he
children of God, to whom they might freely cry, 'My Father!'

And I say that they were not deceived. I say that experience has
shown that they were right; that the Church Catechism, where it is
really and honestly taught, gives the children an honest, frank,
sober, English temper of mind which no other training which I have
seen gives. I have seen, alas! Church schools fail, ere now, in
training good children; but as far as I have seen, they have failed
either because the Catechism was neglected for the sake of cramming
the children's brains with scholarship, or because the Catechism was
not honestly taught: because the words were taught by rote, but the
explanations which were given of it were no explanations at all, but
another doctrine, which our forefathers knew not: either Dissenting
or Popish; either a religion of fancies, and feelings, and
experiences, or one of superstitious notions and superstitious
ceremonies which have been borrowed from the Church of Rome, and
which, I trust in God, will be soon returned to their proper owner,
if the free, truthful, God-trusting English spirit is to remain in
our children. I know that there are good men among Dissenters, my
friends; good men among Romanists. I have met with them, and I
thank God for them; and what may not be good for English children
may be good for foreign ones. I judge not; to his own master each
man stands or falls. But I warn you frankly, from experience (not
of my own merely--Heaven forbid!--but from the experience of
centuries past), that if you expect to make the average of English
children good children on any other ground than the Church Catechism
takes, you will fail. Of course there will be some chosen ones here
and there, whose hearts God will touch; but you will find that the
greater part of the children will not be made better at all; you
will find that the cleverer, and more tender-hearted will be made
conceited, Pharisaical, self-deceiving (for children are as ready to
deceive themselves, and play the hypocrite to their own consciences,
as grown people are); they will catch up cant words and phrases, or
little outward forms of reverence, and make a religion for
themselves out of them to drug their own consciences withal; while,
when they go out into the world, and meet temptation, they will have
no real safeguard against it, because whatsoever they have been
taught, they have not been taught that God is really and practically
t