So the "Two Voices" of the Old and New Year fall on our highly sensitive ears, and quicken and chasten the current of our thought. The sentries of time are changing. Weary December gives place to vigorous January. 1879 joins "the dead past." 1880 steps forth, with nimble foot, bright eye, and lips all eloquent with promise upon "the living present." We utter our tender "good bye" to trembling Age, but hasten to dash away the tears of Regret, that we may give a cheery welcome to quick-footed, impetuous, and hope-inspired Youth.

It is the Midnight of the Years. The clock is striking twelve. The notes of the great bell of time peal along the clear crisp air, making the profound stillness resonant with an other-world solemnity and awe. The dear old year is dying: yes, is really going, is gone!!

Why, it seems but yesterday we rose to greet its advent, and with believing and hopeful heart to share its companionships; our timorous spirits, a little apprehensive, indeed, of repeating old sins and meeting new sorrows, but still wonderfully soothed by Him who is the Lord of all our years, and who presides over the succession of the Ages, as He said, "Be not afraid, only believe" Me.

Gone! gone beyond recall, and beyond redemption! That halffilled hand cannot receive another gift; that scant store of holy deed cannot be increased by a solitary jot. We meant, ah! did we not? to load the year with our goodness; to fill his hand with "the fruit" of our Spirit-life, to wreath his brow with a graceful coronet of pure, heroic virtues, and to crowd his granary with the harvest of our beneficence. JANUARY, 1880.-VOL. LXXXII.-N. S. No. 121.

But the door is shut, the key is turned, and we cannot get in another shock, not even a solitary ear of corn; the grip of the hand is fixed, and will not relax, and our pleas and regrets are alike in vain. Our hearts ache at the sight of our helplessness to repair the past, with its wasted hours, its follies, its mean selfishness, its sins. Ah, comrades, let men say what they please, we feel it an unspeakable solace at this midnight of the years to know that God, our Father, sends the light of His radiant holiness through all this year, and searches out every sin and brings it to the all-revealing and all-purifying light of the Cross, that "the blood of His Son Jesus Christ may cleanse from all sin." It is that fact of full forgiveness, and of glad welcome into the Divine Light, that lifts the crushing burden of regret and shame, and enables us to start the New Year determined, in spite of a thousand gnawing failures of purpose and of motive and of achievement, to press toward the mark of the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus."

Nor can we hesitate a moment as to our persistent effort; for though we have put so little into the Treasury of the Past, yet, how sublimely God has loaded it with His benefits! What mercy, what patience, what long-suffering, what gentleness! How loving His disciplines! How strong His support! How cheering His presence! Had it not been for His precious love we could not have survived the crushing sorrow that came down on us like an avalanche, started by a whisper! If He had not inspired us with new hope we must have sunk beneath the engulphing waters of despairs and defeats, of blighted trusts, and broken plans. Had He not cheered us in our desolations and given us the strength to resist the fierce onset of evil, we must have lost all! Verily our Father has been good, unutterably good to us! His loving chastisements, and gentle leadings, and strong consolations, have been new with the mornings, and persistent through the nights! Regrets! Ah, we would spend hours on them were it not that our hearts are so filled with gratitude for the exceeding riches of His grace, that song drives off regret, joy wipes away the tear, and we stand on the threshold of the New Year with a glad and thankful psalm. "Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless His holy name."

But although the bell has struck the clock is still ticking. Time

moves on

"Fresh joys, fresh hopes are here,

A tablet white,

On which to write."

Though one voice is hushed, another fills the air, and invites to Anticipation and to Work. January is New; and in his tiny hand holds the key of the future. What doors it will fit, to what spacious abodes, filled with plenty, it will admit us, we know not: but eager hopefulness gleams from the Stranger-Infant's Eye, and the possibilities of the Young are infinite and glorious.

"Whatso

But all the years join in the mandate of the new morn, ever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might." The moment for regrets is gone. The hour of anticipation is passing.

"Act, act, in the living present,
Heart within, and God o'er head."

SUNDAY SCHOOLS AND MODERN ENGLAND.

3

True regret for the misspent yesterday is not in long-drawn sighs and wordy laments: but in energetic and pure action. Avaunt all loitering! Begone all lagging behind! "Press toward the mark." Life's highest prize must be won. The ideal is before us, enlarging with the years; and an unflinching, unswerving, unpausing persistency still animates us in following after it. "Press on," "in weariness and painfulness," "in watchings often," "in labours more abundant," in season and out of season," using everything, joy and sorrow, defeat and success, rest and labour, business and worship, for Christ and men. So shall we best greet the new-born year, and prepare for the eternity that awaits us in our Father's Home. JOHN CLIFFORD.

