# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1900_S22
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

22 Proceedings of the eighteenth convention

[without] contradiction that the institution of the Sunday school is by no means adequate for Christian education. And yet precisely in our country, where the danger of falling away to the sects is such a threatening one, we need such Christians as are firmly grounded and well armed, who know the pure doctrine and can well distinguish it from the false.

What, then, is to be thought of it when in many of our congregations, even in old congregations, a Sunday school is set up alongside the congregational school? Should the need for a Sunday school really be conceivable where all is well with the weekday school? Should not the children there simply and without more ado be referred to the congregational school? Do we not, by setting up Sunday schools, give room to the thought that the meager instruction there is sufficient? That we never concede the latter is clear from what has been said above. But this does not deny that in times of necessity one must often make do with the barest minimum. If one cannot feed someone to the full, one should not turn him from the door and also refuse the little that one could give him, but one gives him what one has and asks God to bless it for him. When parents in a time of dearth feed their children meagerly with a crust of bread, we do not go to law with them, but praise them for sharing the poor little bit of bread with their children. So here. If a congregation were so small and poor and so far removed from church and worship that it could not set up a weekday school, and it began a Sunday school and set over it as teacher whoever from its midst is capable of it, who would want to blame it for that? It is different, however, when father and mother live in abundance and want to put their children off with famine fare. Such we would rightly call ravens of parents [that is, heartless parents], even if they were to appeal ever so loudly to the fact that parents have been praised who in the famine gave their children only a crust of bread. So here. If parents think they have done their duty fully because they send their children to the Sunday school, while a Christian congregational school offers them the opportunity to feed them abundantly at the laid table of their God, then such parents have brought hunger and want into the land for their children and will have to bear with their poor children the curse of their evil works. For education through Sunday school instruction is and remains the treatment of a child in time of want. Of such parents there are, alas, a not small number. When they leave their children to us so that we give them once a week a little piece of the bread of life, we should not say: We will not give you this either, since you want nothing during the week; rather we should give them at least on Sunday a little piece of bread. For this we then pray God's double blessing upon them, and also keep our eyes open during the week so that not