sunday-school has now become very large, and the marginal references in this volume will show how much I have been indebted 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 excellent summaries in " The Growth of the Kingdom of God." Many valuable suggestions of a practical 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.

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

VII The Sunday-school and the Twentieth Century 229

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.

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 very 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 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 relation 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 himself, 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

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 heareth " ; David taken from the sheepfold 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."1 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 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." l

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 command his children and his household after him. " 2 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 pictures 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.

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 perfect " l — 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," 2 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 insistence 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 household 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 judgments by which the people were to be guided : " Thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, 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." l The preservation of the national records seemed to hinge upon the maintenance of this unwritten 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, saying, 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." 2 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." 3 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 in the heart of the family : l " 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 importance. 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 interested 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 illustration 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-

IO 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 obedient. "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 training. 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

1 "Christian Nurture," p. 39.

THE BIBLE AND THE CHILD I I

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." l We weary of the swing of the pendulum with its monotonous burden until 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,2 and both were to be practised, so that " thou and thy son and thy son's son, all the days of thy life," may nourish 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 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,1 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 hierarchy 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 perpetual 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 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, ultimately 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." 2

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 presence 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.

2 Edersheim, "Sketches of Jewish Social Life in the Days of Christ," p. 125.

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.1

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." 2 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-

1 Edersheim, "Sketches," etc., p. 108. 2 Trumbull, "Yale Lectures on the Sunday-school," pp. 7, 8.

manent institution. Like the pillar in the wilderness, 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 worship among the features of the synagogue. The exile multiplied these Bible-schools amazingly. l At least eleven different expressions were coined to describe them. Attendance upon them ultimately 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.2 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." 3

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

1 Trumbull, "Yale Lectures on the Sunday-school," pp. 8, u. 2 Edersheim, "Sketches," p. 130. 3 " Yale Lectures," p. 192.

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 children, which have not known any thing, may hear, and learn to fear the Lord your God.' " l

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 \J

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." l

So he made ready for the visit to Jerusalem which was taken " after the custom of the feast " ; 2 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 answers."

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

1 Trumbull, p. 29. 2 Luke 2 : 42.

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 youngest 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." l Among the last injunctions to Peter was that to " Feed my lambs," which, interpret it as we may, can scarcely have been spoken

1 Matt. 18 : io.

without some profound reference to the young life to be hereafter folded in the church which our Lord came to found.1

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,2 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." 3

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 irresistible 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

1 Craft, "The Bible and the Sunday-school," p. 107. 2 Trumbull, p. 33. 3 Isa. 40 : II.

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, remained. " For the promise," said Peter in his address on the day of Pentecost, " is to you, and to your children." l Children at a very early age were baptized and added to the Lord. There is nothing which makes Paul so much one of ourselves as his tender affection for Titus, " my own son," or for " Son Timothy," 2 the heir of his inspiring 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 recollection, 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."3

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 strengthened by new and more sacred bonds. "Children,"4 the injunction now ran, "obey your parents in the Lord ; for this is right." Here was a new motive

3 S. G. Green, "Christian Ministry to the Young," p. 18.

for a natural duty. You catch its force still better in another form of the same injunction : "Children, obey your parents in all things ; for this is well pleasing unto the Lord." l The ancient Jewish conception seems to be lifted into a serener light as we listen to John when he begins his second Epistle : " The elder unto the elect lady, and her children, whom I love in the truth." 2

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.3 Paul, who had himself been a scholar in the school of Gamaliel, made the synagogue wherever he went in his journeys as a Christian missionary the scene of careful, patient, exhaustive teaching, while at Athens,4 in the market-place, every day, he discussed 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 influence after the exile, became now " the fresh starting points of the Christian church 5 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,