The Duty of the Church in Relation to Sunday Schools [pp. 377-393]

Duty of the Church
by being confined to the text of our version. Every illus tration of its geography, civil and natural history, and an tiquities, is a cause of attraction to the volume itself; and no
class of publications is so favourite with ingenuous children
as those devoted to its simplification and elucidation. There
is scarcely any species of useful literature which may not be ac commodat'ed to the taste and capacity of children and youth, and,
at the same time, be profitable to a very large class of adults.
The whole range of moral biography, especially, should be
reduced to this service; for, on no minds is example more
potent in its impressions. How vast would be the moral effect of bringing up children to read all history with reference
to the providence of God! If Christian historians have so
long confined their ambition to the bare chronicling of facts,
and seen no other than their political and philosophical connexions, it is time that our children should be taught to read
on better principles.
The next generation of teachers will be principally composed of the present scholars; and this fact increases their
claim for adequate preparation at our hands. Such have been
the deficiencies or trammels of the early religious nurture of
most of us, that we go to the duty of teaching comparatively
awkward. Our scholars, on the contrary, will have the advantage of teaching to children what they have learned as
children; and when this is effected, the success of the system
will be increased in a manifold degree. To us, however, it
falls to be the pioneers, and on our age it is incumbent to furnish the ablest agents for a new era in the enterprise. These
are offices for the pious and intelligent in the Church. The
late accessions to it from the ranks of intellectual men is unprecedented, and we would earnestly direct their faculties to
a work which is not unworthy of their powers. There are
men of this class who could give a more decisive impulse to
the cause of Christianity, by bending their minds to the promotion of religious education by such means as we have designated, than by entering the ministry, or devoting their
time to oral teaching in Sunday Schools. The employment
of a few leisure hours might result in modifying the reading
of multitudes of the three millions of children in the nation.
Can a brighter and more enduring laurel be held up than
would be accorded to success in this field? Can the men,
advanced in life, and full of honours, who have at last yielded
to the claims of God, better redeem the scores of years they
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