The Great Revival of the Eighteenth Century / With a supplemental chapter on the revival in America

by Edwin Paxton Hood

It is remarkable that in the course of two or three years, several bishops—the Bishop of Gloucester, in the cathedral, the Bishops of Chester and Salisbury, in their charges to the clergy of their dioceses—strongly commended the plan. All orders of mind poured around the movement their commendation; even Adam Smith, whom no one will think likely to have fallen into exaggerated expressions where Christian activity is concerned, said, “No plan has promised to effect a change of manners with equal ease and simplicity, since the days of the apostles.” The poet Cowper declared that he knew of no nobler means by which a reformation of the lower classes could be effected. Some attempts have been made to claim for John Wesley the honour of inaugurating the Sunday-school system; considering the intensely practical character of that venerated man, and how much he was in advance of his times in most of his activities, it is a wonder that he did not; but his venerable memory has honours, certainly, in all sufficiency. He wrote his first commendation of Sunday-schools in the Arminian Magazine of 1784. He says, “I find these schools spring up wherever I go; perhaps God may have a deeper end therein than men are aware of; who knows but that some of these schools may become nurseries for Christians?” Prophetic as these words are, this is fainter and tardier praise than we should have expected from him; but in 1787 he writes more warmly, expresses his belief that these schools will be one great means of reviving religion throughout the kingdom, and expresses “wonder that Satan has not sent out some able champion against them.” In 1788 he says: “I verily think that these schools are one of the noblest specimens of charity which have been set on foot in England since the days of William the Conqueror.”

Some estimate may be formed of the rapidity with which the movement spread, when we find that in this year, 1787, the number of children taught in Sunday-schools in Manchester alone, on the testimony of the very eminent John Nichols, the great printer and anecdotist, was no fewer than five thousand. It was in this year also, 1787, that Mr. Raikes was visiting some relatives in the neighbourhood of Windsor. He must have attained to the dignity of a celebrity; nor is this wonderful, when we remember the universal acceptance with which his great idea of Sunday-schools had been honoured. The Queen invited him to visit her, and inquired of him, he says, “by what accident a thought which promised so much benefit to the lower order of people as the institution of Sunday-schools, was suggested to his mind?” The visit was a long one; he spent two hours with the Queen—the King also, we believe, being present most of the time—not so much in expounding the system, for that was simple enough, but they were curious as to what he had observed in the change and improvement of the characters among whom he worked; and we believe that it was then he told the King, in the words we have already quoted, that he regarded his work as a kind of “botanising in human nature;” this was a favourite phrase of his in describing the work. The result of this visit was, that the Queen established a Sunday-school in Windsor, and also a school of industry at Brentford, which the King and Queen occasionally visited. It may be taken as an illustration of the native modesty of Mr. Raikes’s own character that he never referred in his paper to this distinguished notice of royalty.

Do our readers know anything of Mrs. Sarah Trimmer? A hundred years ago, there was, probably, not a better-known woman in England; and although her works have long ceased to exercise any influence, we suppose none, in her time, were more eminently useful. Pious, devoted, earnestly evangelical, if we speak of her as a kind of lesser Hannah More, the remark must apply to her intellectual character rather than to her reputation or her usefulness. Almost as soon as the Sunday-school idea was announced, she stepped forward as its most able and intrepid advocate; her Economy of Charity exercised a large influence, and she published a number of books, which, at that time, were admirably suited to the level of the capacity which the Sunday-school teacher desired to reach; she was also a great favourite with the King and Queen, and appears to have visited them on the easy terms of friendship. The intense interest she felt in Sunday-schools is manifest in innumerable pages of the two volumes which record her life; certainly, she was often at the ear of the royal pair, to whisper any good and pleasant thing connected with the progress of her favourite thought. She repeatedly expresses her obligation to Mr. Raikes; but her biographer only expresses the simple truth when he says: “To Mr. Raikes, of Gloucester, the nation is, in the first place, indebted for the happy idea of collecting the children of the poor together on the Sabbath, and giving them instruction suited to the sacredness of the day; but, perhaps, no publication on this subject was of more utility than the Economy of Charity. The influence of the work was very visible when it first made its appearance, and proved a source of unspeakable gratification to the author.”

It is not consistent with the aim of this book to enter at greater length into the life of Robert Raikes; we have said sufficient to show that the term which has been applied to him of “founder of Sunday-schools,” is not misapplied. He was a simple and good man, on whose heart, as into a fruitful soil, an idea fell, and it became a realised conviction. Look at his portrait, and instantly there comes to your mind Cowper’s well-known description of one of his friends,

“An honest man, close-buttoned to the chin,

Broadcloth without, and a warm heart within.”

No words can better describe him—not a tint of fanaticism seems to shade his character; he had a warm enthusiasm for ends and aims which commended themselves to his judgment. It is pleasant to know that, as he lived when the agitation for the abolition of the slave trade was commencing, he gave to the movement his hearty blessings and best wishes. At sixty-seven years of age he retired from business; no doubt a very well-to-do man, for he was the owner of two freehold estates near Gloucester, and he received an annuity of three hundred pounds from the Gloucester Journal. He died at his house in Bell Lane, in the city of Gloucester, where he had taken up his residence when he retired from active life; he died suddenly, in his seventy-sixth year, in 1811. Then the family vault in St. Mary-le-Crypt, which sixty years before had received his father’s ashes, received the body of the gentle philanthropist. He had kept up his Sunday-school work and interest to the close; and he left instructions that his Sunday-school children should be invited to follow him to the grave, and that each of them should receive a shilling and a plum cake. On the tablet over the place where he sleeps an appropriate verse of Scripture well describes him: “When the ear heard me, then it blessed me; and when the eye saw me, it gave witness to me: because I delivered the poor that cried, and the fatherless, and him that had none to help him. The blessing of him that was ready to perish came upon me: and I caused the widow’s heart to sing for joy.”

It seems very questionable whether the slightest shade can cross the memory of this plain, simply useful, and unostentatious man. And it ought to be said that Anne Raikes, who rests in the same grave, appears to have been every way the worthy companion of her husband. She was the daughter of Thomas Trigg, Esq., of Newnham, in Gloucestershire; the sister of Sir Thomas Trigg and Admiral John Trigg. They were married in 1767. She shared in all her husband’s large and charitable intentions, and when he died he left the whole of his property to her. She survived him seventeen years, and died in 1828, at the age of eighty-five.

RAIKES’S HOUSE, GLOUCESTER.