CHAPTER X

THE REVIVAL BECOMES EDUCATIONAL.—ROBERT RAIKES.

In the year 1880 was celebrated in England and America the centenary of Sunday-schools. The life and labours of Robert Raikes, whose name has long been familiar as “a household word” in connection with such institutions, were reviewed, and fresh interest added to that early work for the young.

Gloucestershire, if not one of the largest, is certainly one of the fairest—as, indeed, its name is said to imply: from _Glaw_, an old British word signifying “fair”—it is one of the fairest, and it ought to be one of the most famous, counties of England. Many are its distinguished worthies: John de Trevisa was Vicar of Berkeley, in Gloucestershire, and a contemporary with John Wyclif, and, like him, he had a strong aversion to the practices of the Church of Rome, and an earnest desire to make the Scriptures known to his parishioners; and in Nibley, in Gloucestershire, was born, and lived, William Tyndale, in whose noble heart the great idea sprang up that Christian Englishmen should read the New Testament in their own mother-tongue, and who said to a celebrated priest, “If God spares my life, I will take care that a plough-boy shall know more of the Scriptures than you do.” The story of the great translator and martyr is most interesting. Gloucestershire has been famous, too, for its contributions to the noble army of martyrs, notably, not only James Baynham, but, in Gloucester, its bishop, John Hooper, was in 1555 burnt to death. In Berkeley the very distinguished physician, and first promulgator of the doctrine of vaccination, Dr. Edward Jenner, the son of the vicar, was born; and from the Old Bell, in Gloucester, went forth the wonderful preacher George Whitefield, to arouse the sleeping Church in England and America from its lethargy. The quaint old proverb to which we have already alluded—“As sure as God is in Gloucestershire”—was very complimentary, but not very correct; it arose from the amazing ecclesiastical wealth of the county, which was so rich that it attracted the notice of the papal court, and four Italian bishops held it in succession for fifty years; one of these, Giulio de Medici, became Pope Clement VII., succeeding Pope Leo X. in the papacy in 1523. This eminent ecclesiastical fame no doubt originated the proverb; but it acquired a tone of reality and truth rather from the martyrdom of its bishop than from the elevation of his predecessor to the papal tiara; rather from Tyndale, William Sarton, and his brother weaver-martyrs, than from its costly and magnificent endowments; from Whitefield and Jenner rather than from its crowd of priests and friars.

Thus Gloucestershire has certainly considerable eminence among English counties. To other distinguished names must be added that of Robert Raikes, who must ever be regarded as the founder of Sabbath-schools. It is not intended by this that there had never been any attempts made to gather the children on the Sabbath for some kind of religious instruction—although such attempts were very few, and a diligent search has probably brought them all [?] under our knowledge; but the example and the influence of Raikes gave to the idea the character of a movement; it stirred the whole country, from the throne itself, the King and Queen, the bishops, and the clergy; all classes of ministers and laymen became interested in what was evidently an easy and happy method of seizing upon the multitudes of lost children who in that day were “perishing for lack of knowledge.”

Mr. Joseph Stratford, in his _Biographical Sketches of the Great and Good Men in Gloucestershire_, and Mr. Alfred Gregory, in his _Life of Robert Raikes_—to which works we must confess our obligation for much of the information contained in this chapter—have both done honour to the several humbler and more obscure labourers whose hearts were moved to attempt the work to which Raikes gave a national importance, and which from his hands, and from his time, became henceforth a perpetual institution in the Church work of every denomination of Christian believers and labourers. The Rev. Joseph Alleine, the author of _The Alarm to the Unconverted_, an eminent Nonconformist minister of Taunton, adopted the plan of gathering the young people together for instruction on the Lord’s day. Even in Gloucestershire, before Raikes was born, in the village of Flaxley, on the borders of the Forest of Dean—Flaxley, of which the poet Bloomfield sings:

“’Mid depths of shade gay sunbeams broke Through noble Flaxley’s bowers of oak; Where many a cottage, trim and gay, Whispered delight through all the way:”

in the old Cistercian Abbey, Mrs. Catharine Boevey, the lady of the abbey, had one of the earliest and pleasantest Sabbath-schools. Her monument in Flaxley Church, erected after her death in 1726, records her “clothing and feeding her indigent neighbours, and teaching their children, some of whom she entertained at her house, and examined them herself.” Six of the poor children, it is elsewhere stated, “by turns dined at her residence on Sundays, and were afterwards heard say the Catechism.”

