SUNDAY-SCHOOL WORK: ITS SPHERE AND ITS METHODS.

BY REV. H. CLAY TRUMBULL, OF PHILADELPHIA, PA.

IN coming before this National Council, at the request of its Provisional Committee, to read a paper upon Sunday-school work, I wish to have it distinctly understood that I am here not as a "Sunday-school man," but as a church-man. "I believe in the Holy Catholic Church"; and if the intensity of my conviction that the church of Christ is the one agency which God has ordained for the evangelizing of the world, and for the upbuilding of his people in faith and knowledge, is to be accepted as an index of my relative standing among lovers of that all-inclusive agency for good to a fallen race, then I am glad to be known as a very high church-man.

Christ is the head of the church." The church" is his body." He "loved" it, and "gave himself for it." It is that "which he hath purchased with his own blood," and which he "nourisheth and cherisheth." Unto it are "committed the oracles of God." To it are the commands, " Preach the gospel to every creature." and Teach all nations," the encouragement, "Lo, I am with you alway," and the promise," The gates of hell shall not prevail against it." The church shares its responsibility and its work with none. It brooks no rival as the "Bride of Christ." The Bridegroom himself has said, " If thy brother . . . neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as a heathen man and a publican." Unless, therefore, the Sunday school could be fairly recognized as a duly constituted department of the church of Christ, I would turn from it at once, and give my strength and energies to some legitimate sphere of church influence and activity.

But believing, as I do, that the Sunday school is a divinely ordained and approved department of the church of Christ, of equal validity and antiquity with pulpit preaching, I am glad to stand here and urge upon these brethren and fathers in the ministry, and these Christian laymen, the duty of rendering the Sunday school more widely and wisely efficient for the service to which it was originally set of God. And to guard against possible misconceptions of my meaning just here, it may be well for me to state

what I mean by the Sunday school, and how I understand it to have been divinely ordained and approved.

a

By the Sunday school I mean that department of the church in which Bible truth is taught by form of question and answer, to scholars gathered in groups under intelligent and disciplined teachers. To say nothing of the earlier centuries of this teaching, from the days of Abraham to the coming of our Lord Jesus, it is sufficient now to say that at the birth of Jesus it prevailed in all the Jewish synagogues. The morning service of the synagogue was a service of worship supplemented by promiscuous words of exhortation. This was followed by a religious school session, Bible school, a divinity school, where the teachers sat raised above their scholars on cushions or benches, and their classes gathered below and about them Saul and his fellow-pupils at the feet of Gamaliel for the full discussion of religious truth, in the course of which questions were asked and answered with the utmost freedom alike by the young and the old. In so high esteem was this school session held among the godly Jews that, as the Talmud informs us, they had it for a common proverb concerning the duty of the true Israelite, "From the synagogue to the divinity school,” or, in modern parlance, "From the forenoon church service to the Sunday school.

That Jesus was himself a member of the Sunday school of his day hardly admits of an intelligent doubt. Indeed, the single glimpse which is given to us out of all his boyhood life shows him in one of these "divinity-school" gatherings at Jerusalem; and when his anxious mother, finding him there, tells how long and in how many places she has sought him, sorrowing, his prompt answer, "How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" to me seems to say, "Why did you look elsewhere? Did you not know I would be in the Sunday school?" There he was, with, perchance, "the now aged Hillel the looser, and Shammai the binder, and the wise sons of Betirah, and Rabban Simeon, Hillel's son, and Jonathan the paraphrast, the greatest of his pupils," sitting among them, questioning and being questioned, according to the method which prevailed in such schools throughout the Holy Land.

And when Jesus commissioned his disciples to the formation and guidance of his church, he enjoined it upon them not only to preach the gospel everywhere, and to receive new members into the church by administering the rite of baptism, but to do the work of train

ing the converts by "teaching them to observe all things whatsoever" he had commanded. This term "teaching" was, I am confident, understood by the disciples to mean instructing through the method of question and answer. In other words, Jesus, in the "Great Commission," commanded his disciples to win converts through preaching, and to train converts by the Sunday school, by the church school in which teachers gather the scholars in groups, and instruct them catechetically.

