THE POPULATION OF INDIA is two hundred and forty millions of souls, or nearly eight times the population of the British Isles. These people speak more than a hundred languages or dialects. THE NUMBER OF CHILDREN of a school-going age in India is said to be forty millions, of whom less than two hundred thousand attend Christian schools. THE NUMBER OF ENGLISH BAPTIST MISSIONARIES in India is forty, or one to six millions of people. Were the country equally divided among these forty missionaries, there would be to each man an area five times as large as Wales, and a population five times as numerous. Were India provided with Baptist missionaries as Wales is with ministers, instead of having forty, it would have ninety-six thousand! A LITTLE ONE SHALL BECOME A THOUSAND.-Fifty years ago, Kothah-byu, the first convert among the Karens, was baptized in Burmah. His wife was present at the fiftieth anniversary of his baptism, which was kept in May last by the dedication of a large memorial hall for public worship. She was the first Karen woman who was baptized, yet the mission has now 438 churches, and a membership of nearly 20,000. PASTORS, IS IT TRUE?-Dr. Christlieb said at the meeting of the Evangelical Alliance at Bale: "In Germany we have a great want of money with which to send the numbers of men who offer themselves for missionary work. You in England and America are in want of men. We send you many. The Moravian Church contributes four shillings per member; Saxony and Wittemburg, 23d. per member. What is the cause of so great a discrepancy? It is to be attributed chiefly to the attitude of the pastors." Would the list of our gifts to Home and Foreign Missions and the College verify that verdict ?"G. B. Almanack for 1880. A HINDOO, who had become a Christian, first had a Bible given him and afterwards a clock. "The clock will tell me how time goes, and the Bible will teach me how to spend it," said the old man. Received on account of the General Baptist Missionary Society from November 16th, Subscriptions and Donations in aid of the General Baptist Missionary Society will be thankfully received by W. B. BEMBRIDGE, Esq., Ripley, Derby, Treasurer; and by the Rev. W. HILL, Secretary, Crompton Street, Derby, from whom also Missionary Boxes, Collecting Books and Cards may be obtained. Sunday Schools and Modern England. No. II.-YOUNG ENGLAND BEFORE GOING TO SCHOOL. I HAVE striven hard to obtain a true idea of those English Youths whose condition a century, or a century and a quarter ago, first_suggested the thought that they might be taught to read on a Sundaythat latter " a possibility," as John Foster acutely says, "which had never been suspected before; a disclosure as of some hitherto hidden power of nature."* The evidence, unfortunately, and very suggestively, is slight in amount, and by no means definite and unambiguous in meaning. Children generally were not of sufficient importance then to be taken much note of. Nobody cared to collect statistics of juvenile crime; and few dreamt of investing labour on youthful lives for the sake of receiving the ample returns of the matured virtues of manhood and womanhood. No Pepys or Evelyn recorded the proofs of juvenile ignorance and vice; and no Raikes was yet at hand to declare the connection between the training of the sapling to-day, and the character of the oak to-morrow. Extreme darkness prevailed in the England of George the First as to the duty and advantage of educating the youth of Great Britain in knowledge, in wisdom, and in goodness. The people were perishing for lack of knowledge; and few could see the simple and obvious law, it has taken us so long to learn, that the way to life was to begin at the beginning. Judging from the general features of English life at the dawn of Modern England, near the middle of the last century, and guided by the scant information we have of the actual condition of the children of this country, we cannot err in concluding that the first pupils of Sunday Schools were in a hideously deplorable state. The moral atmosphere they breathed was enervating and destructive to the last degree. Mental and spiritual food they had none. The light of truth was so beclouded, that if they wished to see it they could not. The examples they saw at home and abroad were pernicious in the extreme, and but for a few BRIGHT SPOTS, few compared with the general condition of the country, no one conversant with the facts could do other than predict a period of thickening gloom and ghastly disaster for the land. But such bright spots there were. Some few children were exceptionally favoured. There were homes where the law of the Lord was studied day and night; where Zacharias and Elizabeth were both righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless, and their offspring had breathed into them from the birth the breath of the Spirit of the Lord. The Epworth rectory contained an exemplary family, living an exemplary life. The mother of John and Charles Wesley was a true Hannah, devoting her children to God, and nourishing within them an inspiring and saving faith in His love. In the home of a humble Dissenter at Southampton the * Popular Ignorance, by John Foster, p. 84. GENERAL BAPTIST MAGAZINE, FEBRUARY, 1880.