What now is the Sunday school?  In the days that are past, it was looked upon merely as a weekly meeting of boys and girls.  Today it is regarded as an institution for the releasing of great moral and religious impulses into life.  Of late there have even crept into its life the names and some of the methods of our public school system.  Grading and trained teaching have also come into its life to stay; the modern Sunday school is but little like that of a decade ago, and the changes are not yet done with.  Some of the innovations will be proved by experience and retained with modification, while others doubtless will be eliminated as worthless for the purposes of the Sunday school in its ideals of moral and religious education.  Improvement, however, is in the school atmosphere.

However, with all the change, past, present and contemplated, the school proper has but little time for the doing of its work.  Fifty-two sessions a year, of an hour’s or an hour and a half’s duration at best, fifty-two or seventy-eight hours a year, only one-third of which is given to Bible study, furnish a meager opportunity to accomplish its aim.  Compared with twelve hundred hours a year in the public school, or the twenty-eight hundred hours a year a boy may work, it seems pitifully small, for the aim of the Sunday school is bigger than the other two.  The Sunday school purposes to fit the boy to play the game in public school and work and life.  It seeks to give him impulses that will help him to keep clean, inside and outside, to work with other boys in team play, to render Christian service to his fellows, and to love and worship God as his Father and Christ as his Saviour.  The means it employs for these great purposes are Bible study, Christian music, the association of the boys in classes, and Christian leadership.  To these the school is beginning to add through-the-week meetings for what have been called its secular activities.  All this has come after a great deal of campaigning on the part of groups of devoted men and women interested in boy life and welfare.  The Sunday school has had to overcome many handicaps in reaching the boy of teen age, among which were the lack of efficient, virile teachers, a misunderstanding of boy nature, lessons not adapted to the boy’s needs, music that was not appealing, and the indiscriminate grouping of boys with members of the other sex.  These, however, have been rapidly overcome, and today the school is fairly well organized to meet the needs of the boy.

There are yet some definite things to be written into the life of the Sunday school to win and hold the boy of teen age in its membership for life.

The first of these is the incorporation into the Sunday school activities of those things that interest and touch and mold every phase of a boy’s life.  It means the allotment of a definite part of the school period for the discussion of the things the group of boys will engage in during the week, and a through-the-week meeting as a real part of the school work.  This allows and provides for the athletic, outdoor, camping, social, and literary outlet for the boy spirit.