Notwithstanding the instances we have given, Mr. Raikes must really be regarded as the founder of Sunday-schools as an extended organisation. With him they became more than a notion, or a mere piece of local effort; and his position and profession, and the high respect in which he was held in the city in which he lived, all alike enabled him to give publicity to the plan: and before he commenced this movement, he was known as a philanthropist; indeed, John Howard himself bears something like the same relation to prison philanthropy which Raikes bears to Sunday-schools. No one doubts that Howard was the great apostle of prisons; but it seems that before he commenced his great prison crusade, Raikes had laboured diligently to reform the Gloucester gaol. The condition of the prisoners was most pitiable, and Raikes, nearly twenty years before he commenced the Sunday-school system, had been working among them, attempting their material, moral, and spiritual improvement, by which he had earned for himself the designation of the “Teacher of the Poor.” Howard visited Raikes in Gloucester, and bears his testimony to the blessedness and benevolence of his labours in the prison there; and the gaol appears not unnaturally to have suggested the idea of the Sunday-school to the benevolent-hearted man. It was a dreadful state of society. Some idea may be formed of it from a paragraph in the _Gloucester Journal_ for June, 1783, the paper of which Raikes was the editor and proprietor: it is mentioned that no less than sixty-six persons were committed to the Castle in one week, and Mr. Raikes adds, “The prison is already so full that all the gaoler’s stock of fetters is occupied, and the smiths are hard at work casting new ones.” He goes on to say: “The people sent in are neither disappointed soldiers nor sailors, but chiefly frequenters of ale-houses and skittle-alleys.” Then, in another paragraph, he goes on to remark, “The ships about to sail for Botany Bay will carry about one thousand miserable creatures, who might have lived perfectly happy in this country had they been early taught good principles, and to avoid the danger of associating with those who make sobriety and industry the objects of their ridicule.”