Among the numerous benevolent institutions of the present day, and perhaps
among our mo^t useful charities, may be recokoned the system of Sabbath School
instruction. Besides its oijvious effects in promoting the moral and religious in¬
struction of the rising generation, and especially among the poor, the ignorant,
and the depraved ; it has been the pioneer of many otjier important objects of
Christian enterprise, and is one of the most efficient auxilaries of them all. The
Sabbath School teacher gains easy access to the wretched and unhappy every
where, and often finds a way, or opens a door for the Bible, the Tract and the
Missionary into spheres of usefulness which otherwise might have escaped ob¬
servation.

While the " Brittish and Foreign Bible Society'* is confessedly ** the bloomil^
<3aughter of Sabbath Schools," "e feel a pride and pleasure in acknowledging
that the JYeiv-York Ma<^dahn Society^ owes its origin to a chain of facts devel¬
oped by labors of Sabbath School teachers in this city, and especially in the
Female Penitentiary at Bellevue.

About two years since throiigli the labors of a few pious females of different
Christian denominations, a Sabbath School was permanently established in the.
Female Penitentiary at Bellevue, they having secured the occasional assistance
of their husbands and other brethren. The Penitentiary^ is for the most part
filled with abandoned white females, who have been arrested by the police for
drunken rioting, and other disturbances of the public peace; or have been sent
hither as vagrants. Here all ages and descriptions of prostitutes are herded to-
getlier, from the old and superannuated daughters of infamy and pollution, fa¬
miliar with crime, and habituated to fiithiness and degradation; to those novi¬
ciates in the arts and guilt of ilie brothel, who have fallen victims to seduction
but recently, and have been overtaken thus early in the road to ruin by the arm
of civil law. Here they are crowded into four of five night rooms in numbers,
varying from two to four hundred, and the term of their commitment limited
to sixty days. Many of them it is true, were worn out by drunkenness and dis¬
sipation, and languishing in the Hospital of the most loathsome diseases. But
a large proportion ol these wretched females still had youth and health on their
side, and many of them had but recently forsaken the paths of virtue; and had
respectable and pious parents, who mourned over their daughters with anguish
indi^cribable ; nithout»,h ignorant of their fate, except that they had fallen into
the fangs of the seducer, and had abandoned home and friends for a life of infa¬
my and crime.

The short period of their imprisonment only gave these ladies access to them
for the new Sabbaths included in the sixty days, and the next they would hear of.
the subjects of their prayers and tears, was that they had returned " like the
dog to his vomit, or the sovv that was washed to her wallowing in the mire."
and soon their crimes would bring them back to the school, for very many of
them were out but a ^ew days, and spent half their time in this Penitentiary.
Indeed some of these unhappy women have been committed seventeen limes,
and served out sixty days at each commitment.

From the indiscriminate manner in which they were thronged fogether in
the night rooms, and absence of any moral or religious means of instruction
t'lroiigh the week, it was soon found that tlie labors of the Sabbath School were
for the most part unproductive. Sometimes the impressions made on the hearts
and consciences of these daughters of guilt and sorrow, by the pious efforts of
the teachers, would seem to afford a ho])e of future amendment, but their term