system is maintained through a series of years.

(1) Appearance. It is the testimony of every superintendent and pastor who has graded his Sunday school that the appearance of the school is greatly improved by the graded system. The older scholars are assembled in one body, instead of being scattered throughout the room; scholars of the same size and age are brought together in classes. The school will also actually seem larger than it was before the grading.

(2) Order. The order of the school will be more easily maintained. The big boys and the giggling girls, both at the self-conscious, awkward age, will be in a new environment, no longer the leaders over smaller and younger pupils, but in classes by themselves, and with responsibilities appealing to their self-respect.

(3) Social Relations. It will be a benefit to the scholars of each age to be associated in groups of the same period in life, with the same interests and similar mental acquirements. Many scholars will find their new associations more congenial than their former ones in the ungraded classes, where older and younger people have been brought together. The class will now become, far more than it was before, a social power.

(4) Teaching Work. In the ungraded class, with older and younger pupils together, the teacher met with his greatest difficulty in finding a common ground of interest. In the graded class, with pupils of uniform age and equal intellectual understanding, the teaching can be better adapted to the needs of the pupils.

(5) Incentive to Interest. The prospect of promotion awakens an interest in the classes. Each scholar looks forward to the time when he will attain to a higher grade with its enlarged privileges.

(6) Obtaining Teachers. The grading of the school greatly aids in the solution of the ever-present problem of obtaining new teachers, (a) The graded school requires a smaller number of teachers than the ungraded school, since it provides for the consolidation of skeleton classes in the Senior Department. This sets at liberty a number of experienced teachers for service in other grades. (b) Whenever a new class comes from the Primary Department, a teacher is already at hand in the Junior Department whose class at the same time has advanced to the Intermediate Department. The teacher goes year by year with his class until it leaves the department, and then he returns to a new class beginning the studies of the same department. (c) After the results of a teacher-training class are available there will always be trained teachers waiting for classes.

(7) Leakage Period. The young people between fifteen and twenty years of age constitute the "leakage period,"[5] when they are in great danger of drifting away from the school. They will be held to the school far more firmly if they have before them the prospect of membership in large classes of young people, with social opportunities, and club life, so popular with youth at the early adolescent age. It has been clearly shown by practical experience that an organized Senior Department, with large classes kept full by regular reinforcement from the Intermediate Department, will maintain itself and hold its members, while skeleton classes of the young people constantly tend to disintegration.

The well-organized, completely graded Sunday school possesses such evident and great advantages that it is certain to be established wherever thorough and efficient religious instruction is sought. The sooner it comes, and the more faithfully it is maintained, the better it will be for the church of to-day and to-morrow, and the more quickly and effectually will the grave problems of our modern civilization be solved.

V