quite incidentally, such a picture of the morals and condition of England in the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, as to make us feel that the Christian civilization on which we pride ourselves is really a thing of recent growth. Mr. Gregory's description of Gloucester Castle jail will be sufficient for our purpose. Ex uno disce omnes. "Though from forty to sixty fresh prisoners were received within its walls every week, there was but one court for them all. The day-room for men and women felons was only twelve feet long by eleven feet broad. Persons imprisoned for debt, of whom there was always a great number, were huddled together in a den of fourteen feet by eleven, without windows, and with no provision for admitting light and air save a hole broken in the plaster wall. In the upper part of the building was a close, dark room called 'the main,' in which the male felons were kept during the night, and the floor of this apartment was so ruinous that it could not be washed. Directly opposite the stairs leading to this sleeping-room was a large dunghill. Owing to the utter absence of all sanitary arrangements, the whole place continually reeked with infection, and deaths were of constant occurrence. Sometimes as many as a dozen victims succumbed in a month. As far as the debtors were concerned, the only wonder is that any of them survived. No provision of any kind was made to keep them alive. No allowance was granted them, either of food or money, nor was any opportunity given them of earning anything. At night, unless they could afford to pay for beds, they were obliged to lie upon straw; and for clothing, as for food, they were entirely dependent on their own resources or the charity of the benevolent. The prisoners committed for a felony, though as a rule less deserving, were a little better treated. They were provided with beds and clothing, and allowed a sixpenny loaf every two days. The indiscriminate herding together of debtors and felons, men and women, child offenders and hardened criminals, was productive of the most fearful immorality. Every new inmate, on entering this den of iniquity, was required by his fellow-prisoners to pay a certain sum of money called "Garnish," which was immediately spent in beer bought from the jailer, who eked out his emoluments by the profits derived from this trade. The jailer had no salary, but was paid by fees." Assuredly the expression to "rot in jail" meant someting in those horrible old days. Raikes went among the prisoners, and first of all tried to alleviate their positive physical misery. He constantly, as early as 1768, made appeals in his paper for contributions in money or kind, which he offered to take care of himself and apply to their purpose. "The unhappy wretches," he says, in the Gloucester Journal, "who are confined in our county jail for small crimes which are not deemed felonies (for felons have an allowance of bread), are in so deplorable a state that several of them would have perished with hunger but for the humanity of the felons, who have divided with them their little pittance. A person who looked into the prison on Saturday morning was assured that several had not tasted food for two or three days before. Were a county Bridewell established, they might then work for their subsistence. The boilings of pots or the sweepings of pantries would be well bestowed on these poor wretches. Benefactions for their use will be received by the printer of this journal." Besides striving to alleviate the physical destitution of the prisoners, Raikes lent books to those who could read, and got the better educated to give instruction to the others. He also provided work for those able and willing to do it. Perhaps there never was a better example of the truth that the honest and sensible efforts of a sound-hearted Christian man to do social good are never without result, than the work of Raikes for the Gloucester prisoners. Compared with the vast mass of wrong and wretchedness toward which those efforts were directed, what was actually done might seem little. But something was done : a visible result was obtained, which attracted Howard's attention and praise when he visited Gloucester County jail in 1773. It is certain that no effort to reach deep-seated social evils will escape the sneer of those who cover their personal | selfishness under an assertion of the hopelessness of the end in view; but the experience of Raikes with the Gloucester prisons, and afterward still more signally with the neglected children of the town, is of itself a signal proof that if well-meant, social efforts fail, it is either from want of Christianity to give them backbone, or from want of sense to give them shape and direction. In the end of the eighteenth century pin-making was a staple trade of Gloucester, and a very large number of children were employed in the process. Few of the children of the poor anywhere received any education, and where there was, as in Gloucester, employment for them, they were put to work as soon as they were able to earn anything. We know too well the state of things in great manufacturing centres to-day, with labor commencing by law only at a much later age, with education much more general, with habits of sobriety and virtue, at least, in good repute, and yet, with all these restrictions upon evil, there are elements which threaten at this moment the social fabric more seriously than many are disposed to think. The son or daughter is unfortunately able and too ready to say to father or mother, "My conduct pleases myself, and