as by voluntary effort, so that with this movement the voluntary system may be said to make its appearance. Lastly, all these philanthropic efforts were inspired by a solid but sober piety nurtured by a church which came nearer than at any other period of its history to enjoying the undivided allegiance of the people. Another notable movement in connexion with the church was one confined to Wales, that of the Welsh “circulating schools” established by Griffith Jones about 1730, consisting of an organized staff of schoolmasters who went round teaching adults to read the Bible in Welsh. In the English rural parishes the comparative religious unanimity favoured the quiet development of elementary education in a small way upon less specifically religious lines. Numerous small endowments for the elementary education of poor children were provided by well-to-do parishioners; indeed to such an extent did the practice of making charitable (and largely educational) bequests increase that the legislature intervened in the interest of private inheritance by reviving the law of mortmain in an act of 1736. The village schoolmaster became a feature of rural life, frequently enjoying a schoolhouse provided sometimes by endowment and sometimes even directly by the parishioners at the cost of the rate levied by the vestry, but more often aided only by a little stipend from an endowment for teaching poor children, and eking out an always scanty subsistence by the fees of such paying scholars as he could succeed in getting together.
Towards the end of the 18th century the emergency of the industrial revolution evoked a fresh religious effort upon a more highly organized scale in the shape of the Sunday-school movement, which may be said to represent the educational contribution of the Evangelical revival Robert Raikes, the founder of the The Sunday-school movement.Sunday School Union, established his first Sunday school in 1782. The idea of the Sunday school did not originate with Raikes; among earlier pioneers in this field were John Wesley, who held Sunday classes at Savannah in 1737; Theophilus Lindsey at Catterick in the North Riding of Yorkshire, about 1769; Hannah Ball at High Wycombe in 1769; and Jenkin Morgan near Llanidloes in 1770. Sunday schools, too, had been founded in England by Joseph Alleine, the Puritan Father, in the 17th century, and in Catholic Italy and France by St Charles Borromeo and Jean Baptiste de la Salle in the 16th and 17th centuries respectively. Nevertheless, in virtue of his achievement in organization, Raikes is rightly regarded as the founder of the English Sunday school. The peculiar value of the Sunday-school system in its early days lay in the combination of secular with religious instruction; in many cases the school was held on Saturday as well as Sunday, and its restriction to the one day or two days was due to the prevalence of child labour under stress of the great industrial expansion. With better economic conditions and with the development of day schools the Sunday schools gradually became restricted in function to purely religious instruction. Even with this limitation there is no doubt that the great Sunday-school organizations of the various churches still deserve to be reckoned among the educational assets of the nation, and as agencies both of religious instruction and of general culture they may tend, under modern educational and religious developments, to play an increasingly important part.
At the end of the 18th century the development of industry and the social unrest which followed the French Revolution combined to bring home to the public mind the need of a national system of day schools. Unfortunately, just at this moment the revival of Nonconformity as the result of the religious vitality of the Movements of Lancaster and Bell, and rise of the religious controversy.Evangelical movement shattered the religious peace of the early Hanoverian period and divided the nation once more into hostile camps, to which class distinctions lent additional bitterness. The famous controversy between Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster and their respective followers in the opening years of the 19th century served to define the religious difficulty substantially in the form in which it exists after the lapse of a century for the present generation. Both these remarkable men conceived independently the idea of a national system of popular education upon a voluntary basis; both concurred in extolling the merits of the monitorial system, which each claimed to have originated. The controversy between them, begun upon personal grounds, resolved itself into a national contest of rival principles of religious teaching. Lancaster as a young Quaker schoolmaster, confronted with pupils drawn from various religious bodies, planned his religious instruction upon the lines of doctrine common to all the orthodox Christian denominations. Thus he is the father of the undenominational religious teaching which later formed the basis of the Cowper-Temple compromise. But whereas the Cowper-Temple clause is purely negative in form and so seems to point to an undogmatic religion, the Lancasterian teaching was essentially positive and dogmatic within its limits. In 1805 Mrs Trimmer opened the attack upon Lancaster’s system with a work bearing the expressive title of A Comparative View of the New Plan of Education promulgated by Mr Joseph Lancaster and of the System of Christian Instruction founded by our Forefathers for the initiation of the young members of the Established Church in the Principles of the Reformed Religion. The church as a whole refused to co-operate in religious teaching upon the basis of a common Christianity, and joined issue with Lancaster and his Whig and Nonconformist following not merely upon the question of the exclusion of dogmatic formularies, but also upon the question of the control of whatever religious teaching should be given. In fact the vital question at this period was whether the clergy of the Established Church were to control the national education. The religious issue was prominent in connexion with the remarkable attempt at legislation made by the Whig statesman Mr Whitbread in his Parochial Schools Bill of 1807. As originally introduced, the bill proposed to make it compulsory on parochial vestries to levy rates for the support of schools for teaching reading, writing and arithmetic. The compulsory provisions were dropped in the House of Commons, but the bill was rejected by the Lords, mainly on the ground that it did not place education on a religious basis or sufficiently secure control to the minister of the parish.
The failure of the liberal proposals of Whitbread, and the strength of the Dissenting opposition to any settlement on purely church lines (such as that advocated by Bell in 1808 for establishing schools under the control of the parochial clergy), rendered recourse to voluntary effort inevitable. In 1808 the Royal Lancasterian Foundation of voluntary schools.Society was formed to carry on the work of Lancaster, the name being afterwards changed, owing to personal difficulties due to the wayward character of Lancaster, to the British and Foreign School Society. In the following year the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church throughout England and Wales was formed, with Bell as its superintendent. In voluntary effort on a grand scale the church easily outdistanced her opponents, and in 1831 the National Society was able to show that there were in all over 13,000 schools in connexion with the church, of which 6470 were both day and Sunday schools, having a total attendance of 409,000.
The rapid development of the voluntary school system was no doubt greatly facilitated by the monitorial plan of teaching, upon which Bell and Lancaster equally relied. Probably the first idea of utilizing the older pupils to teach the younger presented itself independently to Lancaster in the Borough Road and to Bell in Monitorial system.Madras. The monitorial plan never rested upon any educational theory; it was simply a makeshift, a rough-and-ready expedient for overcoming the practical difficulty caused by the dearth of competent teachers. Historically it is important as the precursor of the pupil-teacher system which so long formed the exclusive basis of the English elementary system.
Meantime a further political move was attempted by Brougham, who included educational reform among his multifarious activities. In 1816 he procured the appointment of a general commission of inquiry into endowed charities. The labours of this great inquisition lasted for twenty years and led
