3. Sunday Lectures.

I spoke of a Sunday lecture society just now. The lecture is a third lever of Sunday education lately taken in hand by us here in America. In Boston, each winter since 1869, the Free Religious Association or its friends have arranged a course of ten or twelve Sunday afternoon lectures in Horticultural Hall. The lecturers have been Jew, Roman Catholic, Protestant of more than one denomination, Thelst, Atheist,—invited as thinkers having equal rights. Individual freedom, with fellowship, in religion is the Association's motto, the ideal towards which it works. Its members have usually very definite convictions of their own, some holding one belief, some another; but they are allied in their society to maintain one public platform where differences of belief shall meet on friendly terms in virtue of a common love of truth and of charity,—where the differences of belief shall meet as within sects only the similarities meet. Accordingly page 92 many speakers have been sought to speak for various phases of religious thought,—many more than have felt able or willing to accept the invitation. Not religion only and morals,—social problems, history, biography, science, art, have furnished topics. The lectures are meant to be "solid"; and the audience, a thoughtful set of listeners, ranges from three or four hundred to twice that number. The expenses are now met, in part by a ten or fifteen cents' admission, in part by private subscription.

Chicago bravely led the way in a more popular movement, and has this story to tell about it: Some thirty months ago a company of young men began the work "with abundant faith and a cash capital of six dollars." They have provided three courses of lectures. Last winter's course lasted seven months, and the audience present averaged thirteen hundred and seventy-seven persons,—the audience absent being all whom the circulation of the city newspapers printing verbatim reports could reach. No one connected with the management of the society has ever received a cent for service rendered. "It sells first-class lectures at cost price." Every pair of ears that listens pays ten cents; and this rate has provided lectures, advertisements, rent for the largest hall in Chicago, and at the season's end left four hundred dollars in the treasury. The lectures are given at 3 P.M., in order not to interfere with church-services. The topics embrace nearly all the great themes of thought except theology, which is let alone. And all classes of the people contribute to the audience, though the tendency is to gather more cultured listeners than the movement was designed to help. This present winter, be it said, however, the experiment is disappointing its friends. The political excitement, the surfeit of speeches from which the public has been suffering through the whole page 93 election-autumn, the revival-attractions of Messrs. Moody and Sankey, perhaps too the fact that the purely popular speakers occasionally engaged hitherto had been dropped from the list, all seemed to converge as causes to make the audience dwindle; and, the ten cent rate no longer paying expenses, the lectures have been suspended for a while, to be resumed by and by.

Chicago's neighbors, Milwaukee and St. Louis, have followed her example. At Milwaukee such subjects as Mr. Fields carries call out eight hundred or one thousand hearers. Proctor talking of astronomy, with charts behind him, draws eighteen hundred. At St. Louis the audience last winter averaged nine hundred and sixty through rain or shine. It was largely made up of men with their families, of youths and boys even, who could hardly have afforded more than the ten cents charged. An illustrated lecture, the prospect of seeing as well as hearing, was sure to draw a crowd. In all three cities the work suffered for a while from pulpits that denounced the "Sabbath desecration," but soon their outcry died away.

The appeal to the eye is specially to be commended in any hour's instruction meant to reach our "working-man." The picture is the magnet which makes the difference between the small audience and the large, between the slack and eager interest, between the lesson vaguely and the lesson clearly understood, between distinct and fading memory of it. We know in Boston how the Lowell Institute is overcrowded to hear any good narrator who goes there with a stereopticon. Let the chance of pictures be widely known, and on the winter Sunday afternoon or evening, which so many people know not what to do with, at a ten cents' admission our Music Hall would probably be well filled to travel with such a man and such an instrument through any country on the page 94 globe, or to follow him into the wonder-lands of science or along the tracks of history and biography.