if it does not please you, I will go to lodgings.' Impatience of authority, sin against the divine order of the family, surely bring punishment, and the moral results among our factory classes are grave in the extreme. Speaking, in The state of the young in times such as those Raikes lived in was inconceivably worse. On the Sunday, when the pin-factories left the children free, the streets of Gloucester presented scenes of disorder which are happily rare now. Raikes says the children were "ignorant, profane, filthy and disorderly in the extreme." And yet it is not long since Mr. Smith of Coalville could describe the state of the children employed in brickmaking in the very same way. From such children the jails were fed. 1786, the Bishop of Chester said: "Our houses cannot secure us from outrage, nor can we rest with safety in our beds. The number of criminals increases so rapidly that our jails are unable to contain them, and the magistrates are at a loss how to dispose of them. Our penal code is already sufficiently sanguinary, and our executions sufficiently numerous, to strike terror into the populace; yet they have not hitherto produced any material alteration for the better, and were they multiplied a hundredfold, they would probably fail of the desired effect." Writing in his paper, in June, 1783, Raikes had said that no fewer than sixty-six persons had been sent to the Castle in one week, and that the jailer's stock of fetters was so completely in use that the smiths were hard at work casting new ones. sionaries, our social economists, our judges, are constantly He has the same tale to tell that our divines, our city misuttering in the ears of the nation to-day: "The people sent in are neither disappointed soldiers nor sailors, but chiefly frequenters of alehouses and skittle-alleys." Raikes had already done what he could for the adults, and Howard and Sir George Paul had succeeded in laying the foundations of prison reform. Raikes was now to attempt to do something for the children. He is said to have been looking for a gardener in a part of Gloucester near the Severn, known as St. Catherine's Meadows, and while waiting for the man's return, he had a conversation with the man's wife, which led him to take action in the matter of a school for the neglected children. The following letter, written to Colonel Townley of Sheffield, who had asked for information about Sunday-schools, details the circumstances: "GLOUCESTER, November 25, 1783. "SIR: My friend, the Mayor, has just communicated to me the letter which you have honored him with, inquiring into the nature of Sunday-schools. The beginning of this scheme was entirely owing to accident. Some business leading me one morning into the suburbs of the city, where the lowest of the people (who are principally employed in the pin manufactory) chiefly reside, I was struck with concern at seeing a group of children, wretched and ragged, at play in the streets. I asked an inhabitant whether these children belonged to that part of the town, and lamented their misery and idleness. Ah! sir,' said the woman to whom I was speaking, 'could you take a view of this part of the town on a "This conversation suggested to me that it would be at least a harmless attempt, if it were productive of no good, should some little plan be formed to check the deplorable profanation of the Sabbath. I then inquired of the woman if there were any decent, well-disposed women in the neighborhood who kept schools for teaching to read. I presently was directed to four. To these I applied, and made an agreement with them to receive as many children as I should send upon the Sunday, whom they were to instruct in reading and in the Church Catechism. For this I Sunday you would be shocked indeed; for then the street is filled with multitudes of these wretches, who, released that day from employment, spend their time in noise and riot, playing at "chuck," and cursing and swearing in a manner so horrid, as to convey to any serious mind the idea of hell rather than any other place. We have a worthy clergyman,' said she, 'curate of our parish, who has put some of them to school; but upon the Sabbath day they are all given up to follow their own inclinations without restraint, as their parents, totally abandoned themselves, have no idea of instilling into the minds of their children principles to which they themselves are entire strangers.' engaged to pay them each a shilling for their day's employment. The women seemed pleased with the proposal. I then waited on the clergyman before mentioned, and imparted to him my plan. He was so much satisfied with the idea that he engaged to lend his assistance by going round to the schools on the Sunday afternoon to examine the progress that was made, and to enforce order and decorum among such a set of little heathens." The Sunday-school teachers, it will be observed, were paid. Mrs. King, wife of the steward of Mr. Pitt, who represented Gloucester in Parliament, was the teacher in the first Sunday-school started in Gloucester. Her remuneration was one shilling and sixpence a Sunday, and of this sum Raikes paid one shilling, and the Rev. Thomas Stock, the minister of the parish and Raikes's zealous fellowlaborer, the other sixpence. The plan of paying the teachers two shillings and sixpence, or one shilling per Sunday, was continued in Gloucester down to 1810, and a year before Raikes's death. By that time there had come a serious decline in the spirit of the enterprise in the town. The expense was found to operate greatly against the undertaking. In