Great events were happening in the world in 1780. Not the least of these was the formation of the first Sunday school by Robert Raikes in Gloucester, England. He wrote about his experiment in his journal, and people in London and elsewhere became interested. As a result, for thirty years thereafter he became busy in this new and important reform of Sunday school work. It has been said, "The necessity for public work arises largely from the neglect of private duties." If the Sunday school is looked upon as a substitute for home instruction, its real purpose will not be attained. The purpose which teachers should have in view is the same which should be before parents, namely, to train the children in self-government. Mrs. Eddy says in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 106), "Man is properly self-governed only when he is guided rightly and governed by his Maker, divine Truth and Love."
At the present hour there seem to be a good many assaults upon the integrity of child life. There is, for example, the commercial selfishness which, in exploiting child labor, deprives the young workers of opportunity for education. Then there is the liquor traffic, which, by debauching parents, tends to deprive children of their birthright, and which in its insidious endeavors to continue itself tries to seduce into the acquiring of false appetite even those of tender years. Assaults are made upon the minds of children also by the purveyor of things impure. Few have any idea of the evil intentions in perverted minds to make profit out of the spreading of their own moral perversion among school children and others. As the intention of the merchant of drugs and intoxicants is to pervert the bodily habit so that the individual may continue to be a source of profit, so immoral creatures have made an industry intended to pervert the mentality and poison the minds of the young of our race that they may reap profit.
In the public schools, which are intended to make education the common advantage for all citizens, the materialist is too often in evidence, trying to establish his superstitions regarding health, hygiene, contagion, infection, and so on. There is the problem of medical supervision with its desire for bodily inspection, invasion of modesty, and gratuitous operations. There is also the problem of the great serum industry, which, now established on a profitable basis, insists upon an outlet for its product and demands the continued inoculations of those who can be forced to submit; and where attendance upon school is compulsory, it seems a simple thing to make vaccinations and inoculations and other contaminations of the bodies of children compulsory, even though the children themselves may have reached the point of knowing what it is that maintains health, and may be trusting God as the creator and preserver of man. It would be well for those engaged in evil traffic whereby children are offended to remember the ringing words of the Master, "Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."
