With such a view of the value of the Sunday-School to Japan, it is interesting to note that in May, 1913, there were one thousand seven hundred Protestant Sunday-Schools in Japan, with an enrollment of about 100,000 pupils. If the question is asked, Do the Sunday-Schools have any effect on the lives of the children? it is a pleasure to answer with a brief extract from the personal letter of a new missionary to Japan:—
“This afternoon a lady called whose mother belongs to the nobility and has older ideals, but her father is American. She is a most earnest Christian and has done a great deal. She has access to the nobility’s children and is forming a Sunday-School, but she has many discouragements. At one village they had started a school of two hundred, and the children were showing its influence, but the schoolmaster feared just this and so managed to frighten the parents that all were withdrawn. This village was built in terraces with a long flight of stairs, down which many blind people went. The boys used to hang cords across so as to trip them. But now they have begun to take these poor people by the hand, and lead them down.” A Sunday-School that can teach such practical Christianity to mischievous boys must be a power in the community.
A Sunday-School Parade in Peking.
In October, 1911, the city of Peking, China, witnessed a Sunday-School parade in which two thousand children took part. With banners flying, and led by the Methodists with six hundred children and a band, the parade passed through the most important streets of the city to a large church where a children’s mass meeting was held.
A noteworthy “forward movement” was undertaken by the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1913, when the Rev. Wallace H. Miner, son of a missionary, sailed for China, to become a Sunday-School worker and organizer in that new republic. His work will be to assist the missionaries in promoting the work of the Sunday-Schools, to instruct native preachers in methods of Sunday-School organization and administration, and to train local teachers and native field workers, introducing modern methods into Chinese Sunday-Schools as far as they are adapted to Chinese conditions.
A Sunday-School Union in India.
Would that India had more men like the rich coffee planter who gives his services to Christian work, and who travels from end to end of India organizing Sunday-Schools. The statistics of the Sunday-School Union of India are deeply significant, as is also the fact that there is such a Union. “The Sunday-School Union of India has a membership of 458,945, being an increase of 37,866 on the previous year. The Union stands for the very best in Bible instruction, equipment, and management. It publishes 10,000,000 English and vernacular pages of Scripture illustrated expositions, nearly all of which are based on the international syllabus. To meet the needs of Sunday-Schools in fifty languages, there are about fifty editions of ‘helps’ in twenty languages. A prominent feature of the Union is that it stands for salvation through Jesus Christ, and membership in the church to which it belongs.”[89]
An African Sunday-School.
It would be fascinating to visit the Sunday-Schools in various lands, and to hear the same dear children’s hymns sung in many languages by black children and white, red, and brown. We have time for only a peep at an Egyptian Sunday-School, but even this glimpse shows how naturally and inevitably the love and power of Jesus Christ can change the heart and life of a little child.
At 2 P. M. the beating of the bell has the desired effect, and presently there rises up from the edge of the river a crowd of some of the dirtiest and yet some of the prettiest little boys and girls you ever saw. Nearly every little girl carries perched on her shoulder a baby brother or sister. They rush without ceremony into the compound, but there they are intercepted, and made to walk quietly and orderly into the classes provided for them.
A kind Syrian nurse from the Hospital takes her place in a class of some thirty or forty girls, and, if only you could peep behind the scenes, you would hear such sad stories connected with the lives of several of her girls. Some have been married and cast aside by their husbands for some trivial fault, and then how glad they are once more to find their way back to school, where they know they are loved and cared for.
A blind girl sits among a class of the very naughtiest but sweetest little folk, who try her patience to the utmost. A kind missionary takes another class, and I am sure that, although she is accustomed to teaching all through the week, she has never taught such pieces of humanity as those before her. Still another class of mischievous little boys is taught by one of the day-school boys, who sometimes has to appeal to the superintendent to restore order.... Now the bell has to be beaten, gently too, and, after much noise, all shaggy heads are bent in prayer, then sentence by sentence, the Lord’s Prayer is said, and a very elongated “Amen” comes in at the end. Now three rooms are occupied instead of one, for if all the classes were kept in one room the noise would be deafening. What are all those dirty little bags hung around the children’s necks? Ah! those bags contain the most precious thing the children have, viz., an old Christmas card which serves as a register. If by some unfortunate chance that ticket gets lost, genuine tears form a streamlet down the troubled little face of the owner, for he or she knows it is just a mere chance if the superintendent will relent so far as to provide another, and yet without it admittance to the yearly Christmas tree is a thing impossible.
These registers are marked and a tiny box handed around to receive many little widows’ mites, for although the children are of the poorest, we try to teach them that it is more blessed to give than to receive. And now we are all in the room again, and a time is spent in catechising the whole school so as to make sure they have been listening to their lesson. The story had been told of the ten lepers, and the ingratitude of the nine, who went away without saying “thank you.” Z., a very regular member, looked up with glowing eyes, and said, “I would very much like to say thank you to Jesus for all He has done for me, but I am afraid He would not care to bend His hand from heaven to let a little girl like me kiss it.”... Another little girl is all eagerness to speak. Her name means “Cast Out,” and when her turn comes she says, “I love pickles, oh! so much, and when my mother said, ‘Go to the market and bring back pickles in vinegar,’ I used to dip my fingers into the vinegar all the way home,—they would creep into the basin in spite of myself,—but now since my teacher has told me it is like stealing, I try not even to look at the basin, but run all the way home with it to my mother.”[90]