“We-a love the Sunday-school.
We-a love the Sunday-school.
(Girls)--So do I.
(Boys)-So do I.
(School)--We all love the Sunday-school.”
“SPARKLING DEWDROPS.”
Some people believe that when General Conference assigned them to the
Committee on Hymn-Book Revision, power and authority were given unto
them to put a half-sole and a new heel on any and all poetry that might
look to them to be a little run over on one side. If they felt as I
do about the lines that head this article they would have “Sunday”
scratched out and “Sabbath” written in before you could bat an eye. The
mere substitution of one word for another may seem a light matter to a
man that has never composed anything more literary than an obituary for
the Western Advocate of Sister Jane Malinda Sprague, who was born in
Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, in 1816, removed with her parents at
a tender age to New Sardis, Washington County, Ohio, where, etc., etc.
If he wanted to extract a word he would do it, and never even offer to
give the author gas. But I know just how it hurts. I know or can imagine
how the gifted poet that penned the deathless lines I have quoted must
have walked the floor in an agony until every word and syllable was
just to suit him, and so, though I feel sure he meant to write
“Sabbath-school,” I don't dare change it.
To most persons one word seems about as good as another, Sunday or
Sabbath, but when there are young people about the house you learn to be
careful how you talk before them. Now, I would not go so far as to say
that “Sunday” is what you might call exactly rowdy, but er... but...
er... Let me illustrate. If a man says, “It's a beautiful Sunday
morning,” like enough he has on red-and-green stockings, baggy
knickerbockers, a violet-and-purple sweater, a cap shaped like a
milk-roll, and is smoking a pipe. He very likely carries a bagful of
golf-sticks, or is pumping up his bicycle. But if a man says, “This
beautiful Sabbath morn,” you know for a certainty that he wears a
long-tailed black coat, a boiled shirt, and a white tie. He is bald from
his forehead upward, his upper lip is shaven, and his views and those
of the late Robert Reed on the disgusting habit of using tobacco are
absolutely at one.
Not alone a regard for respectability, but the hankering to be
historically accurate, urges me to make the change I speak of.
Originally the institution was a Sunday-school, and not very respectable
either. I should hate to think any of my dear young friends were in the
habit of attending such a low-class affair as Robert Raikes conducted.
Sunday-schools were for “little ragamuffins,” as he called them, who
worked such long hours on week-days (from five in the morning until nine
at night) that if they were to learn the common branches at all it had
to be on a Sunday. A ragged school was bad enough in itself, putting
foolish notions into the heads of gutter-brats and making them
discontented and unhappy in their lot; but to teach a ragged school
on Sunday was a little too much. So Robert Raikes encountered the most
violent opposition, although from that beginning dates popular education
in England.
To be able to read is no Longer a sign that Pa can afford to do without
the young ones' wages on a Saturday night, and can even pay for
their schooling. It is no longer a mark of wealth or even of hard-won
privilege, but the common fate of all; to know the three R's, and Sunday
is not now set apart for secular instruction. So good and wholesome an
institution as the Sunday-school was not permitted to perish, but was
changed to suit the environment. It is now become the Sabbath-school for
the study of the Bible, a Christian recrudescence of the synagogue.
For some eighteen centuries it was supposed that a regularly ordained
minister should have exclusive charge of this work. At rare intervals
nowadays a clergyman may be found to maintain that because a man has
been to college and to the theological seminary, and has made the study
of the Scriptures his life-work (moved to that decision after careful
self-examination) that therefore he is better fitted to that ministry
than Miss Susie Goldrick, who teaches a class in Sabbath-school very
acceptably. Miss Goldrick is in the second year in the High School, and
last Friday afternoon read a composition on English Literatoor, in which
she spoke in terms of high praise of John Bunion, the well-known author
of “Progress and Poverty.” Miss Goldrick is very conscientious,
and always keeps her thumbnail against the questions printed on the
lesson-leaf, so as not to ask twice, “What did the disciples then do?”
It were a grave error to suppose that no secular learning is acquired in
the modern Sabbath-school. I remember once, when quite young, speaking
to my teacher, in the interval between the regular class work and the
closing exercises, about peacocks. I had read of them, but had never
seen one. What did they look like? She said a peacock was something like
a butterfly. I have always remembered that, and when I did finally see
a peacock, I was interested to note the essential accuracy of the
description.
