usual Lesson is laid aside and a special Lesson substituted. The School System should take due account of the advent of such days, providing for them in mapping out the Course. Special Lessons should be carefully prepared, on the same general plan as the others in the system. Examination Days. Examination Days should be compulsory, just as in Day School, and Reports sent home to the parents. Children should be promoted strictly in accordance with the results, and no favoritism should be shown. If good reason be shown for failure to pass, the child might be "conditioned," and permitted to go on, with that subject as an extra to be passed off later; and this passing should be adhered to most emphatically. If a scholar be ready to pass off a condition, that examination could be held at any time, and not on Examination Days. In schools with a Graded Curriculum, it will be found, as each class is thus able to go on at its own proper rate of study, classes will complete a Course ahead of Examination Day. It should then have a Special Examination, as in Common School Work. Catechism Examinations may be held at any time, the pupil reciting first to the teacher privately, and then to the Examining Committee. The Written Examinations should be strict and impartial. Fifteen Questions are a good number to assign, on printed or hektographed sheets, and the choice of any ten questions allowed. Care should be had to remove all temptations to cheating, for even in Sunday School bad examples are contagious. Teachers, even, are careless about giving help. High moral aims should be fostered. Commencement Day. Yes, there should be a Commencement Day, and it is not "a foolish fad." Creditable, faithful work everywhere, not least in Religious Education, is worthy of due recognition. "Honor to whom honor is due." Give a proper recognition, Certificate or Diploma, for the Examination passed; a Certificate usually for Term or Annual Examinations; a Diploma for the Completion of the High School Course. A good "passing grade" should be expected, perhaps not quite so high as Day School, which usually demands 70 per cent. Probably 60 per cent. in Sunday School would be the best we should anticipate for several years yet. The Summer Special Session might have a Special Examination, with Certificates, not counting in the regular system for Diploma, save that the holding of a certain number of Summer Certificates would confer additional "honors" on the final graduation, as "Cum Laude," or "Cum summa laude" on the Diploma. QUESTIONS FOR THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION. 1. What improper qualities have been emphasized in your Sunday School? 2. Give examples of harm wrought by such method. 3. What remedies of practical application can you suggest? 4. If your school is not doing its best work, what is your duty? Remember that "the good is the great enemy of the best." "To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin." 5. Map out a suggested and practical plan of Organization for your Sunday School. CHAPTER XXV. THE PLAN OF THE SUNDAY SCHOOL. SUGGESTED READINGS. THE BOY PROBLEM. Forbush. *THE MODEL SCHOOL. Boynton. THE BIBLE SCHOOL. McKinney. THE TEACHER, THE CHILD, AND THE BOOK. Schauffler. *THE MODERN SUNDAY SCHOOL. Vincent. THE HOME DEPARTMENT. Hazard. PRINCIPLES AND IDEALS OF THE SUNDAY SCHOOL. Burton. The Time of the Sunday School. We have indicated that physically the morning, within an hour or so after breakfast, is the best time for mental work. Therefore a Morning Session of the Sunday School is to be preferred to an Afternoon one. In the country districts, with late breakfasts and home work, the time is usually afternoon. Often the Services interfere with a morning session. Whatever the time, the Session must be at least one full hour in length, no less. This is the usual rule, though of course subject to local conditions. It should be carefully ordered and systematized, and this order strictly and unflinchingly adhered to. This is the prime duty of the Superintendent. It is not his place to wander around shaking hands with the teachers, and "getting acquainted." The Sunday School is not the place for that. He has no right to deprive the children of their teacher for an extra five minutes, even to discuss the weather. Such interruptions are a sort of malfeasance in office. Hence long Addresses and "Talks" from the desk, painfully tedious notices, all these are to be dispensed with per se. Divide the hour up as follows: Commence sharp on the stroke of the hour with the bell. The school should open promptly no matter if only one-quarter of the members be present, and it should never drag out even five minutes beyond the time set as closing time. An excellent Visual Impression (a realizing sense of something wrong) is created by the "I am Late" card, turned from "I am on Time" at the opening hymn. The entire Opening Service may consume five minutes, a Hymn, Creed, Lord's Prayer, and Collects, for the Sunday School is essentially a school. Then forty-five minutes clear (no interruptions of any kind from Superintendent, Librarians, Secretaries, or Treasurer) for the teaching of the Lesson. If there has to be Catechising, which under a Graded System must confine itself to Catechism, Doctrine, and to General Questions on Bible History and Church Year and Prayer Book, then let thirty minutes be assigned for the lesson and fifteen for the catechising. Half an hour is too brief a time for ill-trained teachers, who do not systematize their work, to accomplish much. They are too diffuse and scattered. Trained Public School Teachers find it almost too short a period. There will now be remaining fifteen minutes of the hour. The Secretaries have quietly, without interruption, distributed the Record Cards or Books during the preceding period. The Librarian has taken up the returned books, also without interrupting, and has the outgoing ones ready at hand. For ten minutes now the Teachers mark the classes in whatever points are to be recorded; the Librarians give out their books; the Treasurer takes up his offerings; the Class Marks are left in the class forms for Collection after school; forms for notification of illness or of absentees are filled out, and left there also by teachers, as well as reports in writing of the calls on scholars in the Home Visiting done by each teacher on his or her class. All this need not take more than the allowed ten minutes. This leaves a last five minutes for the Announcements of the Superintendent or Minister, for the Closing Hymn, and Prayers. This is system and order, the only respectable way of conducting a school. Even with perchance a poor or indifferent system of lessons, it must bring tolerably satisfying results. The Place of the Sunday School! When shall we ever learn to build with an eye to God's best service? How almost criminally short sighted we all are! The Sunday School, the most potent agency, at least in its possibilities, in the whole land for righteousness of life and uprightness of character, is yet the last thought of in its housing. We erect well-planned theatres, why not Sunday Schools? Even with our growing assortment of Parish Buildings, or enormous Institutional Plants in every large city, there are scarcely ten respectable Sunday School Buildings, among all the churches of this land, with all bodies of Christians considered. Most of these ten are located within a dozen miles of New York City. One large church near New York, with a modern building, supposed to be model in every way, remembered that it possessed a Sunday School after the building was completed, and as a consequence more than 1,000 children are seated in one room. Why not secure for the children just as suitable, well-equipped school rooms as we possibly can? At least let them come in, in their rightful place, in the erection of all Parish Buildings. A special Book on the Erection and Equipment of Proper Sunday School Buildings, large and small, and the alteration of existing ones is now being published by the author and a prominent architect. It is a study by itself and cannot well be treated here. Music in the Sunday School. Suitable hymns for children under eleven are, according to the Episcopal Hymnal: 11, 49, 58, 65, 112, 254, 412, 452, 515, 516, 532, 534, 538, 540, 544, 550, 552, 560, 562, 563, 567, 578. For the older children: 110, 143, 261, 319, 418, 503, 505, 506, 507, 509, 521, 522, 542, 556, 558, 568, 570, 573, 577, 640, 656, 672. For doctrine the following are valuable: 90, 91, 149, 152, 375, 379, 383, 387, 388, 463, 591, 537. Children's Church is sometimes condemned simply because some ministers, following denominational example, have made it a substitute for the services of the Church. Rightly conducted, it educates the child to take his place in the congregation. As the larger number of schools are held immediately after Morning Prayer, perhaps the best time for it is on the afternoon of the first Sunday in the month, when in most parishes there is noonday Celebration. Departments. Even in the smallest school there should be Departments. In the largest the same kinds only perhaps several divisions of a department. The Departments correspond with the Grading. (a) The Font or Baptismal Roll, in which are gathered |