Sunday Schools and Modern England.

No. I. THE SUNDAY SCHOOL AND THE EVANGELICAL REVIVAL.

HISTORIANS agree that Modern England dates from the middle of the Eighteenth Century. That point forms the historical water-shed from whose heights it is possible to see the currents of our national life flowing down into the plains on either side.

PROFESSOR GREEN makes 1742 the birth year of Modern England, and in the first paragraph of the chapter devoted to the history of our country under the Georges, says, "the fall of Walpole revealed a change in the temper of England which was to influence from that time to this its social and political history. New forces, new cravings, new aims, which had been silently gathering beneath the crust of inaction, burst suddenly into view." "* Mr. WILLIAM STEBBING, in an article in the December Nineteenth Century, picturesquely and truly says, "It is the drama of the nineteenth century which is being rehearsed in the eighteenth. The players do not know their parts; the prompter's voice breaks the unity of the action; there is no audience but the company of the theatre; and the author seems not yet to have decided upon the dénoûment. But, on the other hand, there is an absence of formality which atones for much confusion; we see how the points are made which give the piece its final success, and we hear the stage directions." Mr. LECKY bears witness that "it was in this period that the first steps were taken which were destined, in succeeding generations, to exercise the widest and most abiding influence on human affairs. Without any great or salient revolutions the aspect of Europe was slowly changing." doubt England, as we see it to-day, is the product of all the past, of the England of Alfred and Elizabeth, and William of Orange, as well as of the Georges; for the life of a nation is a grand unity in spite of all its breaks and changes; but the evidence is complete that the England of 1880 owes its characteristic qualities and forces to a large influx of new power within the first sixty or seventy years of the last century. Modern England is, in short, the result of a Regeneration;

* Green's Short History of the English People, p. 716.

+ Lecky's England in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. I., pp. 576, 577.

No

it is a "a new creature," born again, not of the flesh, but by the Spirit of a Great Evangelical Revival.

A NINETEENTH CENTURY FACT.

Therefore it is not surprising that one of the most real and impressive products of this "great birth of time" should be the Sunday School; and that Modern England, as it faces us this New Year's morning, should place the Sunday School forward as the chief institution of the Christian Church, and the most important department of educational and aggressive Christianity. Its place is as fixed and undeniable as its sway is potent and increasing. What preaching was in the first, Sunday Schools are in the nineteenth century. Indeed some think they threaten to overshadow everything else: and it is a fact that they proclaim themselves fundamental to the pastorate, the elderate, and the diaconate; to missions at home and abroad; they are at the beginning of things. The church that has no Sunday School is as fatally maimed as the man without limbs or senses. Even communities of an extremely fatalistic faith, who forbade "prayer for the unconverted," and taught that individual salvation was as much a matter of fixed decree as that two and two are four, have taken the bands from their eyes, gathered in the children, and attempted to fold and "feed the lambs." As a religious and social force (and the religious and social forces are at the bottom of the best political and commercial forces) the Sunday School is as characteristic a feature of the England of 1880 as Puritanism of the England of Cromwell and Milton; the Reformation of the England of Henry the Eighth and Elizabeth; the New Learning of Erasmus of the England of the dawning of the sixteenth century; or the Magna Charta of the England of the perfidious King John. And though it is one of the last of those "new forces" whose appearance marks the uprising of Modern England, and at its birth it gave but faint promise of strength and progress, yet it has become as prolific of various advantage as any of its contemporaries; and is, at this moment, as prophetic of fine issues for the welfare of England and the world as any of the numerous progeny dating their origin in the last century.

THE BIRTH OF THE FIRST SUNDAY SCHOOL

In England is not accurately registered. Buckle goes as far as 1765, and traces its paternity to Theophilus Lindsay.* C. J. Abbey declares that it is certain, Hannah Ball established a Sunday School at High Wycombe as early as 1769.† Others, moved by the philanthropic impulses of the hour, gathered the boys and girls together with the hope of saving them from vice, and directing them to a better life :‡ but it was

ROBERT RAIKES,

Of Gloucester, who gave the institution a definite shape, organized its operations into a system, urged it upon the public, and became, in a

*History of Civilization, Vol. I., p. 302. Note.

The English Church in the Eighteenth Century. By C. J. Abbey and H. T. Overton. Vol. II., p. 36. Note.

Cf. General Baptist Magazine, 1871, p. 19.