denomination till the Methodist Episcopal Church alone now reports no less than 25 colleges, (including theological schools,) having 158 instructors; 5,345 students; $3,055,861 endowments and other property; and 105,531 volumes in their libraries. It reports also 77 academies, with 556 instructors and 17,761 students, 10,462 of whom are females, making an aggregate of 102 institutions, with 714 instructors and 23,106 students. The Southern division of the denomination reported before the war 12 colleges and 77 academies, with 8,000 students, making an aggregate for the two bodies of 191 institutions and 31,106 students.

The moral and social influence, in England and America, of such a series of educational provisions, reaching from the first year of Methodism to our own day, must be incalculable; and could it point the world to no other monuments of its usefulness, these would suffice to establish its claims as one of the effective means of the moral progress of the English race in both hemispheres since Wesley began his singular career.

*

*The limits of this work will not admit of more detail in these important facts. I give, however, a tabular view of Methodist educational institutions in the United States, as reported in 1865, în the Appendix No. IV.

CHAPTER IV.

ITS SUNDAY-SCHOOL ENTERPRISE.

METHODISM has an honorable place in the history of Sunday-schools. As early as 1769 a young Methodist, Hannah Ball, established a Sunday-school in Wycombe, England, and was instrumental in training many children in the knowledge of the Holy Scriptures. Doubtless similar attempts were made before that time, but they were only anticipations of the modern institution of Sunday-schools. In 1781, while another Methodist young woman (afterward the wife of the celebrated lay preacher, Samuel Bradburn,) was conversing in Gloucester with Robert Raikes, a benevolent citizen of that town and publisher of the Gloucester Journal, he pointed to groups of neglected children in the street, and asked: "What can we do for them?" She answered: "Let us teach them to read and take them to Church!" He immediately proceeded to try the suggestion, and the philanthropist and his female friend attended the first company of Sunday-scholars to the Church, exposed to the comments and laughter of the populace as they passed along the street with their ragged procession. Such was the origin of our present Sunday.

school, an institution which has perhaps done more for the Church and the social improvement of Protestant communities than any other agency of modern times, the pulpit excepted. Raikes and his humble assistant conducted the experiment without ostentation. Not till November 3, 1783, did he refer to it in his public journal. In 1784 he published in that, paper an account of his plan. This sketch immediately arrested the attention of Wesley, who inserted the entire article in the January number of the Arminian Magazine for 1785, and exhorted his people to adopt the new institution. "They took his advice," says an historian of Methodism, and "laboring, hard-working men and women began to instruct their neighbors' children, and to go with them to the house of God on the Lord's day." The same year, as we learn from a letter of Mary Fletcher, her husband, "lately hearing of Sunday-schools, thought much upon them, and then set about the work." He soon had three hundred children under instruction, and diligently trained them till his last illness. He drew up proposals for six such schools in Coalbrook Dale, Madeley, and Madeley Wood. He wrote an essay on "the Advantages likely to Arise from Sunday-Schools," and designed to prepare small publications for their use, but his death cut off his plans.

Wesley's earliest notice of Sunday-schools is in his

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Journal for July 18, 1784, the year of Raikes's published account of them. He speaks of them prophet ically: “I find these schools springing up wherever I go; perhaps God may have a deeper end therein than men are aware of; who knows but some of these schools may be nurseries for Christians?" They were introduced into the metropolis by the Calvinistic Methodist, Rowland Hill, in 1786; and in the same year they were begun in the United States by the Methodist bishop, Francis Asbury, and this first Sundayschool of the New World prefigured one of the most important later advantages of the institution, by giving a useful preacher to the Methodist Episcopal Church. Wesley mentions in 1786, that five hundred and fifty children were taught in the Sunday-school of his society at Bolton, and the next year he found there eight hundred, taught by eighty "masters." Richard Rodda, one of his preachers, records that, in 1786, he formed a Sunday-school in Chester, and soon had nearly seven hundred children "under regular masters." Wesley wrote to him in the beginning of 1787: "I am glad you have taken in hand that blessed work of setting up Sunday-schools in Chester. It seems these will be one great means of reviving religion throughout the nation. I wonder Satan has not yet sent out some able champion against them." On the 18th of April, 1788, Wesley preached at Wigan "a sermon for the Sunday

schools," and "the people flocked from all quarters in a manner that never was seen before." The year before his death he wrote to Charles Atmore, an itinerant preacher: "I am glad you have set up Sunday-schools at Newcastle. This is one of the best institutions which has been seen in Europe for some centuries." Thus is Methodism historically connected with both the initiation and outspread of this important institution. Under the impulse of its zeal the Sunday-school was soon almost universally established in its societies. A similar interest for it prevailed among other religious bodies; and in three years after Raikes's published account of it, more than two hundred thousand children were receiving instruction from its thousands of teachers. The Irish Conference of 1794 voted: "Let Sunday-schools be established as far as possible in all the towns of this kingdom where we have societies ;" and in March, 1798, a "Methodist Sunday-School Society" was formed at City Road Chapel, London. In the following December Drs. Coke and Whitehead preached the first sermons before it. In our day Methodism, exclusive of all minor sects which bear the name, has under its direction an army of nearly 500,000 scholars and more than 80,000 teachers in England and Scotland.

For many years American Methodism made no provision for the general organization or affiliation of its Sunday-schools. Its Book Concern issued some