Religious Conditions Before Sunday Schools
In writing of the religious and social state of English country towns when Robert Raikes began his Sunday-school work, the Rev. G. T. Coster says, in the London Sunday-school Teacher:
“ The masses of the people were sunken in ignorance. The educational institutions of the country were largely diverted from the classes for whom they had been founded, while the parochial charity schools taught but little and reached very few. ‘The Sunday-schools established by Mr. Raikes of Gloucester,’ says Mr. Green in his ‘Short History of the English People,’ ‘were the beginnings of popular education.’ Gambling prevailed. State lotteries sanctioned the perilous fascination. ‘A traveler in London in 1775 observes that he could not help looking with displeasure at the number of paper lanthorns that dangled before the doors of lottery offices, considering them as so many false lights hung out to draw fools to their destruction’—fools that had, many of them, little enough to lose. Drunkenness was considered no discredit to the great; and, a fashionable sin among the higher, we cannot wonder at its prevalence among other classes. The public houses in London in 1736 were, in proportion to the population, nine times more numerous than a century later. The moral and intellectual condition of the lower classes presented a terrible spectacle of ignorance and depravity. What Hannah More—who did so much by her day-schools for the children of the agricultural poor—found in Gloucestershire and Somersetshire was to be found in any county in England. The parishes within fifteen miles of her residence she describes as ‘almost pagan.’ Thirteen of them were without a resident curate. At Cheddar, with a population of two thousand, eight persons at the morning service and twenty in the afternoon were considered a good congregation. No clergyman had resided in it for forty years. Children were buried without any funeral service. In another parish, among a hundred and eight children, not one could tell who had made them. At Wiveliscombe, the incumbent was nearly always intoxicated, and was ‘very frequently prevented from preaching by two black eyes honestly earned in fighting.’ At Cheddar, where in 1789 she began her work, she was opposed by all the farmers, whom she found to be ‘as ignorant as the beasts that perish, intoxicated every day before dinner, and plunged in such vices as make me think London a virtuous place.’ When she first visited it, she went to every house in the place, and found each a scene ‘of the greatest ignorance and vice.’ ‘We saw,’ she says, ‘but one Bible in the parish, and that was used to prop a flower-pot.’ Such was rural England a century ago!"