Also, one day a new lady taught our class, Miss Evans having gone up to
Marion to spend a Sunday with her brother, who kept a stove store there,
and this new lady borrowed two flower vases from off the pulpit and a
piece of string from Turkey-egg McLaughlin to explain to us boys how the
earth went around the sun. We had too much manners to tell her that we
knew that years and years ago when we were in Miss Humphreys's room. I
don't remember what the earth going around the sun had to do with the
lesson for the day, which was about Samuel anointing David's head with
oil--did I ever tell you how I anointed my own head with coal oil?--but
I do remember that she broke both the vases and cut her finger, and had
to keep sucking it the rest of the time, because she didn't want to get
her handkerchief all bloodied up. It was a kind of fancy handkerchief,
made of thin stuff trimmed with lace--no good.
The Sabbath-school may be said to be divided into three courses, namely,
the preparatory or infant-class, the collegiate or Sabbath-school
proper, and the post-graduate or Mr. Parker's Bible-class.
What can a mere babe of three or four years learn in Sabbath-school?
sneers the critic. Not much, I grant you, of justification by Faith, or
Effectual Calling; but certain elementary precepts can be impressed
upon the mind while it is still in a plastic condition that never can
be wholly obliterated, come what may in after life. Prime among these
elementary precepts is this: “Always bring a penny.”
Some one has said, “Give me the first seven years of a child's life
and I care not who has the remainder.” I cannot endorse this without
reserve; but I maintain as a demonstrated fact: “Bring up a child to
contribute a copper cent, and when he is old he will not depart from
it.” It was recently my high privilege to attend a summer gathering
of representative religious people in the largest auditorium in this
country. Sometimes under that far-spreading roof ten thousand souls were
assembled and met together. This fact could be guessed at with tolerable
accuracy from the known seating capacity, but the interesting thing was
that it could be predicated with mathematical certainty that exactly ten
thousand people were present, because the offertory footed up
exactly one hundred dollars. What an encouragement to these faithful
infant-class teachers that have labored unremittingly, instant in season
and out of season, saying over and over again with infinite patience,
“Always bring a penny,” to know that their labor has not been in vain,
and that as a people we have made it the rule of our lives always to
bring a penny--and no more.
I have often tried to think what a Sabbath-school must be like in
California, where they have no pennies. It seems hardly possible that
the institution can exist under such a patent disability, and yet it
does. Do they work it on the same principle as the post-office in
that far-off land where you 'cannot buy one postal card because the
postmaster cannot make change, but must buy five postal cards or
two two-cent stamps and a postal? In other words, does a nickel, the
smallest extant coin, serve for five persons for one Sunday or one
person for five Sundays? I have often wondered about this.
Subsidiary instruction in the preparatory course consists of sitting
right still and being nice, keeping your fingers out of Johnny Pym's
eye, because it hurts him and makes him cry, not grabbing in the basket
when it goes by, even though it does have pennies in it, coaching in a
repertory of songs like: “Beautiful, Beautiful Little Hands,” “You in
Your Little Corner and I in Mine,” “The Consecrated Cross-Eyed Bear,”
“Pass Around the Wash-Rag”--the grown folks call that “Pass Along the
Watchword” and stories about David and Goliath, Samson and the three
hundred foxes with fire tied to their tails, Moses in the bulrushes, the
infant Samuel, Hagar in the wilderness, and so forth. The clergy have
often objected that these stories, being told at the same period of life
with those about Santa Claus, “One time there was a little boy and he
had a dog named Rover,” the little girl that had hair as black as ebony,
skin as white as snow, and cheeks as red as blood, because her Ma,
who was a queen by occupation, happened to cut her finger with a
black-handled knife along about New Year's--the clergy, I say, have
often objected that all these matters, being brought to a child's
attention at the same period in its life, are likely to be regarded in
after years as of equal evidential value. I am not much of a hand to
argue, myself, but I should like to have one of these carping critics
meet my friend, Mrs. Sarah M. Boggs, who has taught the infant-class
since 1867, having missed only two Sundays in that time, once, in 1879,
when it stormed so that nobody in town was out, and once, last winter a
year ago, when she slipped off the back porch and hurt her knee. I can
just see Sister Boggs laying down the law to anybody that finds fault
with the infant-class, let him be preacher or who. Why the very idea!