We read of a humbler labourer, realising, perhaps, more the idea of a Sabbath-school teacher, in Bolton, in Lancashire, James Hey, or “Old Jemmy o’ th’ Hey.” Old Jemmy, Mr. Gregory tells us, employed the working days of the week in winding bobbins for weavers, and on Sundays he taught the boys and girls of the neighbourhood to read. His school assembled twice each Sunday, in the cottage of a neighbour, and the time of commencing was announced, not by the ringing of a bell, but by an excellent substitute, an old brass pestle and mortar. After a while, Mr. Adam Compton, a paper manufacturer in the neighbourhood, began to supply Jemmy with books, and subscriptions in money were given him; he was thus enabled to form three branch establishments, the teachers of which were paid one shilling each Sunday for their services. Besides these there are several other instances: in 1763 the Rev. Theophilus Lindsey established something like a Sunday-school at Catterick, in Yorkshire; at High Wycombe, in 1769, Miss Hannah Ball, a young Methodist lady, formed a Sunday-school in her town; and at Macclesfield that admirable and excellent man, the Rev. David Simpson, originated a similar plan of usefulness; and, contemporary with Mr. Raikes, in the old Whitefield Tabernacle, at Dursley, in Gloucestershire, we find Mr. William King, a woollen card-maker, attempting the work of teaching on a Sunday, and coming into Gloucester to take counsel with Mr. Raikes as to the best way of carrying it forward. Such, scattered over the face of the country, at great distances, and in no way representing a general plan of useful labour, were the hints and efforts before the idea took what may be called an apostolic shape in the person of Robert Raikes.

Notwithstanding the instances we have given, Mr. Raikes must really be regarded as the founder of Sunday-schools as an extended organisation. With him they became more than a notion, or a mere piece of local effort; and his position and profession, and the high respect in which he was held in the city in which he lived, all alike enabled him to give publicity to the plan: and before he commenced this movement, he was known as a philanthropist; indeed, John Howard himself bears something like the same relation to prison philanthropy which Raikes bears to Sunday-schools. No one doubts that Howard was the great apostle of prisons; but it seems that before he commenced his great prison crusade, Raikes had laboured diligently to reform the Gloucester gaol. The condition of the prisoners was most pitiable, and Raikes, nearly twenty years before he commenced the Sunday-school system, had been working among them, attempting their material, moral, and spiritual improvement, by which he had earned for himself the designation of the “Teacher of the Poor.” Howard visited Raikes in Gloucester, and bears his testimony to the blessedness and benevolence of his labours in the prison there; and the gaol appears not unnaturally to have suggested the idea of the Sunday-school to the benevolent-hearted man. It was a dreadful state of society. Some idea may be formed of it from a paragraph in the _Gloucester Journal_ for June, 1783, the paper of which Raikes was the editor and proprietor: it is mentioned that no less than sixty-six persons were committed to the Castle in one week, and Mr. Raikes adds, “The prison is already so full that all the gaoler’s stock of fetters is occupied, and the smiths are hard at work casting new ones.” He goes on to say: “The people sent in are neither disappointed soldiers nor sailors, but chiefly frequenters of ale-houses and skittle-alleys.” Then, in another paragraph, he goes on to remark, “The ships about to sail for Botany Bay will carry about one thousand miserable creatures, who might have lived perfectly happy in this country had they been early taught good principles, and to avoid the danger of associating with those who make sobriety and industry the objects of their ridicule.”

