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Christian Knowledge (see TRACT SOCIETIES, III., 2) in 1698 and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in 1701. He was also a member of the commission appointed by the house of commons to add fifty new churches to the metropolis, then rapidly extending its boundaries. A great object of both the societies above named was, in the first instance, to extend religious teaching to portions of Great Britain and her dependencies which were untouched by the parochial system of the Church of England. Thus, regions so far apart as the Scottish Highlands and the American plantations became objects of their efforts. A cooperator in the same field was Thomas Bray, commissary to the governor of Maryland. The Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge had its headquarters in London, but had correspondents throughout the country. A great feature of its work was the establishment of " charity schools." These were originally day-schools imparting rudimentary instruction in reading and writing and, generally, also in arithmetic and some simple manual occupation. Religious instruction was insisted upon in all the schools. In the absence of any uniform or national system of education, the society did a great work, although the total number of children in attendance all over the country appears never to have exceeded 30,000 at any one time. The system continued to be actively carried out through the greater part of the eighteenth century. Toward the end of this period Miss Hannah Ball (d. 1792), an early disciple of John Wesley, started a Sunday-school at High Wycombe. Another was set on foot in Gloucester by Miss Cooke, also a Methodist, for the benefit of the children engaged in her uncle's pin-factory. From such-small beginnings the movement was spread largely through the sympathy of the editor of the influential Gloucester Journal, the well-known Robert Raikes, (q.v.). In 1801 a conservative estimate computed these schools at 1,516, with an average exceeding 100 children in each, in London alone (see SuNDAY seHOOI.s).

The eighteenth century witnessed the spread, and indeed almost the genesis, of the modern hospital system. Until then, the only hospitals, even in

London, had been adapted from the 6. Hospitals; medieval monastic establishments of

insane. While the care of the sick, in its early stages, was intimately connected with the afflatus of Christianity, the forward movement of the period above mentioned appears to have owed its origin mainly to the humane instincts of leading medical practitioners combined with an entirely legitimate desire in the profession to utilize the institutional care of the sick in the study and advancement of the science and practise of the healing art. From these considerations it would seem that, so far as the extension of the hospital system at this date was a branch of philanthropy, it falls outside the title and scope of the present section. An exception should perhaps be made in the case of the new and more humane treatment of the insane inaugurated in 1791 at York by William Tuke (d.

1822), a tea-merchant of that city and a member of the Society of Friends. In the Tuke family, as in the sect to which it adhered, philanthropy has been hereditary. William Tuke's great grandson, James Hack Tuke (d. 1896), twice traveled in Ireland to administer relief during the famine year of 1847, and again during the distress of 1881. He also journeyed to Paris during the Commune of 1871 to distribute $100,000 raised by his denomination to relieve the sufferings arising from the siege of the preceding winter. A further exception with regard to the late Miss Florence Nightingale (q.v.), who first established a training-school for sick-nurses, and had herself in early life been a disciple of Elizabeth Fry (q.v.), should also, perhaps, be made.

Conversely, the Methodist movement of the same century (see METHODISTS, I.) was too exclusively concerned with the Evangelical revival to rank

among directly philanthropic or social 7. Anti- agencies, though John Wesley himself

Slavery and wrote against Slavery (q.v.). With the Prison- founders of the so-called "Clapham

agitation against the slave-trade, and ultimately against slavery itself, was close and intimate. As early, indeed, as 1727, the Society of Friends at its annual meeting had taken up the position that " the importing of negroes from their native country and relations by Friends is not a commendable nor allowed practise." From these two bodies were drawn most of the champions of the crusade. The historian Lecky remarks that the activity of the philanthropic spirit " has been largely stimulated by the Evangelical Revival." The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade founded by Granville Sharp (d. 1813) in 1787 was largely composed of Quakers. William Wilberforce (q.v.) was a leading member of the Low-church or Evangelical colony settled round Clapham Common, and was besides an influential member of parliament and a friend of William Pitt, the prime minister. Thus he constituted a link between the religious and the political worlds. Thomas Clarkson (d. 1846) was already in deacon's orders in the Church of England when he took up the question, and actually refrained from taking priest's orders lest that profession should interfere with his prosecution of the cause, to which he felt so strong a call that he writes, " At length I yielded, not because I saw any reasonable prospect of success in my new undertaking (for all cool-headed and cool-hearted men would have pronounced against it) but in obedience I believe to a higher Power." Again, the era of Prison Reform (q.v.) was inaugurated by john Howard (q.v.). Of Non-conformist training and strong religious sentiments, his duties as high sheriff of Bedfordshire brought him into contact with the harsh treatment of prisoners in his native land. The horrors of jail fever were equaled by those of the miscellaneous herding together of the novice or perhaps the innocent with the most depmVed. His end came in the course of prosecuting his investigations in the prisons of South Russia. His endeavors were directed toward the reform of the system; those of Elizabeth Fry who, like the Tukes, came of a prominent Quaker family, aimed