How Did the Sunday School Begin?

Who began the Sunday church school? The answer is, a layman, philanthropist, and editor, forty-six-year-old Robert Raikes. See him walking near a pin factory on the outskirts of Gloucester, England, in the year 1781. Raikes is struck with pity at the sight of the “wretchedly ragged” children in the streets.

He stops to inquire of a passerby, who tells him that he would be shocked indeed if he were to come to this spot on a Sabbath day and observe the noise and riots, the cursing and swearing in the crowded streets which resembled nothing so much, says the man, “as the idea of hell on earth.” Not one in twenty persons can read or write in Great Britain at this time. Working six days at long hours in the factory, deprived of religious and secular teaching, these children are regarded as “little savages.”

On Sundays they roam through the countryside damaging farm products and properties and staging riots in the vicious, foul streets of the slums. Then and there Robert Raikes determines to gather these children into a school on the Sabbath to give them instruction in reading and in the church catechism.

He finds four devoted women to whom he pays a shilling each for a day’s Sabbath teaching. Robert Raikes sets out to prove that “the little vermin,” as they were called, can be made to learn.

Thus began the modern Sunday school in the compassionate heart of a layman and an editor. Raikes, himself, had to bear the smear of being called “Bobby Wild Goose.” His Sunday school they dubbed “The ragged regiment of sooty alley.”

At long last, opposition to Robert Raikes in England gradually died down as the popularity of his movement grew. Before Robert Raikes died the Queen, herself, sent for Raikes to learn the story of his work and progress, and gave his Sunday school work the stamp of royal favor.

When Robert Raikes died in 1811, there were four hundred thousand enrolled in the Sunday schools of Great Britain alone, and as a tender reminder of his love for children, each child present at his funeral, was given an English plum-cake and a shilling in accordance with his will as a further proof of his love for little children to the last.