From sentences like these it is easy to see the direction in which the mind of the good man was moving, before he commenced the work which has given such a happy and abiding perpetuity to his name. He gathered the children; the streets were full of noise and disturbances every Sunday. In a little while, says the Rev. Dr. Glass, Mr. Raikes found himself surrounded by such a set of little ragamuffins as would have disgusted other men less zealous to do good, and less earnest to disseminate comfort, exhortation, and benefit to all around him, than the founder of Sunday-schools. He prevented their running about in wild disorder through the streets. By and by, he arranged that a number of them should meet him at seven o’clock on the Sunday morning in the cathedral close, when he and they all went into the cathedral together to an early service. The increase of the numbers was rapid; Mr. Raikes was looked up to as the commander-in-chief of this ragged regiment. It is testified that a change took place and passed over the streets of the old Gloucester city on the Sunday. A glance at the features of Mr. Raikes will assure the reader that he was an amiable and gentle man, but that by no means implies always a weak one. He appears to have had plenty of strength, self-possession, and knowledge of the world. He also belonged to, and moved in, good society; and this is not without its influence. As he told the King, in the course of a long interview, when the King and Queen sent for him to Windsor, to talk over his system with him, in order that they might, in some sense, be his disciples, and adopt and recommend his plan: it was “botanising in human nature.” “All that I require,” said Raikes, to the parents of the children, “are clean hands, clean faces, and their hair combed.” To many who were barefooted, after they had shown some regularity of attendance, he gave shoes, and others he clothed. Yes, it was “botanising in human nature;” and very many anecdotes show what flowers sprang up out of the black soil in the path of the good man.

All the stories told of Raikes show that the law of kindness was usually on his lips. A sulky, stubborn girl had resisted all reproofs and correction, and had refused to ask forgiveness of her mother. In the presence of the mother, Raikes said to the girl, “Well, if you have no regard for yourself, I have much for you. You will be ruined and lost if you do not become a good girl; and if you will not humble yourself, I must humble myself on your behalf and make a beginning for you;” and then, with great solemnity, he entreated the mother to forgive the girl, using such words that he overcame the girl’s pride. The stubborn creature actually fell on her knees, and begged her mother’s forgiveness, and never gave Mr. Raikes or her mother trouble afterwards. It is a very simple anecdote; but it shows the Divine spirit in the method of the man; and the more closely we come into a personal knowledge of his character, the more admirable and lovable it seems. Thus literally true and beautiful are the words of the hymn:

“Like a lone husbandman, forlorn, The man of Gloucester went, Bearing his seeds of precious corn; And God the blessing sent.

Now, watered long by faith and prayer, From year to year it grows, Till heath, and hill, and desert bare, Do blossom as the rose.”

Mr. Raikes was a Churchman; he was so happy as to have, near to his own parish of St. Mary-le-Crypt, in Gloucester, an intimate friend, the Rector of St. Aldate’s—a neighbouring parish in the same city—the Rev. Thomas Stock, whose monument in the church truly testifies that “to him, in conjunction with Robert Raikes, Esquire, is justly attributed the honour of having planned and instituted the first Sunday-school in the kingdom.” Mr. Stock was but a young man in 1780, for he died in 1803, then only fifty-four years of age; he must have been, at the time of the first institution of Sunday-schools, a young man of fine and tender instincts. He appears, simultaneously with Mr. Raikes’s movement, to have formed a Sunday-school in his own parish, taking upon himself the superintendence of it, and the responsibility of such expenses as it involved. But Mr. Stock says, in a letter written in 1788, “The progress of the institution through the kingdom is justly attributed to the constant representations which Mr. Raikes made in his own paper of the benefits which he saw would probably arise from it.” At the time Mr. Raikes began the work, he was about forty-four years of age; it was a great thing in that day to possess a respectable journal, a newspaper of acknowledged character and influence; to this, very likely, we owe it, in some considerable measure, that the work in Gloucester became extensively known and spread, and expanded into a great movement. But he does not appear to have used the columns of his newspaper for the purpose of calling attention to the usefulness and desirability of the work until after it had been in operation about three years; in 1783 and 1784, very modestly he commends the system to general adoption.

