ed in favour of
Christianity. How selfish is the parent who stamps his religious ideas
into a child's receptive nature, as a moulder stamps the hot iron with
his model! I shall prejudice my children neither for Christianity nor
for Buddhism, nor for Atheism, but allow them to wait for their mature
years. Then they can open the question and decide for themselves." Later
Coleridge led his friend into the garden, and then whimsically
exclaimed: "How selfish is the gardener to ruthlessly stamp his
prejudice in favour of roses, violets and strawberries into a receptive
garden-bed. The time was when in April I pulled up the young weeds,--the
parsley, the thistles,--and planted the garden-beds out with vegetables
and flowers. Now I have decided to permit the garden to go until
September. Then the black clods can choose for themselves between
cockleburrs, currants and strawberries." The deist saw the point.

Another weakness in our system of religious training for children is
manifest at the adolescence-period of the child. We have been in the
habit of allowing the child to consider the Bible-school as his church.
We send him to the Bible-school in his very early years, but make no
demands upon him as far as specific church-attendance is concerned. And
at the kindergarten-period we are probably wise in this; for after the
child has attended kindergarten for an hour, it is too great a tax upon
him to require him to sit through an hour's church-service. But after
the kindergarten-period it seems to me the plain duty of parents to
encourage the child to attend church, though not necessarily for the
entire service; for if the child does not establish a church-going
_habit_ during these plastic years, the probability is that he will
never form it. This partially explains why there is such a leakage
between the Bible-school and the church. When the child gets "too old
for Bible-school," not having formed the church-going habit, he is
stranded

"Between two worlds,
One dead, the other powerless to be born."

And the result is he drifts away from the Church.

In the endeavour to remedy this situation in his own Church it has been
the custom of the writer to have all children from seven to twelve years
of age in the Bible-school, which meets on Sunday morning before church,
attend the morning worship for the first fifteen minutes. During this
time they hear the Call to Worship, the Invocation, the Lord's Prayer,
the Children's