A school in which instruction is given on Sunday: esp. such a school for children held in connection with a parish or a congregation; such schools are now intended only for religious instruction, but originally instruction in secular subjects was also given.
Robert Raikes, of Gloucester, was the originator in England of the Sunday-school as an adjunct of a church congregation.
1783. Gloucester Jrnl., 3 Nov. Some of the clergy,… bent upon attempting a reform among the children of the lower class, are establishing Sunday schools, for rendering the Lord’s day subservient to the ends of instruction, which has hitherto been prostituted to bad purposes.
1783. R. Raikes, Lett., 25 Nov. in Gentl. Mag. (1784), LIV. I. 411/2. The success … has induced one or two of my friends to … set up Sunday schools in other parts of the city, and now a whole parish has taken up the object.
1784. Wesley, Wks. (1872), IV. 284. Before Service I stepped into the Sunday-school which contains two hundred and forty children, taught every Sunday by several masters.
1791. J. Learmont, Poems, 53. ’Tis nae i’ power o’ Sunday Schools … To fleg Vice out o’ her strang holes.
1820. Gentl. Mag., XC. I. 430/2. Sunday Schools, instruments of disaffection.
1848. Thackeray, Van. Fair, li. I would rather be a parson’s wife, and teach a Sunday School than this.
1885. [W. H. White], M. Rutherford’s Deliv., iii. He taught in the Sunday-school, and afterwards, as he got older, he was encouraged to open his lips at a prayer-meeting.
attrib. 1836. Partington’s Brit. Cycl. Lit., etc., III. 855. A Sunday school society was formed in 1785…. In 1803, the first Sunday school union was formed in London.
1841. Penny Cycl., XXI. 44/1. Sunday-school teachers as a class possess many excellent points of character.
1901. W. R. H. Trowbridge, Lett. her Mother to Eliz., xx. 96. There was a Sunday-school feast at Braxome.
Hence Sunday-schooling rare, Sunday-school teaching.
1847. Helps, Friends in C., I. viii. 158. In such a thing as this Sunday schooling,… a judicious man … would endeavour to connect it with something interesting.