It is remarkable that in the course of two or three years, several bishops—the Bishop of Gloucester, in the cathedral, the Bishops of Chester and Salisbury, in their charges to the clergy of their dioceses—strongly commended the plan. All orders of mind poured around the movement their commendation; even Adam Smith, whom no one will think likely to have fallen into exaggerated expressions where Christian activity is concerned, said, “No plan has promised to effect a change of manners with equal ease and simplicity, since the days of the apostles.” The poet Cowper declared that he knew of no nobler means by which a reformation of the lower classes could be effected. Some attempts have been made to claim for John Wesley the honour of inaugurating the Sunday-school system; considering the intensely practical character of that venerated man, and how much he was in advance of his times in most of his activities, it is a wonder that he did not; but his venerable memory has honours, certainly, in all sufficiency. He wrote his first commendation of Sunday-schools in the _Arminian Magazine_ of 1784. He says, “I find these schools spring up wherever I go; perhaps God may have a deeper end therein than men are aware of; who knows but that some of these schools may become nurseries for Christians?” Prophetic as these words are, this is fainter and tardier praise than we should have expected from him; but in 1787 he writes more warmly, expresses his belief that these schools will be one great means of reviving religion throughout the kingdom, and expresses “wonder that Satan has not sent out some able champion against them.” In 1788 he says: “I verily think that these schools are one of the noblest specimens of charity which have been set on foot in England since the days of William the Conqueror.”

Some estimate may be formed of the rapidity with which the movement spread, when we find that in this year, 1787, the number of children taught in Sunday-schools in Manchester alone, on the testimony of the very eminent John Nichols, the great printer and anecdotist, was no fewer than five thousand. It was in this year also, 1787, that Mr. Raikes was visiting some relatives in the neighbourhood of Windsor. He must have attained to the dignity of a celebrity; nor is this wonderful, when we remember the universal acceptance with which his great idea of Sunday-schools had been honoured. The Queen invited him to visit her, and inquired of him, he says, “by what accident a thought which promised so much benefit to the lower order of people as the institution of Sunday-schools, was suggested to his mind?” The visit was a long one; he spent two hours with the Queen—the King also, we believe, being present most of the time—not so much in expounding the system, for that was simple enough, but they were curious as to what he had observed in the change and improvement of the characters among whom he worked; and we believe that it was then he told the King, in the words we have already quoted, that he regarded his work as a kind of “botanising in human nature;” this was a favourite phrase of his in describing the work. The result of this visit was, that the Queen established a Sunday-school in Windsor, and also a school of industry at Brentford, which the King and Queen occasionally visited. It may be taken as an illustration of the native modesty of Mr. Raikes’s own character that he never referred in his paper to this distinguished notice of royalty.

Do our readers know anything of Mrs. Sarah Trimmer? A hundred years ago, there was, probably, not a better-known woman in England; and although her works have long ceased to exercise any influence, we suppose none, in her time, were more eminently useful. Pious, devoted, earnestly evangelical, if we speak of her as a kind of lesser Hannah More, the remark must apply to her intellectual character rather than to her reputation or her usefulness. Almost as soon as the Sunday-school idea was announced, she stepped forward as its most able and intrepid advocate; her _Economy of Charity_ exercised a large influence, and she published a number of books, which, at that time, were admirably suited to the level of the capacity which the Sunday-school teacher desired to reach; she was also a great favourite with the King and Queen, and appears to have visited them on the easy terms of friendship. The intense interest she felt in Sunday-schools is manifest in innumerable pages of the two volumes which record her life; certainly, she was often at the ear of the royal pair, to whisper any good and pleasant thing connected with the progress of her favourite thought. She repeatedly expresses her obligation to Mr. Raikes; but her biographer only expresses the simple truth when he says: “To Mr. Raikes, of Gloucester, the nation is, in the first place, indebted for the happy idea of collecting the children of the poor together on the Sabbath, and giving them instruction suited to the sacredness of the day; but, perhaps, no publication on this subject was of more utility than the _Economy of Charity_. The influence of the work was very visible when it first made its appearance, and proved a source of unspeakable gratification to the author.”

