Not alone a regard for respectability, but the hankering to be
historically accurate, urges me to make the change I speak of.
Originally the institution was a Sunday-school, and not very
respectable either. I should hate to think any of my dear young
friends were in the habit of attending such a low-class affair as
Robert Raikes conducted. Sunday-schools were for "little
ragamuffins," as he called them, who worked such long hours on
week-days (from five in the morning until nine at night) that if
they were to learn the common branches at all it had to be on a
Sunday. A ragged school was bad enough in itself, putting foolish
notions into the heads of gutter-brats and making them discontented
and unhappy in their lot; but to teach a ragged school on Sunday
was a little too much. So Robert Raikes encountered the most violent
opposition, although from that beginning dates popular education in
England.

To be able to read is no Longer a sign that Pa can afford to do
without the young ones' wages on a Saturday night, and can even pay
for their schooling. It is no longer a mark of wealth or even of
hard-won privilege, but the common fate of all; to know the three
R's, and Sunday is not now set apart for secular instruction. So
good and wholesome an institution as the Sunday-school was not
permitted to perish, but was changed to suit the environment. It
is now become the Sabbath-school for the study of the Bible, a
Christian recrudescence of the synagogue. For some eighteen
centuries it was supposed that a regularly ordained minister should
have exclusive charge of this work. At rare intervals nowadays a
clergyman may be found to maintain that because a man has been to
college and to the theological seminary, and has made the study of
the Scriptures his life-work (moved to that decision after careful