various places the Nonconformists, and notably the Wesleyans, had tried voluntary agency, and had proved by success that it was able to cope with the work. It is recorded that the end of paid teaching in time forward the work progressed with yearly increasing success." Besides the fact that the early teachers were paid for their labor, other differences between the schools of that time and those of this must be noted. We presume that the practice of teaching the alphabet and reading is now rare. Then it was almost universal. Of course the state of primary education then and now explains this difference. In a list of rules drawn up for one of the earliest Sunday-schools, we find it stated that the persons to be taught are chiefly the young who are past the usual age of admission to the weekly schools, and from the necessities of their labor cannot find time to attend them. But besides these young persons, adults who cannot read, and Gloucester came about after this fashion. Six young men, lamenting the decline of Sunday-schools in Gloucester, determined to spare no effort to revive them. They were met with discouragement on every hand. There was no money, there were no children, there were no teachers. Thus discountenanced at all hands, the young men resolved, with the blessing of God, to act for themselves. "Gathering one night after business hours, around a post at the corner of a lane, within twenty yards of where Bishop Hooper was martyred, they clasped each other by the hand, and, with reverently uncovered heads, resolved that, come what would, Sunday-schools in Gloucester should be re established. As a fund to start with, they subscribed a harf-crown each; and then, dividing the city into districts, they canvassed it for scholars. On the following Sunday upward of one hundred children attended, and from that are desirous of hearing God's word and learning the Church Catechism, are invited to attend. In the school referred to, the first rule enacts that the master or dame appointed by the subscribers shall attend on the Sunday morning from 8 o'clock to 10.30, and in the evening from 5.30 till 8, "to teach reading, the Church Catechism, and some short prayers from a little collection by Dr. Stonehouse; and also to read (or have read by some of those who attend, if any can do it sufficiently) three or four chapters of the Bible in succession, that people may have connected ideas of the history and consistency of the Scriptures." Those in attendance at the Sunday-school were required to attend church, and children belonging to other communions were required to attend their respective places of worship, and be able to give an account of the preacher's text. In another school, one of the rules was, that nothing be taught inconsistent with the design of the Lord's Day; another, that the subscribers, churchwardens, and sidesmen were requested to pay attention to the streets, to see that there was no idling about and playing on the Lord's Day. In Leeds, where Sunday-schools speedily flourished, writing was taught, as well as reading religion. The aim of Sunday-schools, as conceived by the first promoters of them, is well stated in a book issued from Raikes's press: "To furnish opportunities of instruction to the children of the poorer part of the parish without interfering with any industry of the week-days; and to inure children to early habits of going to church, and to spend the leisure hours of Sunday decently and virtuously. The children are to be taught to read, and to be instructed in the plain duties of the Christian religion, with a particular aim to their good and industrious behavior in their future character of laborers and servants." The title of a book of 120 pages, printed in 1794, is "The Sunday Scholar's Companion, consisting of Scripture Sentences disposed in such order as will quickly ground Young Learners in the fundamental Doctrines of our most Holy Religion, and at the same time lead them pleasantly on from simple and easy to compound, difficult words." Returning to Gloucester, we find Raikes doing the work in the spirit that will always insure success in all such moral effort. He took great personal trouble; he met his boys at church, and often distributed rewards to them; he took pains with individual children who were refractory; he went about among the parents. Although his figure is now dim and far off, and the personal details which have| been preserved meagre enough, it is plain that Robert Raikes possessed one of those characters at once weighty and sympathetic, to which belongs, as of right, influence over others. The children, attached to him as they were, had the greatest fear of displeasing him; though his manner was gentle, and he never rebuked sharply. A number of instances of life-long gratitude and reverence on the part of old scholars are on record, which are indicative enough of the place he held in many hearts. No attempt to better social conditions ever bore more immediate fruit than did the Gloucester Sunday-schools. In 1786 we find the Gloucestershire magistrates passing a unanimous vote that "the benefit of Sunday-schools is too evident not to merit the recognition of this Bench, and the thanks of the community to the gentlemen instrumental in promoting them "; and Raikes says (May 24th, 1784), "the good effects of the Sunday-schools established in this city are instanced in the account given by the principal persons in the pin and sack manufactories. Great reformation has taken place in the multitudes whom they employ. From being idle, ungovernable, profligate, and