THE FREE BAPTIST WOMAN'S MISSIONARY SOCIETY has lately issued its Sixth Annual Report, which relates chiefly to work in Orissa. These American ladies have their regularly organized society, with all lady officers, consisting of president, vice-presidents, corresponding secretary, home secretary, recording secretary, treasurer, committee on missionary intelligence, auditor, board of managers, district secretary, and western committee. Connected with the society they have a magazine, “The Missionary Helper," published bi-monthly, and having its editorial contributors, publishing committee, and editor, and agent. The Indian staff consists of nine American ladies, four being wives of missionaries, and five single ladies. The report contains many items of interest, which we should be glad to give, if space permitted. We wish our co-workers in America and Orissa great grace and blessing.

THE MISSIONARY REVIEW.-A bi-monthly magazine, now being published in America, is a work which seems to meet a general want, and to be adapted for great usefulness. Its aim is to cover the whole ground of missions of all denominations, and to present a clear view of the work of all societies. It is ably conducted by Rev. R. G. Wilder, Princeton, N.Y., who has had thirty years' experience in missionary labour in India. Trübner & Co., Ludgate Hill, are the London Publishers. A similar publication in England would be of immense service, and ought to pay.

Foreign Letters Received.

Received on account of the General Baptist Missionary Society from December 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.

III. ROBERT RAIKES; HIS IDEA, METHOD, AND SPIRIT.

THOMAS CARLYLE rebukes, with deserved and scathing satire, the brainless notion that any great man is "the creature of his time;" that the time calls him forth, and does everything for him; and that he, forsooth, does nothing. "The time," says the Chelsea sage, "the time call forth? Alas! we have known times call loudly enough for their great man, but not find him when they called! He was not there. Providence had not sent him; the time calling its loudest, had to go down to confusion and wreck because he would not come when called.

. . . I liken common languid times, with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting character and embarrassed circumstances impotently crumbling down into ever worse distress towards final ruin;—all this I liken to dry dead fuel, waiting for the lightning out of heaven that shall kindle it. The great man, with his free force direct out of God's own hand is the lightning. The dry mouldering sticks are thought to have called him forth. They did want him greatly, but as to calling him forth! Those are critics of small vision, I think, who cry, 'See, is it not the sticks that made the fire?"

Verily if any Time could have called a great man into being, then that Eighteenth Century, with its miserable scepticisms, crowded insincerities, and seething miseries, ought to have summoned him. Surely it was calling loud enough, and had been for all its eighty years, for the man wise enough to discern Young England's need, and brave enough to attempt the gigantic task of supplying that need. The dry mouldering sticks were there, but the lightning-alas! it waited long!

At length "there was a man sent from God" whose name was-well! what? does it matter? Shall we, need we, have wordy contentions as to the honour of men? Honour is God's; as all God-sent men really know and feel. We poor feeble mortals have none. What are we, even when we reach the crown and summit of all our greatness? And what is our power? Mainly this, that we see what He wants done, and set ourselves simply and unselfishly, and in hearty obedience, to the doing of it; without noise of drum and pomp of circumstance, and with a right earnest love both of Him and of His work. And if forsooth we find

"Not once or twice, in our rough island story,
The path of duty is the way to glory,"

the duty is ours, the glory is God's; it does not belong to the dull dead. sticks, but to the lightning that comes out of heaven to kindle them. Steadfastly holding all this to be fact, and yet historical verity requires the record that "there was a man sent from God, whose name was" ROBERT RAIKES, "AND THROUGH HIM THE SUNDAY SCHOOL WAS

BORN."

*Heroes and Hero Worship, 12.

GENERAL BAPTIST MAGAZINE, MARCH, 1880.-Vol. LXXXII.-N. S. No. 123.

Who was he? What was he? What was his idea, and whence came it? What was his method, and how did he work it?

THE YOUTH'S HERITAGE.

Young Raikes was pre-eminently favoured in his birth. He was heir to the most splendid patrimony boy or girl can have; to the influence of a good home, of a father of fine character, large enterprise, chivalrous daring, and true beneficence. That father had started the Gloucester Journal, and was its printer, publisher, and editor; he had made it a power in the county of Gloucester and beyond; gained high repute as a philanthropist and man of business, and whilst diligent as newspaper man" was devoting his time and his loving care to the prisoners who were rotting in Gloucester gaol.

a

Robert, his son, born in 1735, had the sense not only to take to his father's printing business, and apply himself with energy to its mastery, but also to appropriate, by inspiration and imitation, his father's incorruptible purity, love of progress, and spirit of philanthropy. The "paper" grew in power and usefulness; the business increased in range and profit, and the career of active sympathy with the ignorant and the criminal, initiated by the father, was not only sustained, but widely extended by the son; so that Robert Raikes was known by many and esteemed by a few, as a prison philanthropist, years before John Howard began his crusade against the enormous iniquities of the eighteenth century gaols. So he was unwittingly qualifying for his chief work as the Father and Founder of Sunday Schools by doing the humble duty that lay next him in visiting the criminal inmates of Gloucester Castle, appealing for help through his paper on their behalf, and becoming thoroughly acquainted with the causes of their degradation and suffering. He was faithful in that "little," and God was training him, by that faithfulness, for his wider and greater work.

HIS PORTRAIT.

