The heavy fall in the number of children attending Sunday
schools reported at the Baptist Union meetings this week (Baptists 16,000 fewer in the year, Congregationalists 23,000, Methodists 66,000, Anglicans 82,000) is a serious matter for the Churches, but perhaps not as serious as it looks. By no means all the lapsed thousands would have gone on to be Church members, and by no means all of them will fail to become Church members. The general attitude towards Sunday, and the family car in particular, has created heavy competition to the Sunday school, which can never hope to retain anything like the place it held in the life of the Churches a generation ago. Whether it can even retain any place at all is a little uncertain. The supply of suitable teachers, moreover, gets more difficult rather than less.
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