filthy in the extreme, they say the boys and girls are become not only more cleanly and decent in their appearance, but are greatly humanized in their manners; more orderly, tractable and attentive to business, and of course, more serviceable than they ever expected to find them. Cursing and swearing, and other vile expressions, which used to form the sum of their conversation, are now very rarely heard among them." The success of the plan in Gloucester was largely due to Raikes's personality. The general spread of the Sundayschool was largely due to its success in Gloucester, and still more to the efforts Raikes made through the medium of his newspaper to describe and recommend it. His Journal circulated far beyond the county in which it was published, and Raikes also reached the outside world through the Gentleman's Magazine, the Arminian Magazine and the European Magazine. The almost immediate spread of the system may be judged of by the following extract from a private letter (of the year 1787) of Raikes to Mr. John Nichols, editor of the Gentleman's Magazine, but published in that magazine: "It is incredible with what rapidity this grain of mustard seed' has extended its branches over the nation. The third of this month (November) completes four years since I first mentioned the expediency of Sunday-schools in the Glouces ter Journal, and by the best information I am assured that the number of poor children who were heretofore as neglected as the wild ass's colt, but who are now taken into these little seminaries of instruction, amounts to 250,000. In the town of Manchester alone the schools contain 5,000. It would delight you to observe the cheerfulness with which the children attend on the Sunday. A woman told me last Sunday that her boy inquires of her every night before he goes to bed whether he has done anything in the day that will furnish a complaint against him on Sunday. You see, sir, to what care and vigilance this may lead.'” Frequently as Mr. Raikes had occasion to speak in his paper and elsewhere in print of Sunday schools and their origin, he never mentioned his own name, and he observed the same rule when he had the opportunity of speaking of the schools in 1787 to Queen Charlotte at Windsor. While he always spoke of the clergy as the agents in the Sunday-school work, his contemporaries gave him the full honor of Father of Sunday-schools; and in a private letter, written in 1787, he speaks of the "outset of the little plan I was the means of suggesting to the world." In 1785 the "Society for the Establishment and Support of Sunday-schools throughout the Kingdom of Great Britain' was founded, and in 1803 the Sunday-school Union. Sunday-schools spread rapidly in Wales. They were introduced into that part of the country by the famous Charles of Bala, and to this day they retain the peculiarity of a large attendance of adults. The Sunday-schools of Wales date from 1785, and in 1802 Mr. Charles, walking in Bala, met a little girl, of whom he asked that she should repeat the text of his last Sunday's sermon. The child wept, but was silent. At length she said: "The weather, sir, was so bad that I could not get to read the Bible." "Could not get to read the Bible !" exclaimed Mr. Charles, full of surprise. The only Bible to which the child had access was at a place seven miles off over the hills, and thither she was in the habit of going to read the chapter from which the text had been taken. This, as is well known, was the beginning of the British and Foreign Bible Society, which dates from March 7, 1804. In Scotland, as in England, though there were solitary instances of work done for children on Sunday, “Sunday teaching as a system sprang from the efforts of Robert Raikes." "In 1795, a society was formed called the Edinburgh Gratis Sunday-school Society.' But at the first, the obstacles the system had to meet with were great. They remind us of the first opposition to Foreign Missions. The Assembly of the Scottish National Church condemned in severe terms the unauthorized instructions of lay teachers, and some of the teachers were threatened with legal proceedings for violating the statutes by which teachers of religion were compelled to obtain a license and take oaths of allegiance to the Government. Some ministers stated from the pulpit that Sabbath-school teaching was a breach of the Fourth Commandment, and others threatened to exclude from the Communion of the Church all parents who sent their children to the Sabbath-schools. From some parts of Aberdeenshire Sunday-school teachers were marched into the city of Aberdeen, under the charge of constables, to account before the magistrates for their presumption. But all the opposition came to nought. The civil authorities, on learning the nature of the new institutions, wished the teachers Godspeed, and Church dignitaries soon became warm patrons of the schools they at first condemned. Those very religious bodies which passed resolutions against Sunday-schools now have annual statistical returns of their operations. In America Sunday-schools began with a feature which, honorably characterizes them still; young ladies, the first in station in society and accomplishments, were among the earliest teachers in New York. And, we may add, Christian people of the first position not merely devote their energies to Sunday-school work during their youth, but continue their personal work in the schools long after larger cares have come upon them-cares and duties which, in this country, are deemed an excuse for laying the work aside. Raikes retired from