At once this teaching work was begun in the Christian church. The term "instructed," as applied to Theophilus and Apollos and the representative Jew in Romans, means literally" catechised," as Alford says; the original term (katekeo) signifying, according to Melancthon and more recent scholars, "that method of teaching in which the utterances of the Master are called forth by questions." As the church extended its area, Mosheim declares, "Schools were erected everywhere from the beginning"; and of the days of Clement and Origen - the second and third centuries - Dr. Proudfit concludes, "In such high estimation was the business of catechetical instruction then held as to command the whole time and labor of the greatest minds of the church. . And in like estimation it continued to be held so long as truth was looked upon as the proper glory and power of Christianity, and the teaching of truth as the great means of converting souls, and rearing up a holy posterity to perpetuate the church. But when the ecclesiastical spirit overcame the evangelical, . . . catechetical instruction, of course, declined." From the earlier centuries down to the present time, all the history of the Christian church goes to show that only when the church school - the Sunday school, as we now call it has been given the place which our Lord assigned to it in the original plan of his church, has there been substantial progress made in the upbuilding of any body of Christian believers in the knowledge of God's Word and in the practice of its precepts. As Bishop Jebb affirmed, "In exact proportion as catechising has been practised or neglected, in the same proportion have the public faith or morals been seen to flourish or decline."

Do not misunderstand me. Every great reform has been brought about through preaching. Christendom has been aroused from its sloth and stimulated to new life and activity by the trumpet voice of the faith-filled preacher. Inspiration to achievement and progress has come, not by the schools, but by the pulpit. Preaching has been and is to be the pre-eminent agency to convict and win

sinners and to exhort and guide saints, but the religious training of any people has been attained, and the results of any reformation have been made permanent, only through a process of teaching, by the Sunday school or its substantial equivalent. As the decline of catechetical instruction presaged the dark ages of the middle centuries, so, on the other hand, every revival of true church life has been accompanied and made effective by a return to the catechetical mode of instruction; and those branches of the church which have retained their spiritual vitality in seasons of general religious declension have invariably given prominence to this method of teaching.

The New England religious record is a striking illustration of this universal truth. Our pilgrim fathers had no thought of building up a Christian commonwealth through the family and the pulpit alone. They gave large prominence to the teaching idea. Their religion covered seven days in the week, and they practically gave five days to the Sunday-school idea by having religious truth taught catechetically, although by an imperfect plan, in the public school. No wonder, then, that they wanted all of Sunday for preaching! But the vicious element in their system was the union of Church and State, and the trouble with their form of Sunday school was, that it was turned over to the civil authorities. When the public schools were gradually secularized, the people were left without the Sunday school, and the religious decline of the community was a consequence, as it is sure to be with any people who have only the family and the pulpit as the means of religious instruction. Error and unbelief came in like a flood, and all things pure and lovely and of good report were being swept away from the face of New England, when in the good providence of God a new barrier was reared against the devastating forces by the introduction of the modern Sunday school, of the original church school of Christianity, in its new and improved form. And from that day to this the religious elevation and progress of New England have kept pace with the extension and improvement of the Sunday school. In any examination into the rise and decline of scepticism in New England, it is giving prominence to the secondary rather than the primary causes which emphasizes the particular forms of error which made their appearance in the pulpits of that region, and the subsequent new presentations of truth by the preachers which met successfully the popular heresies. Scepticism and error were inevitable in New England when a generation arose with no training in

the Sunday school. It is never safe to leave the membership of the church so uninstructed in Bible truth as to render it possible for false doctrine to be proclaimed unnoticed in the pulpit. Scepticism and error again lost their hold in New England when the children and their parents were brought through the Sunday school to search the Scriptures daily, whether the things affirmed by their ministers were true. This is, in substance, the story of religious progress and decline everywhere.

That the Sunday school has not been commonly recognized as a formal department of the church, doing a work specifically commanded of God, is as undeniable as that it ought to be thus accepted. That it is more and more widely looked upon in this light is one of the hopeful signs of progress. A church without its teaching service is surely a sadly imperfect church. If a church prosecutes its work of teaching through the Sunday school in its present form, then its Sunday school is a department of its organization of like legitimacy with its pulpit. If, however, a church refuses to accept the Sunday school as now constituted for the doing of its teaching work, then it is bound to employ some other method of conforming to the command of the Great Commission, by teaching God's Word catechetically to the people of its charge. At all events, the Sunday school as it is, or the Sunday school reorganized and improved, must be counted an essential and a divinely sanctioned department of every duly constituted local church. And the recognition of this fact brings into immediate prominence certain important church duties toward the Sunday school which have been too often overlooked or ignored.

(1.) Each church must hold itself responsible for the teaching given in its Sunday school; and this of course involves the duty of choosing its teachers and of training them for and in their work. The superintendent of the school should be a recognized church officer in charge of the school management, subject, of course, to church oversight. His assisting teachers, selected by himself as "faithful men [and women] who shall be able to teach others also," should be approved by the church; and they as well as he should be formally and publicly inducted into station. Those who are already teachers and those who are candidates for this position should have the advantage of thorough instruction in both the matter and manner of teaching, that they may become "apt to teach," and may speak "the things which become sound doctrine."

(2.) Time enough, and at proper hours, must be given to the