Statistics of Least and Most Instructed Districts in England and Wales 70 THE Church of England SUNDAY SCHOOL QUARTERLY MAGAZINE. March, 1848. INTRODUCTION. EVERY thing which is brought into religious connexion with God, becomes great, expansive, and imperishable. So it was with the Thought of religious education for the children of the poor. A simple Thought, yet a great one. Imaged by love, fostered by faith, and energized by zeal, it found its incarnation in the humble Sunday school, set up at Gloucester. It was a Thought of employing intellectual capabilities for the purpose of removing religious ignorance, and thereby, moral wretchedness. It was sublimely simple, for inasmuch as its simplicity was one element of its success, to be simple where the work is gigantic, is certainly matter of wonder. Not, we add, that he who first developed the Thought, understood perhaps its magnitude. The Thought of the Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan tells us, was merely the Thought of a small tractate, he knew not till the words grew under his pen, how his mind had conceived the thought of a goodly sized volume. And so of the first Sunday school. When the group of wondering, ignorant children, stood round their teachers, the Thought seemed in its embodiment but small, yet it is now to be reckoned by a different estimate; for you must ask how many "babes around the throne," first learned to say Hosannah in a Sunday school; you must inquire how many whose earth-pilgrimage was longer, remembered, when years had intervened, the words which had fallen from their teacher's lips, and you must ascertain how vast an amount of social peace and welfare, is the product of Sunday school instruction, before you can rightly tell the dimensions of that Thought which hath been thus fruitful. |