business at the age of sixty-seven. He had all along conducted his paper himself, managing, besides, a large and prosperous printing business, which, with the Gloucester Journal, had been the property of his father. Though from the year 1802 unconnected with the Journal, he drew from it till the time of his death an annuity of £300 a year. In character, wealth, and liberality, Raikes was one of the chief citizens of Gloucester. His family consisted of "six excellent girls and two lovely boys," most of whom lived to fill honorable and useful positions in society. Robert Raikes died, rather suddenly, at the age of seventy-six, on the 5th of April, in 1811. The "Life" is furnished with a photograph taken from a portrait, of which Mr. Gregory thus speaks: "In a portrait which has been preserved, Mr. Raikes appears as a rather tall, somewhat portly man, of fair complexion, and most benevolent expression of countenance. He is dressed after the fashion of the day, in a buff-coat, drab kersey mere breeches, white stockings, and low shoes." This whole-hearted Englishman was true to his work, and true to himself, to the last; for he directed that his Sunday scholars should follow him to the grave and receive a shilling apiece and a plum-cake. We see the sort of man our country and our Protestantism produce, the sort of man the great majority of us can understand and be proud of -a man full of love to wife and child, true to his God, enjoying his place in life and working manfully in it, using the fruits of his labor to show kindness to his friends, and to all manner of strangers, and devoting a large part of his time and means to set the wrong thing he found close to him right, to heal the social sores, and to bring those ignorant and out of the way to know and love that God who had made orderly, fruitful and happy his own life. I live for those who love me For the heaven that smiles above me, For the good that I can do. JOHN POUNDS AND HIS PUPILS. HIGH among Christian philanthropists should be ranked John Pounds, the cobbler, who was born in Portsmouth, England, in 1766, and died there, January 1st, 1839. In early life he was a laborer in the dockyard, but an accident disabled him from such work, and he became a cobbler, and for more than a third of a century occupied a poor tenement in his native town, where he obtained an honest subsistence by his daily toil. Not long after he had set up his humble shop he took upon himself the charge of his nephew, a feeble boy with distorted feet. He cured this distortion by a very ingenious mechanical invention of his own, which received the warm approbation of the medical faculty, and might, under more auspicious circumstances, have led him to fame and fortune. But this was not to be, and for all his life he was a poor mender of shoes; for it does not appear that he ever aspired to the honor of making a new pair. The care of his nephew opened his heart to the wants of other children alike in need of guidance and assistance, and he sought them out among the most needy and neglected classes. His second charge was the half-crippled son of a poor woman who was obliged to be absent from her home the whole day in order to obtain her livelihood. In course of time his humble workshop, situated in the basement, came to be a veritable "ragged school" for a couple of score of pupils. Not that John Pounds favored raggedness, for he encouraged his pupils to attend Sunday-school, and aided them to procure clothing in which they might make a decent appearance. Many of them could not at first be trusted with the care of their Sunday clothes. On Sabbath morning they put them on at his house, and in the evening returned the garments to him. Our illustration represents him in the midst of his double avocation of cobbler and teacher. It shows him with a dilapidated shoe on his knee, while his pupils, seated or standing around him, are variously engaged: some writing on slates from his dictation, and others reading from such tattered books or handbills as could be had for the picking up. John Pounds was not merely the teacher of these poor children. When they were well, he was the director of their sports; when they were ill, he was their doctor and nurse. He himself did not know very much, measured by any ordinary standard of education; but he faithfully taught these poor children what he knew. Those who were willing to learn, he taught how to mend an old shoe so that it should be almost as good as new; others were instructed how to prepare a palatable meal from the cheapest materials; all who would learn were taught to read and write, and to perform at least the simple operations of arithmetic. In all, his pupils numbered several hundreds, most of them attaining respectable though humble stations in life; whereas, without him, they could scarcely have failed to swell the fearful ranks of the "dangerous classes." Many men have done a larger work than fell to the lot of this English cobbler. No man ever did a more earnest and useful work. Perhaps, when the final account is made up, it will appear, as in the case of the widow and her two mites, that John Pounds has done more than any of the others who have cast their gifts into the treasury of the Lord. MUSIC is the only one of all the arts that does not corrupt the mind.-Montesquieu. DETERMINATION.-No moral culture is complete that does not include the determination which gives strength to character. In educating children spare no time or pains to inculcate habits of perseverance-no pains to teach them to have confidence in their own powers. |