ce goes, never did turn out well, unless they were namby-pamby
creatures, milksops, in fact, rather than men. I have lived to see a
great change for the better in this respect, and a corresponding
improvement of the young man of the day. It may be that he is less
sentimental; but his religion, when he has any, is of a manlier type. I
never saw a copy of Shakespeare till I was a young man. As a child, my
memory had been exercised in learning passages from Milton, the hardest
chapters in the Old or New Testament, and the Assembly Catechism. If
that Assembly Catechism had never been written I should have been happier
as a child, and wiser and more useful as a man. I have led an erratic
life; I have wandered far from the fold. At one time I looked on myself
as an outcast. With the Old Psalmist--with brave Oliver Cromwell--with
generations of tried souls, I had to sing, as Scotch Presbyterians, I
believe, in Northern kirks still sing:--

Woe's me that I in Meshec am
A sojourner so long,
Or that I in the tents do dwell
To Kedar that belong.

Yet nothing was simpler or more beautiful than the lives of those old
Noncons.; I may say so from a wide experience. They were godly men, a
striking contrast to the hunting, drinking, swearing parsons of the
surrounding district. Hence their power in the pulpit, their success in
the ministry. But they failed to understand childhood and youth;
childhood, with its delight in things that are seen and temporal, and
youth with its passionate longing to burst its conventional barriers, and
to revel in the world which looks so fair, and of which it has heard such
evil. Ah, these children of many prayers; how few of them came to be
pious; how many of them fell, some, alas, to rise no more. One reason
was that if you did not see your way to become a church member and a
professor of religion you were cut off, or felt inwardly that you were
cut off, which is much the same thing, and had to associate with men of
loose lives and looser thoughts. There was no _via media_; you were
either a saint or a sinner, of the church or the world. It is not so
now, when even every Young Men's Christian Association has its gymnasium,
and the young man's passions are soothed by temperance and exercise and
not inflated by drink. There may not be so much of early piety as there
was--though of that I am not sure. There is a great deal more of
religion than there was, not so much