We all know the printer philanthropist. His portrait is familiar to us, and has been from our youth. There it is in the Sunday school, a pleasant, contented, farmer-like face, indicative of unruffled serenity, benign feeling, and gentle goodness. No genius flashes its light through the eye, no oratory urges its way over those lips. One cannot suspect its owner of heroism. There is nothing prophetic, or weird, or grand in it. It is simply a good, usable, common-place face, with not very much "character," as the critics say, in it, and without any striking suggestiveness as to the possibilities of his career. It is a typical eighteenth century face; for the faces of ages and epochs have, I believe, a character of their own; and the countenances of men bear traces of the forces of the times in which they have been moulded, as one can see by contrasting a dozen faces of the era of Cromwell with a dozen of the epoch of Raikes. The portrait of Raikes is preeminently that of one who probably dined well, looked kindly on everybody, was gentle in his treatment of wrongdoers, not strained to high tension by ambition, did his work in a steady easy-going matter-of-fact way, without any fuss or parade, and as though he were merely attending to an every day duty.

SUNDAY SCHOOLS AND MODERN ENGLAND.

83

But man is more than skin and bone; more even than nerve; and neither artist nor photographer can truly and fully represent him. They only move on the surface: the hidden man is revealed, if revealed at all, by words and deeds. These are the windows through which we look into his heart, and see him as he really is. As into the narrow sliding tubes of a telescope you may compress the most distant areas of immensity, so, into a few words or acts, may you compress the real character of a man. The best portrait of Robert Raikes is found in the two quotations which we make from his own pen. They are diamonds from whose facets flash the light that reveals the Sunday School Man in his true nature, in his habit as he lived. Look at them in this Centenary Year; they deserve to be carefully read, for they not only bring us to the very cradle of the Sunday School Institution, but also to the warm and beating heart of its father. Ponder this

FIRST NOTICE OF SUNDAY SCHOOLS.

It occurs in the Gloucester Journal, and bears date Nov. 3, 1783. It runs thus

"Some of the clergy in different parts of this county, bent upon attempting a reform among the children of the lower class, are establishing Sunday schools for rendering the Lord's-day subservient to the ends of instruction, which has hitherto been prostituted to bad purposes. Farmers, and other inhabitants of the towns and villages, complain that they receive more injury in their property on the Sabbath than all the week besides; this, in a great measure, proceeds from the lawless state of the younger class, who are allowed to run wild on that day free from every restraint. To remedy this evil, persons duly qualified are employed to instruct those that cannot read; and those that may have learnt to read are taught the catechism and conducted to church. By thus keeping their minds engaged, the day passes profitably and not disagreeably. In those parishes where this plan has been adopted, we are assured that the behaviour of the children is greatly civilized. The barbarous ignorance in which they had before lived being, in some degree, dispelled, they begin to give proofs that those persons are mistaken who consider the lower orders of mankind as incapable of improvement, and therefore think an attempt to reclaim them impracticable, or, at least, not worth the trouble."

HIS BEAUTIFUL MODESTY.

What beautiful and invincible modesty breathes through it! How charmingly unpretentious! What sweet obliviousness of self! Not a whisper escapes him about "the mighty enterprise," "the important institution." Throughout he refers to his helpers rather than to himself, and is undeniably more eager to get the work done than he is to get any honour for doing it. Yet there is a trace of exultant heroism in this newspaper notice that you look in vain for in the artist's portrait. He knows he is making an argument in refutation of the mischievous and ruinous theory that bad men cannot be cured, and if they can they are not worth it. The soul of the Sabbath school movement, which is the love of souls, speaks in these concluding words with quiet assurance and emphatic conviction. The Evangelical Revival, which is a revival of enthusiastic interest in humanity, has been carried forward by Wesley

and Whitfield to sinful men and women, and is destined to embrace the criminal classes through John Howard, and England's slaves through Wilberforce, has effectually got hold of the heart of young England through Robert Raikes.

This is more manifest in a letter written by Raikes, Nov. 25, 1783, and which I copy from the Gentleman's Magazine for June, 1784. It is lengthy; but I give the whole of it, believing it will be of special use in our Sunday schools, as well as of real service to us in trying to estimate the man, his idea, method, and work. He says:

THE FOUNDER'S OWN STORY.

"SIR,-My friend, the mayor, has just communicated to me the letter which you have honoured him with enquiring into the nature of the Sunday Schools.

"The beginning of this scheme was entirely owing to accident. Some business leading me one morning into the suburbs of the city where the lowest of the people (who are principally employed in the pinmanufactory) chiefly reside. I was struck with concern at seeing a group of children, wretchedly ragged, at play in the street; I asked an inhabitant whether those children belonged to that part of the town, and lamented their misery and idleness. Ah! sir,' said the woman to whom I was speaking, 'could you take a view of this part of the town on the Sunday, you would be shocked indeed; for then the street is filled with multitudes of these wretches, who, released on that day from employment, spend their time in noise and riot, playing at chuck, and cursing and swearing in a manner so horrid as to convey to any serious mind an idea of hell, rather than any other place. We have a worthy clergyman,' said she, 'curate of our parish, who has put some of them to school; but upon the Sabbath they are all given up to follow their inclinations without restraint as their parents totally abandoned themselves, have no idea of instilling into the minds of their children principles to which they themselves are entire strangers.'

"This conversation suggested to me that it would be at least a harmless attempt, if it were productive of no good, should some little plan be formed to check this deplorable profanation of the Sabbath. I then enquired of the woman if there were any decent well-disposed women in the neighbourhood who kept schools for teaching to read. I presently was directed to four: to these I applied, and made an agreement with them to receive as many children as I should send upon the Sunday, whom they were to instruct in reading and in the Church Catechism. For this I engaged to pay them each a shilling for their day's employment. The women seemed pleased with the proposal. I then waited on the clergyman before-mentioned and imparted to him my plan; he was so much satisfied with the idea, that he engaged to lend his assistance by going round to the schools on a Sunday afternoon to examine the progress that was made, and to enforce order and decorum among such a set of little heathens.

"This, sir, was the commencement of the plan. It is now about three years since we began, and I could wish you were here to make enquiry into the effect. A woman who lives in a lane where I had fixed