All the stories told of Raikes show that the law of kindness was usually on his lips. A sulky, stubborn girl had resisted all reproofs and correction, and had refused to ask forgiveness of her mother. In the presence of the mother, Raikes said to the girl, “Well, if you have no regard for yourself, I have much for you. You will be ruined and lost if you do not become a good girl; and if you will not humble yourself, I must humble myself on your behalf and make a beginning for you;” and then, with great solemnity, he entreated the mother to forgive the girl, using such words that he overcame the girl’s pride. The stubborn creature actually fell on her knees, and begged her mother’s forgiveness, and never gave Mr. Raikes or her mother trouble afterwards. It is a very simple anecdote; but it shows the Divine spirit in the method of the man; and the more closely we come into a personal knowledge of his character, the more admirable and lovable it seems. Thus literally true and beautiful are the words of the hymn: “Like a lone husbandman, forlorn, The man of Gloucester went, Bearing his seeds of precious corn; And God the blessing sent. Now, watered long by faith and prayer, From year to year it grows, Till heath, and hill, and desert bare, Do blossom as the rose.” Mr. Raikes was a Churchman; he was so happy as to have, near to his own parish of St. Mary-le-Crypt, in Gloucester, an intimate friend, the Rector of St. Aldate’s—a neighbouring parish in the same city—the Rev. Thomas Stock, whose monument in the church truly testifies that “to him, in conjunction with Robert Raikes, Esquire, is justly attributed the honour of having planned and instituted the first Sunday-school in the kingdom.” Mr. Stock was but a young man in 1780, for he died in 1803, then only fifty-four years of age; he must have been, at the time of the first institution of Sunday-schools, a young man of fine and tender instincts. He appears, simultaneously with Mr. Raikes’s movement, to have formed a Sunday-school in his own parish, taking upon himself the superintendence of it, and the responsibility of such expenses as it involved. But Mr. Stock says, in a letter written in 1788, “The progress of the institution through the kingdom is justly attributed to the constant representations which Mr. Raikes made in his own paper of the benefits which he saw would probably arise from it.” At the time Mr. Raikes began the work, he was about forty-four years of age; it was a great thing in that day to possess a respectable journal, a newspaper of acknowledged character and influence; to this, very likely, we owe it, in some considerable measure, that the work in Gloucester became extensively known and spread, and expanded into a great movement. But he does not appear to have used the columns of his newspaper for the