What now is the Sunday school? In the days that are past, it was looked
upon merely as a weekly meeting of boys and girls. Today it is regarded
as an institution for the releasing of great moral and religious
impulses into life. Of late there have even crept into its life the
names and some of the methods of our public school system. Grading and
trained teaching have also come into its life to stay; the modern Sunday
school is but little like that of a decade ago, and the changes are not
yet done with. Some of the innovations will be proved by experience and
retained with modification, while others doubtless will be eliminated as
worthless for the purposes of the Sunday school in its ideals of moral
and religious education. Improvement, however, is in the school
atmosphere.

However, with all the change, past, present and contemplated, the school
proper has but little time for the doing of its work. Fifty-two sessions
a year, of an hour's or an hour and a half's duration at best, fifty-two
or seventy-eight hours a year, only one-third of which is given to Bible
study, furnish a meager opportunity to accomplish its aim. Compared with
twelve hundred hours a year in the public school, or the twenty-eight
hundred hours a year a boy may work, it seems pitifully small, for the
aim of the Sunday school is bigger than the other two. The Sunday school
purposes to fit the boy to play the game in public school and work and
life. It seeks to give him impulses that will help him to keep clean,
inside and outside, to work with other boys in team play, to render
Christian service to his fellows, and to love and worship God as his
Father and Christ as his Saviour. The means it employs for these great
purposes are Bible study, Christian music, the association of the boys
in classes, and Christian leadership. To these the school is beginning
to add through-the-week meetings for what have been called its secular