Do you mean to say, sir--I guess Sister Boggs can straighten him out all
right.
No less faithful is Mr. Parker, the leading lawyer of the town, who
conducts the Bible-class. I believe one morning he didn't get there
until after the last bell was done ringing, but otherwise his record of
attendance compares favorably with Sister Boggs's. Both teachers agree
to ignore the stated lesson for the day, but whereas Sister Boggs leads
her flock through the flowery meads of narration, Mr. Parker and his
class have camped out by preference for the last forty years in the
arid wilderness of Romans and Hebrews and Corinthians First and Second,
flinging the plentiful dornicks of “Paul says this” and “Paul says that”
at each other's heads in friendly strife. Mr. Parker's class is also
very assiduous in its attendance upon the Young People's meetings,
seemingly holding the dogma, “Once a young person always a young
person.” The prevailing style of hairdressing among the members is to
grow the locks long on the left side of the head, and to bring the thin
layer across to the right, pasted down very carefully with a sort of
peeled onion effect.
There is a whole lot of them, and they jower away at each other all
through the time between the opening and the closing exercises, having
the liveliest kind of a time getting over about two verses of the Bible
and the whole ground of speculative theology.
Immeasurably more impermanent in method and personnel is the regular
collegiate department, the Sabbath-school proper. In the early days,
away back when sugar was sixteen cents a pound, the thing to do was
to learn Scripture verses by heart. If you were a rude, rough boy who
didn't exactly love the Sunday-school as much as the hymn made you say
you did, but still one who had rather sing it than stir up a muss, you
hunted for the shortest verses you could find and said them off. From
four to eight was considered a full day's work. But if you were a boy
who put on an apron and helped your Ma with the dishes, a boy who always
wiped your feet before you came in, a boy that never got kept in at
school, a boy that cried pretty easy, a nice, pale boy, with bulging
blue eyes, you came to Sabbath-school and disgorged verses like
buck-shot out of a bag. The four-to-eight-verse boys sat and listened,
and improved their minds. There was generally one other boy like you
in the class, and it was nip-and-tuck between you which should get the
prize, until finally you came one Sunday, all bloated up with 238 verses
in your craw, and he quit discouraged. The prize was yours. It was a
beautiful little Bible with a brass clasp; it had two tiny silk strings
of an old-gold color for bookmarks, and gilt edges all around that made
the leaves stick together at first. It was printed in diamond type, so
small it made your ears ring when you tried to read it.
Other faculties than that of memory were called into action in those
days by problems like these: “Who was the meekest man? Who was the
strongest man? Who was the father of Zebedee's children? Who had the
iron bedstead, and whose thumbs and great-toes were cut off?” To set a
child to find these things in the Bible without a concordance seems
to us as futile as setting him to hunt a needle in a haystack. But our
fathers were not so foolish as we like to think them; they didn't care
two pins if we never discovered who had the iron bedstead, but they
knew that, leafing over the book, we should light upon treasure where
we sought it not, kernels of the sweetest meat in the hardest shells,
stories of enthralling interest where we least expected them, but, most
of all, and best of all, texts that long afterward in time of trouble
should come to us, as it were the voice of one that also had eaten the
bread of affliction, calling to us across the chasm of the centuries
and saying: “O, tarry thou the Lord's leisure: be strong and He shall
comfort thine heart.”
In the higher classes, that still were not high enough to rank with Mr.
Parker's, the exegetical powers were stimulated in this wise: “'And they
sung a hymn and went out.' Now what do you understand by that?” We told
what we “understood,” and what we “held,” and what we “believed,” and
laid traps for the teacher and tried to corner him with irrelevant
texts wrenched from their context. He had to be an able man and a
nimble-witted man. Mere piety might shine in the prayer-meeting, in the
class-room, at the quarterly love-feast, but not in the Sabbath-school.
I remember once when Brother Butler was away they set John Snyder to
teach us. John didn't know any more than the law allowed, and we made
him feel it, until finally, badgered beyond endurance, he blurted out
that all he knew was that he was a sinner saved by grace. Maybe he
couldn't just tell where to find this, that, and t' other thing in the
Bible, but he could turn right to the place where it said that though
a body's sins were as scarlet, yet they should be white as snow. It was
regarded as a very poor sort of an excuse then, but thinking it over
here lately, it has seemed to me that maybe John had the root of the
matter in him after all.