—Vol. LXXXII.-N. S. No. 122. sweet singer of the British Israel was being trained for his future ministry, and as a child had already learnt the meaning of the truths he penned in the acrostic on his own name "Wash me in Thy blood, O Christ, A nd grace divine impart; Then search and try the corners of my heart, Service to Thee, and sing Thy praises too."* The mother of the famous Dr. Samuel Johnson not only taught him to pray, but also impressed his mind with moral truths he never forgot. Dutch tiles were used by Mrs. Doddridge to teach her boy, Philip, the histories of the Old and New Testaments. Later on Sir William Jones found himself indebted to his home training both for his intellectual acumen, and his religious principles. John Newton tells us that his mother made it the chief business and pleasure of her life to instruct him, and to bring him up "in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." Cecil was led by reading "Janeway's Token for Children," the gift of his mother, to desire to know Christ whilst a boy; and old John Foster rarely closed a day, his son tells us,† without praying, with great solemnity and earnestness, for the two boys that knelt at the family altar, saying, "O, Lord, bless the lads!" Moreover, there were, on the one hand, additions made to the charity schools of the country; and, on the other, there were a few men, prophets of the coming era of enthusiastic effort on behalf of young human life, like Fletcher, of Madeley, who says, in sweet and saintly strain, "The birds of my fine wood have almost done singing; but I have met with a parcel of children whose hearts seem turned towards singing the praises of God, and we sing every day from four to five." And again he says, "The day I preached I met with some children in my wood, walking or gathering strawberries. I spoke to them about our Father, our common Father: we felt a touch of brotherly affection. They said they would sing to their Father as well as the birds. outrode them they had the patience to follow me home. The people of the house stopped them, saying, I would not be troubled with children. They cried, and said they were sure I would not say so, for I was their good brother. The next day I inquired after them, and invited them to come to me, which they have done every day since."§ In a similar spirit, and about the same time, the Hon. and Rev. W. B. Cadogan, Vicar of St. Luke's, Chelsea, laboured hard for the children of his parish, took great pains to initiate them into the church, became the principal manager of the charity schools, and publicly catechised his pupils. But facts like these were extremely rare in the middle of the last century, and only appear with distinctness and power as the Evangelical Revival is beginning to assert its influence upon the stupor and supineness of the age. Like brilliant stars in the deep sky, they are grand in their very loneliness, and owe much of their glory to the absence of that solar radiance of love and wisdom which should have been diffused around the homes and hearts of the English youth. Burder's Memoirs of Watts, p. xi. + Foster's Life, vol. I., p. 8. Addison, Guardian, p. 105. Lecky's History of the Eighteenth Century, vol. II., p. 546. SUNDAY SCHOOLS AND MODERN ENGLAND. 43 THE GENERAL CONDITION OF THE COUNTRY. But turning away from these exceptional instances of conspicuous solicitude for the welfare of the young, and looking far and near in the dawning hour of modern England, what do we see? The general character of a home is not only a fair index to the possibilities of the children that dwell therein, but also a revelation of their condition and attainments. Very favourable and special circumstances must exist for the children of a country to rise far above the average of the intellectual and moral life of their surroundings. If, then, we can discover the England of 1742, we may get a photograph of the first form of pupils that entered our Sunday schools. Materially the country was in a splendid condition. Judged by the clamour of the markets, the clink of the money-bags, the growth of population, the rise of manufactures, the state of national finance, the sun of prosperity shone with meridian splendour. George the First, in 1724, congratulated the country on its possession of "peace with all the powers abroad; at home perfect tranquility, plenty, an uninterrupted enjoyment of all civil and religious rights."* But everywhere else the earlier years of England's Hanoverian period are beclouded with PAINFUL MORAL GLOOM, and covered with dense and blinding fogs. All classes are hideously vicious, from the sovereign on the throne to the children in the gutter. The nobility are dissipated, drunken, and debauched. The middle classes are coarse and mercenary, apathetic and selfish. The lower classes are soaked in immoralities, drugged with the opiates of sensualism, brutal and barbarous. Cock-fighting is a coveted sport, and bull-baiting a popular pastime. Swearing is a mark of good breeding. Gin drinking spreads with the fierce virulence of an epidemic. Riots are frequent; and robberies are committed in the streets in day light with impunity, so that, as Horace Walpole says, men are obliged to travel at noon as if they were going to a battle." The young find their delight in rough and savage sports; the chastity of women is energetically despised; drunkenness is a fashionable grace; gambling is a "gentlemanly" occupation; conjugal fidelity is a contemptible excess of virtue; and any violence short of murder is good fun. A generation of prodigious material prosperity had brought to a head the ulcerous evils which had festered in the English nation for more than a century, and made the demand for a sharp and severe remedy irresistible.