SUNDAY SCHOOLS, Sylvester Hassell Robert Raikes, of Gloucester, England, is generally admitted to have been the founder of modern Sunday Schools. In 1781 he hired teachers to instruct some poor children in Gloucester in reading and in the catechism on Sunday. His example was extensively imitated in the British Isles and the United States; and, by the end of the eighteenth century, the instruction had almost universally become gratuitous, and was said to be far superior in quality to what it was before, because now springing from pure benevolence. It is claimed by the Methodists that John Wesley, first in 1784, suggested that the instruction should be gratuitous, and also expressed the hope that Sunday Schools would become “nurseries for Christians” (See the Article on Sunday Schools in McClintock and Strong’s Cyclopedia of Biblical, Theological and Ecclesiastical Literature, vol. x., p.21). The writer of the Article just mentioned declares that, “within the last fifty years Sunday Schools have come to be regarded as an essential branch of church action, not merely in England and America, but throughout the Protestant world, whether in home or mission fields;” and he intimates, at the conclusion of his Article, that, in the Sunday School, he sees “the problem of the conversion of the world in process of solution.” It thus appears that for nearly 1,800 years of the Christian era, the church was destitute of an “essential” requisite in its work, and the problem of the conversion of the world had not begun to be solved. (Hassell)