EVANGELISMIN THE SUNDAY SCHOOL
An Address Before Sunday School Workers
By H. J. Baldwin Supt. of Men, Bible Institute of Los Angeles
sitting on this bench, I have had 2,700 boys before me for sentence, and not one of them was a Sunday School attendant. Had you been a Sunday School scholar, I am sure you would not be before me today.” In my own work in the Juvenile Depart ment of the Cook county jail, Chicago, a penal institution into which are gathered criminals and crooks from all corners of the world, I met several thousand young men. I remember but one who claimed to have been a Sunday School scholar, and he had been irregular in attendance from three to four months before his arrest. W. A. Hillis, district superintendent of the American Sunday School Union, in the Central Western States, says: “In my work of sixteen years in twenty-two dif ferent States, I have found but twenty per sons who were Christians who had not attended Sunday School before they were twelve years of age. In these same con gregations with which I was acquainted, I found, I believe, more than 30,000 Chris tians who said, W e attended Sunday School before we were twelve years of age.’ ” THE PLACE TO BEGIN Statistics show us that about one boy in six is in Sunday School. With girls the
1 ACTS and Figures are stub' born things: They won’t lie. You can’t make them lie. There are some things about them you can neither an
swer nor evade. Nine .thousand children were taken from the slums; heredity was all against them; they were given Christian training, and only one out of the 9,000 was ever arrested—and the charge against him was. proven false. The Chief of Police of New York City said: “Among 1,200 prisoners in the peni tentiary who have passed through my hands, not one had been in Sunday School up to the age of seven years.” The State Secretary of Michigan, in a recent report, states: “Out of 904 boys and men in one of our state penal institu tions, ten of them, at the time they were received, said, ‘We attended Sunday School regularly;’ eighty-five said, ‘We went to Sunday School irregularly;’ 809 said, W e never went to Sunday School.’ ” Judge Fawcett of Brooklyn, in sentenc ing a 19-year-old boy to prison, said: “I have seen all your friends who wished to speak to me about you, and I find that all attempts to have you go to Sunday School failed. In the five years that I have been
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