† No doubt * Green's History of the English People, p. 710. + Johnson says to Boswell, "I remember when all the decent people of Lichfield got drunk every night." A contemporary says of 1729-30, "Luxury created necessities; and this drove the lower ranks into the most abandoned wickedness." Horace Walpole, in his Memoirs of King George II. (vol. I, c. II., p. 49), says, "The vices of the lower people were increased to a degree of robbery and murder beyond example." Bishop Benson, quoted by Lecky, Eighteenth Century, I., 481, writes from London, "There is not only no safety of living in this town, but scarcely any in the country now, robbery and murther are grown so frequent. Our people are now become what they never before were, cruel and inhuman. Those accursed spirituous liquors, which, to the shame of our government, are so easily to be had, and in such quantities drunk, have changed the very nature of our people; and they will, if continued to be drunk, destroy the very race of people themselves." Of Leicester it is said that it was so wicked that Robinson, who became Vicar of St. Mary's, prayed he might never have his lot cast there. On page viii. of his life, it is recorded that "the higher orders were devoted to feasting, frivolity, and amusements, and the lower classes were sunk in sensuality. The little piety which the city contained was amongst the dissenters, and even here its prevalence was not remarkably conspicuous." England had been more barbarous, more inhuman, and more wicked, than it was in the middle of the reign of the second George; but its barbarity had never been so completely unrelieved by high enthusiasms, its inhumanity never so unredeemed by grand loyalties, its wickedness never so unattended by saving excellencies and sublime aims. It was the "hour before the dawn" of a new era, and the darkness was most dense. The ameliorating influences of religion, literature, and law, were few, and for the most part ineffective. RELIGION was a form, and not a power. Christianity was stript of its grandeur, and degraded to a branch of moral police, or a dubious proposition. It ceased to embrace the eternities, to throb with emotion, to inspire zeal, to influence love, to rouse indignation against wrong, and subsided into a weak cordial for some, a poor convenience for more, and a frivolity to most, and was only to very few as life from the dead. A sober judge like Butler spoke of it as "decayed," "avowedly scorned by some," and "disregarded by the generality."* Dr. Watts declares that in his day "there was a general decay of vital religion in the hearts and lives of men;" and Hume spoke of the nation" as settled into the most cool indifference with regard to religious matters that is to be found in the world." THE CLERGY were, by the admission of their defenders, eager for preferment, neglectful of duty, teachers of a colourless morality, mostly without zeal, often without learning, and always without enthusiasm. Bishop Burnet lamented that those who came to him for ordination could not give an account of the contents of the gospels. When Lord Eldon, as "plain John Scott," offered himself for examination at Oxford, in 1766, in Hebrew and history, he was asked the searching question (!) "What is the Hebrew for the place of a skull ?" He replied, "Golgotha." That answer was followed with the profound inquiry, "Who founded University College?" he guessed, "King Alfred;" and the Examiner said, Very well, sir, you are competent for your degree." That was the sorry thing that passed for an examination of Scott, who was then intending to be a clergyman.§ Indeed at no time had these training places sunk to a lower scale than at this period. Morison says, "To speak of them as seats of learning seems like irony; they were seats of nothing but coarse living and clownish manners, the centres where all the faction party spirit and bigotry of the country were gathered to a head.|| The English clergy were no better qualified in other ways than they were in learning. In short Anglicanism was enjoying this life, looking after the foxes, and hoping for preferment; and dissent was languidly debating theological problems, neglecting its high vocation, and leaving the world to go to ruin. The great Puritan movement had spent itself. Churches that should have been patterns and ensamples in all higher things dwelt on the dead levels of unutterable dulness *Charge to the Clergy of Durham, 1751. Cf. Abbey and Overton, II., c. i. Morison's Gibbon, p. 6, et seq. + Calamy's Life and Times, II., p. 531. § Ewald's Representative Statesmen, vol. II., p. 10. Cf. Foster's Popular Ignorance, p. 78, 79. |