The comparative scarcity of polemical athletes and the relative plenty
of the Miss Susie Goldrick kind of teachers, apparently called into
being the Berean Lesson Leaf system, with its Bible cut up into
lady-bites of ten or twelve verses, its Golden Topics, Golden Texts, its
apt alliterations, like:
S AMUEL
EEKS
AUL
ORROWING
and its questions prepared in tabloid form, suitable for the most
enfeebled digestions, see directions printed on inside wrapper. Among
the many evidences of the degeneracy of the age is the scandalous
ignorance of our young people regarding the sacred Scriptures, which
at the very lowest estimate are incontestably the finest English ever
written. Those whose childhood antedates the lesson leaf are not so
unfamiliar with that wondrous treasure-house of thought. It is not for
me to say what has wrought the change. I can only point out that lesson
leaves, being about the right size for shaving papers, barely last from
Sunday to Sunday, while that very identical Bible with the blinding type
that I won years and years ago, by learning verses, is with me still.
Yes, and as I often wonder to discover, some of those very verses that I
gobbled down as heedlessly as any ostrich are with me still.
Remain to be considered the opening and closing exercises, principally
devoted, I remember, to learning new tunes and singing old ones out of
books with pretty titles, like “Golden Censer,” “Silver Spray,” “Pearl
and Gold,” “Sparkling Dewdrops,” and “Sabbath Chimes.” I wasn't going to
tell it, but I might as well, I suppose. I can remember as far back as
“Musical Leaves.” There must be quite a lot of people scattered about
the country who sung out of that when they were little. I wish a few of
us old codgers might get together some time and with many a hummed and
prefatory, “Do, mi, Sol, do; Sol, mi... mi-i-i-i,” finally manage to
quaver out the sweet old tunes we learned when we were little tads, each
with a penny in his fat, warm hand: “Shall we Gather at the River?”
and “Work, for the Night is Coming”; and what was the name of that one
about:
“The waves shall come and the rolling thunder shock
Shall beat upon the house that is founded on a rock,
And it never shall fall, never, never, never.”
What the proper English tune is to “I think when I read that sweet story
of old” I cannot tell, but I am sure it can never melt my heart as that
one in the old “Musical Leaves.” with its twistful repetitions of the
last line:
“I should like to have been with Him then,
I should like to have been with Him then,
When He took little children like lambs to His fold,
I should like to have been with Him then.”
I fear we could not sing that without breaking down. As we recall it, we
draw an inward fluttering breath, something grips our throats and makes
them ache, our eyes blur, and a tear slips down upon the cheek, not of
sorrow--God knows not all of sorrow--but if we had it all to live over
again, how differently we--oh, well, it's too late now, but still.
Leafing over my little girl's “Arabian Nights” the other day, when I
came to the story of “The Enchanted Horse,” I found myself humming,
“Land ahead! Its fruits are waving.” My father used to lead the singing
in Sabbath-school, and when he was sol-fa-ing that tune to learn it, I
was devouring that story, and was just about at the picture where Prince
What's-his-name rises up into the air on the Enchanted Horse, with his
true love hanging on behind, and all the multitude below holding their
turbans on as they look up and exclaim: “Well, if that don't beat the
Dutch!”
And another tune still excites in me the sullen resentment that it
did when I first heard it. In those days, just as a fellow got to the
exciting part in “Frank at Don Carlos's Ranch,” or whatever the book
was, there was kindling to be split, or an armful of wood to be brought
in, or a pitcher of water from the well, or “run over to Mrs. Boggs's
and ask her if she won't please lend me her fluting-iron,” or “run down
to Galbraith's and get me a spool of white thread, Number 60, and hurry
right back, because then I want you to go over to Serepta Downey's
and take her that polonaise pattern she asked me to cut out for her,”
or--there was always something on hand. So what should one of these
composers do--I don't know what ever possessed the man--but go write a
Sabbath-school song with this chorus:
“There'll be something to do,
There'll be something to do,
There'll be something for children to do:
On that bright shining shore,
Where there's joy evermore,
There'll be something for children to do.”