Raikes, Richard, uncle of Henry, was a clergy- man of the Church of England, and flourished near the middle of the 18th century. He was educated at St. John's College, Cambridge, and held a fellowship from that university. After taking holy orders, he was made prebendary of St. David's. He was a man of exact learning and of refinement of taste. He was the early teacher of Henry. The founder of Sunday-schools also received much help and encouragement from this divine, who himself published Essays on Sunday-schools. See Gentleman's Magazine (Lond.), 1855, p. 199.
Raikes, Robert, the noted English philanthro- pist who founded the modern Sunday-school (q. v.), was a native of Gloucester, England, where he was born in 1735. His ancestors were people of good rank, and some of them are distinguished as clergy and politi- cians. His father was a printer and an editor. He published the Gloucester Journal, a county Tory news- paper, and the first journal that attempted to give a re- port of parliamentary proceedings, which was consider- ed, at the time, so great a breach of privilege that he was reprimanded at the bar of the House of Lords in the dark days of George I and under the partisanship of lord-chancellor King. Robert was brought up with a view of succeeding his father in business, and en- joyed, therefore, a liberal education. Having finally become proprietor of the Journal, he managed to give his paper a wide influence and respectful reading. He was a truly devout man, and carried his Christianity into every-day life. He was not only scrupulous about his church attendance on the Sabbath, but made it the rule to frequent early morning prayers on week-days at the Gloucester cathedral. A man who could thus de- vote the hours of a working-day to the glory of his God was likely to cherish an interest in his fellows also. Raikes was particularly interested in the lowly and the degraded. He visited prisons and went about the streets seeking to do good wherever there was need of aid or counsel. The improvements in prison disci- pline at the close of the last century in England are largely due to Robert Raikes. His newspaper was an important agency which he used freely, and thus pow- erfully affected public opinion in favor of the suffering and degraded classes of society. In 1781 his attention was directed to the children of the poor. He had, by frequent intercourse with the common people, learned of their low intellectual state and the absolute neglect suffered by the rising generations. He was struck, as he himself tells us in one of his letters written in 1784, with the number of wretched children whom he found
in the suburbs of Gloucester, chiefly in the neighbor- hood of a pin manufactory, where their parents were employed, wholly abandoned to themselves, half clothed, half fed, and growing np in the most degrading vices. The state of the streets was worse on Sunday, when the older children, who were employed in the factory on week-days, were joined to their younger associates; and all manner of excesses became the theme of com- plaint on the part of the shopmen and the property- owners generally. Even the farmers near there com- plained of the depredations frequently committed by juvenile offenders. Raikes determined to provide a remedy for this growing evil. He saw very clearly the surest result in education, and therefore sought the help of four excellent teachers and devoted Christian women, whom he paid a small allowance for their ser- vices, and, gathering the children on the Sabbath-day; attempted the kind of work which has given shape to the modern Sabbath-school. He procured the help of the clergy, and the enterprise begun in such an unpre- tending manner grew into proportions of which Kaikes himself had not had the faintest idea. The instruction was at first confined to reading and writing. Instead of secular text-books, the Bible was the principal read- ing-book used, and so the children were made familiar with the Gospel's great benefits to man. How he got the children we will let him tell in his own language: "I went around," he says, "to remonstrate with num- bers of the poor on the melancholy consequences that must ensue from a fatal neglect of their children's mor- als. I prevailed with some, and others soon followed; and the school began to prosper in numbers. The chil- dren were to come soon after ten in the morning and stay till twelve ; they were then to go home and re- turn at one, and, after reading a lesson, they were to be conducted to church. After church they were to be employed in repeating the catechism till half-past five, and then to be dismissed with an injunction to go home without making a noise, and by no means to play in the street. With regard to the rules adopted, I only re- quired that they come to the school on Sunday as clean as possible. . Many were at first deterred because they wanted decent clothing, but I coidd not undertake to supply this defect. Although without shoes and in a ragged coat, I rejected none on that account; all that I required were clean hands, a clean face, and the hair combed. If they had no clean shirt, they were to come in that which they had on. The want of decent ap- parel at first kept great numbers at a distance, but they gradually became wiser, and all pressed to learn. I had the good luck to procure places for some that were de- serving, which was of great use. The children attend- ing the school varied from six years old to twelve or fourteen. Little rewards were distributed among the most diligent ; this excited an emulation." The mode of procedure is thus described by himself: " Upon the Sunday afternoon the mistresses take their scholars to church, a place which neither they nor their ancestors ever entered with a view to the glory of God. They assemble at the house of one of the mistresses, and walk before her to church, two and two, in as much order as a company of soldiers. I am generally at church, and after service thev all come round me to make their how. and. if any animosities have arisen, to make their complaint. The great principle I inculcate is to be kind and good-natured to each other; not to provoke one another; to be dutiful to their parents; not to of- fend God by cursing and swearing, and such plain pre- cepts as all may comprehend." Although other schemes may have been formed on a larger scale and excited a more romantic interest, none were ever so productive of more extensively beneficial results. The necessity, and the advantages to be derived from the establishment, of such schools seem to have occurred about the same time to several individuals in various parts of the coun- try ; and although Mr. Stoke, in particular, the rector of St. John's, Gloucester, cordially co-operated in the erec-