=Value of the Instruction in ‘Sunday Schools.’=--Both in Great Britain and the United States, however, the Sunday schools gradually tended to abandon their secular instruction and become purely religious. At the same time the teachers came to serve without pay and to instruct less efficiently. And the value of the secular teaching was not large at the best, as the work was necessarily limited to a few hours once a week. Raikes and all others interested in these institutions recognized their inadequacy as a means of securing universal education, and regarded them merely as auxiliary to a more complete system of instruction. But while a makeshift and by no means a final solution for national education, they performed a notable service for the times, and helped point the way to universal education. [Sidenote: Lancaster] [Sidenote: and the British and Foreign Society;] =The Schools of the Two Monitorial Societies.=--While philanthropic education started largely in the eighteenth century, some of the schools continued well into the nineteenth. This was especially the case with the ‘monitorial’ system, started at Southwark in 1798. This district of London was thronged with barefoot and unkempt children; and Lancaster, the founder of the school, undertook to educate as many as he could. His schoolroom was soon filled with a hundred or more pupils. In order to teach them all, he used the older pupils as assistants. He taught the lesson first to these ‘monitors,’ and they in turn imparted it to the others, who were divided into equal groups. Each monitor cared for a single group. The work was very successful from the first, but Lancaster, attempting to introduce schools of this kind throughout England, fell so recklessly into debt that an association had to be founded in 1808 to continue the work on a practical basis. Within half a dozen years Lancaster withdrew from the organization, but the association, under the name of the ‘British and Foreign Society,’ continued to flourish and found new schools. [Sidenote: Bell and the National Society.] So successful was the Lancasterian work that the Church of England, fearing its nonsectarian influence upon education, in 1811 organized ‘The National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church.’ This long-named association was to conduct monitorial schools under the management of Doctor Andrew Bell, who had experimented with the system in India before Lancaster opened his school. Although they had formed no part of Bell’s original methods, the Anglican catechism and prayer book were now taught dogmatically in the schools founded by the National Society. Bell proved an admirable director, and a healthy rivalry sprang up between the societies. [Sidenote: Differences in the two systems.] [Sidenote: Both were unoriginal] [Sidenote: and mechanical.]