The next momentous step forward in Welsh education was the starting of Sunday Schools, by Charles of Bala. This was one of the {223} direct results of the Revival. From that day to the present the influence of these schools has been incalculably great. Children had their place in them; but their primary function was the education of adults. The term "school" when applied to them is somewhat misleading; they were rather small study-circles, presided over by a democratically chosen leader, and, with the Bible as text-book, discussing almost every question pertaining to this world and the next. Sunday Schools were quickly adopted by all the Nonconformist bodies, and by the Episcopal Church as well; and among the former at least church membership implied membership of the school. Owing to this the minds of the people of Wales became saturated with the Scriptures. The geography of Palestine was more familiar to them than that of England. Bible stories, Bible arguments, and Bible metaphors were become interwoven with the very texture of their thought. Huxley once pointed out that no man who possessed a good knowledge of the Bible could be considered uncultured; and Ruskin maintained that to know by heart some of its greatest passages was to make the writing of an undistinguished style impossible. {224} To these admirable results must be added, in the case of Wales, the training in reasoning, in dialectic, and in controversial fair-play which the Schools supplied. Coming to the nineteenth century, we find efforts to improve educational facilities in Wales so numerous and so varied as to be positively bewildering. The important date to remember is 1846. Prior to that landmark, efforts of a voluntary kind had been made by the National Society, and by the British Society. In that year a Royal Commission was appointed to make a thorough investigation into the condition of education in the Principality. When the Commission issued its report, a year later, a great outcry was raised in Wales; for it was discovered that it had gone much beyond the limits assigned to it for enquiry, and had made strictures, many of them demonstrably false, and others offensively expressed, upon the moral and religious condition of the people. The enquiry has been known in Wales, ever since, as "Brad y Llyfrau Gleision" (The Treason of the Blue Books). Nevertheless the Commission had done good work in that it had aroused interest in the question of education, and had impressed upon Parliament, and public men generally, the {225} necessity of dealing with it. There was, in consequence, a decided quickening of the educational life of Wales; and, down to 1870, a steady increase in the number of schools, as well as an improvement in the quality of the teachers. In 1870 the separate history of elementary education in Wales comes to an end; for it was then assimilated in almost every respect to that of England.