My mother Gladys Ella, née Hume, started going to Sunday and elementary school a year before the outbreak of the First World War in England. When I left home to do my apprenticeship in Sweden in the mid 1950s, Mum sent me a chain of letters, mostly from Memory Lane. Here is a letter she sent me on her earliest childhood entitled ‘Mottos on the Wall.’ Mum was brought up in a poverty-stricken home bereft of a father but could write the account …
Posts Tagged Sunday Schools
Mottos on the Walls
Jan 17
… friskolor (plur.) introduce Arabic as their teaching language which forces out local non-Muslims. Schools using mainly English are producing pupils who cannot write Swedish.
Civitas’ idea that friskolor are more proficient than state schools is another illusion. Any Tom Dick or Harry who can find 20 pupils may start a friskola (sing.). He then employs non-qualified or unauthorised staff and cuts out all expensive lessons like Communication Science, Physics etc., making large …
… One day, Oncken was conversing with Alderman Schröder who had shown great interest in Oncken’s Sunday School work. Schröder insisted that Oncken should accompany him to the Registrar’s and they should have the formalities for citizenship performed. The clerk recognised Alderman Schröder and jokingly asked him if he wished to become a citizen at long last. Schröder replied that if the Registrar was in the mood for granting citizenships, he should give one to his friend Oncken who was a …
… of September 1713 in order to give him as wide an understanding as possible of the needs of the schools and churches throughout the various German states. Everywhere on these tours, he found opposition to the sound, scholarly ideas of Spener and Franke but insisted wherever he went that Christian scholars must be fully instructed in God’s Word. This would mean hard work for them but if they rejected the task, they must renounce any claim to possessing theological acumen. During this …
… the poet William Cowper was a lone voice in campaigning for reform in eighteenth century English schools 1 . This may surprise poetry lovers who have not yet discovered Cowper’s writings on education. Cowper’s most neglected long poem Tirocinium or a Review of Schools, for instance, deals in detail with educational reform. Parents thinking of home-schooling their children as a legal alternative might care to consult Cowper who denounced the school system of his day as barbaric and …
… was essential to the gospel. From now on, for over a year, Hooker expounded the Word in his Sunday morning services and Travers pulled Hooker’s sermon to pieces in his afternoon lecture. Hooker, he argued, taught that God’s will concerning sin was not causative but permissive. Sinners, according to Hooker, are condemned because they have sinned on their own responsibility and not because God has willed them to sin. In other words, Hooker followed the life-bringing teaching of the …
… it is not his task to enquire into these things. Thus we are only permitted to see Wesley at his Sunday best, with Murray polishing up Wesley’s own down-to-earth accounts to make them more spiritual and gentlemanlike.
Between the lines, we learn that Methodism spread by poaching where Calvinists had already evangelized. Oddly enough, in his conclusion regarding the success of Methodism Murray mentions merely the work of such as Newton and Cecil, the Evangelicals of the Church of England …
… who called Huntington an Antinomian were Neonomians, Sabbath-breakers and adulterers. Recently a Sunday trader accused Huntington of being an Antinomian though he lost a good job through refusing to work on the Sabbath. When I pointed out the anomaly in his own behaviour, the Sabbath-breaker told me sanctimoniously that it was honouring the Lord of the Sabbath that constituted keeping the Sabbath which did not rule out Sunday trading as such. This is the kind of hypocritical Antinomianism …
… was instrumental in leading many Indians to Christ and founded a number of indigenous churches and schools in Tamil and Hindi speaking regions. At Tranqebar and Madras, Bibles had been printed in Tamil, Telugi and Hindustani and Bie wanted the same blessing for the Bengalis. So the Governor now asked the British missionaries to help him establish a church, printing press and schools in Serampore. They were fitted out with Danish passports so the British authorities could not hinder them. Bie …