It is not consistent with the aim of this book to enter at greater length into the life of Robert Raikes; we have said sufficient to show that the term which has been applied to him of “founder of Sunday-schools,” is not misapplied. He was a simple and good man, on whose heart, as into a fruitful soil, an idea fell, and it became a realised conviction. Look at his portrait, and instantly there comes to your mind Cowper’s well-known description of one of his friends,

“An honest man, close-buttoned to the chin, Broadcloth without, and a warm heart within.”

No words can better describe him—not a tint of fanaticism seems to shade his character; he had a warm enthusiasm for ends and aims which commended themselves to his judgment. It is pleasant to know that, as he lived when the agitation for the abolition of the slave trade was commencing, he gave to the movement his hearty blessings and best wishes. At sixty-seven years of age he retired from business; no doubt a very well-to-do man, for he was the owner of two freehold estates near Gloucester, and he received an annuity of three hundred pounds from the _Gloucester Journal_. He died at his house in Bell Lane, in the city of Gloucester, where he had taken up his residence when he retired from active life; he died suddenly, in his seventy-sixth year, in 1811. Then the family vault in St. Mary-le-Crypt, which sixty years before had received his father’s ashes, received the body of the gentle philanthropist. He had kept up his Sunday-school work and interest to the close; and he left instructions that his Sunday-school children should be invited to follow him to the grave, and that each of them should receive a shilling and a plum cake. On the tablet over the place where he sleeps an appropriate verse of Scripture well describes him: “When the ear heard me, then it blessed me; and when the eye saw me, it gave witness to me: because I delivered the poor that cried, and the fatherless, and him that had none to help him. The blessing of him that was ready to perish came upon me: and I caused the widow’s heart to sing for joy.”

It seems very questionable whether the slightest shade can cross the memory of this plain, simply useful, and unostentatious man. And it ought to be said that Anne Raikes, who rests in the same grave, appears to have been every way the worthy companion of her husband. She was the daughter of Thomas Trigg, Esq., of Newnham, in Gloucestershire; the sister of Sir Thomas Trigg and Admiral John Trigg. They were married in 1767. She shared in all her husband’s large and charitable intentions, and when he died he left the whole of his property to her. She survived him seventeen years, and died in 1828, at the age of eighty-five.

The visitor to Gloucester will be surely struck by a quaint old house in Southgate Street—still standing almost unaltered, save that the basement is now divided into two shops. A few years since the old oak timbers were braced, stained, and varnished. It is a fine specimen of the better class of English residences of a hundred and fifty years since, and is still remarkable in the old city, owing very much to the good taste which governed their renovation. This was the printing-office of Robert Raikes, a notice in the _Gloucester Journal_, dated August 19, 1758, announcing his removal from Blackfriars Square to this house in Southgate Street. The house now is in the occupation of Mrs. Watson. The house where Raikes lived and died is nearly opposite. It will not be difficult for the spectator to realise the pleasant image of the old gentleman, dressed, after the fashion of the day, in his blue coat with gold buttons, buff waistcoat, drab kerseymere breeches, white stockings, and low shoes, passing beneath those ancient gables, and engaged in those various public and private duties which we have attempted to record. A century has passed away since then, and the simple lessons the philanthropist attempted to impart to the young waifs and strays he gathered about him have expanded into more comprehensive departments of knowledge. The originator of Sunday-schools would be astonished were he to step into almost any of those which have branched out from his leading idea. It is still expanding; it is one of the most real and intense activities of the Universal Church; but among the immense crowds of those who, in England and America, are conducting Sunday-school classes, it is, perhaps, not too much to say, that in not one is there a more simple and earnest desire to do good than that which illuminated the life, and lends a sweet and charming interest to the memory, of Robert Raikes.