Excerpt from Organizing and Building Up the Sunday SchoolThe elemental principle of the Sunday school is possibly to be found In the prophetic guilds before the Exile, and the schools of the Jewish scribes after the Restoration. The great Bible class of Ezra (neh. 8) was not unlike a modern Sunday school. Yet as an organized institution the Sunday school began with Robert Raikes, the philanthropist of Gloucester, England, who on one Sunday in 1780 called together a group of street boys in a room on Sooty Alley, and employed young women to teach them the rudiments of reading and religion. If Raikes had not happened to be the editor of the town newspaper, and in constant need of copy, his Sunday school might soon have been forgotten. But from time to time he published concerning it paragraphs which were copied into other papers and attracted attention, so that the Sooty Alley Sunday school became the parent of a vast progeny throughout the United Kingdom and beyond the seas. N o institution then in existence, or recorded in church history, suggested to Robert Raikes either the name or the plan. Both arose out of his own good heart and active mind.

But since his day both the name Sunday school and its plan of working have been perpetuated, and every Sunday school in the world is a monument to Robert Raikes, the editor of Gloucester.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.