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MODERN SUNDAY SCHOOL MANUALS

Edited by Charles Foster Kent in Collaboration with John T. McFarland

ORGANIZING AND BUILDING UP THE SUNDAY SCHOOL

By JESSE LYMAN HURLBUT

[Illustration]

          NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS
          CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & GRAHAM




          Copyright, 1910, by
          EATON & MAINS




TABLE OF CONTENTS


                                                             PAGE
     I. The Historic Principles Underlying the Sunday School
           Movement                                             7
    II. The Constitution of the Sunday School                  14
   III. The Necessity and Essentials of a Graded Sunday
           School                                              21
    IV. The Grading of the Sunday School                       30
     V. The Departments of the Graded Sunday School            37
    VI. The Superintendent                                     46
   VII. The Superintendent's Duties and Responsibilities       53
  VIII. The Associate and Department Superintendents           63
    IX. The Secretary of the Sunday School                     69
     X. The Treasury and the Treasurer                         75
    XI. Value of the Sunday School Library                     81
   XII. The Management of the Library                          91
  XIII. The Teacher's Qualifications and Need of Training      98
   XIV. The Training and Task of the Teacher                  105
    XV. The Constituency of the Sunday School                 113
   XVI. Recruiting the Sunday School                          122
  XVII. The Tests of a Good Sunday School                     129
        Appendix                                              135




PREFATORY


IN the preparation of this volume the purpose was to supply a convenient
handbook upon the organization, the management, and the recruiting of
the Sunday school, to be read by those desiring information upon these
subjects. But after the larger part of the work had been prepared a
desire was expressed that the method of treatment be so modified that
the volume might be employed as a text-book for classes and individual
students in the department of teacher-training. It has been the aim of
the author not to alter the work so materially as to render it unfitting
for the general reader; and with this in view the series of blackboard
outlines for the teacher, and the questions for the testing of the
student's knowledge, have been placed at the end of the book. In the
hope that both the reader and the student may receive profit from these
pages the book is committed to the public.

                                           =JESSE LYMAN HURLBUT.=




I

THE HISTORIC PRINCIPLES UNDERLYING THE SUNDAY-SCHOOL MOVEMENT


1. =Magnitude of the Sunday-School Movement.= At the opening of the
twentieth century the Sunday school stands forth as one of the largest,
most widely spread, most characteristic, and most influential
institutions of the Anglo-Saxon world. Wherever the English race is
found the Sunday school is established, in the Mother isle, on the
American continent, at the Cape of Good Hope, and in Australasia. In the
United States and Canada it has a following of fourteen million members,
representing every religious denomination. Its periodical literature has
a wider circulation than that of any other modern educational movement.
It touches every class of society, from the highest to the lowest; and
its largest membership is found among the young, who are of all ages the
most susceptible to formative forces. It is safe to say that this
institution has exerted a powerful influence upon the majority of the
men and women of to-day, and is now shaping the character of millions
who will be the men and women of to-morrow.

2. =A Modern Movement.= Great as it appears in our time, the Sunday
school is comparatively a modern institution. Undoubtedly, the germ of
it can be traced back to that source of all the religious life of the
civilized world, the Hebrew people. The elemental principle of the
Sunday school is possibly to be found in the prophetic guilds before the
Exile, and the schools of the Jewish scribes after the Restoration. The
great Bible class of Ezra (Neh. 8) was not unlike a modern Sunday
school. Yet as an organized institution the Sunday school began with
Robert Raikes, the philanthropist of Gloucester, England, who on one
Sunday in 1780 called together a group of street boys in a room on Sooty
Alley, and employed young women to teach them the rudiments of reading
and religion. If Raikes had not happened to be the editor of the town
newspaper, and in constant need of copy, his Sunday school might soon
have been forgotten. But