Excerpt from The Modern Church
Note 1. Why Begin with the Sunday School? A student of botany may approach the study of a wayside flower through a previous study of the vegetable kingdom as a whole. Or he may reverse the process, and, beginning with the wayside flower, extend his investigations and generalizations until he has covered the whole world of plants. So a student of The Modem Church may begin with the ideal Kingdom of God and its concrete embodiment in the Christian church, and follow this by a detailed study of the agencies by which the church in scores of ways is seeking to realize her mission. On the other hand, the student, if he is a member of a Sunday school, may start from this institution and step by step work out through the local church into a survey of the church"s worldwide activities. For our present purpose the latter method has the advantage of beginning with a concrete subject which has immediate and permanent interest. Furthermore, this lesson, and those immediately following it, are intended to assist the members of the class not only to understand the real purpose of their own school, but to gather such facts concerning it as will lead to a better idea of its needs and to more determined efforts to supply them.
Note 2. Origin and Growth of the Sunday School. The duty of giving religious instruction to the people, and especially to the young, was perceived long before any one thought of Sunday schools. Centuries before the Christian era Israel was exhorted to remember Jehovah"s great deeds for the nation and "to make them known unto thy children and thy children"s children" (Deut. 4:9; comp. 6:6, 7, 20-25). Ezra"s great assembly was called for the purpose of giving popular instruction in the Law (Neh. ch. 8). In process of time the synagogue, which had grown up in the Babylonian exile as a place for local worship, became also the local school in which the Old Testament scriptures were the main text-book.
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