the direction of the reverend guest is rather a tribute to the
cloth than an acknowledgment of the Divine Giver to whom thanks are
due. In the olden days it was the pupil who studied the Sunday-school
lessons as needfully as he conned the tasks to be prepared for
Monday's schoolroom. The portion of the old Union Question Book
appointed for next Sunday was gone over under the mother's eye, the
references were looked up, the Bible Dictionary and Concordance
consulted. Then a Psalm or part of a chapter in the New Testament was
committed to memory, and four or five questions in the catechism were
added to the sum of knowledge to be inspected by the Sunday-school
teacher and "audited" by the superintendent.

In writing the foregoing paragraph a scene arises before me of my
father's fine gray head and serious face as he sat at the head of the
room, Bible and reference books upon the stand before him; of the
dusky faces of the servants in the background, intent upon the reading
and exposition of the Word as they came from the lips of the master of
the household, who for the hour was also the priest. I hear much,
nowadays, of the "hard lines" that fell to the children of that
generation, in that they were drilled after the manner I have
described, and compelled to attend church twice or three times on
Sunday. I affirm fearlessly that we did not know how badly off we
were, and that the aforesaid "lines" seemed to our unsophisticated
imaginations to be cast to us in pleasant places. The hour devoted
each Sunday evening to the study of next Sunday's lesson was full of
interest, the prayer that preceded it and the two or three hymns with
which the simple service closed, gave it a solemnity that was delight,
not boredom.

"Primitive methods" we call those studies now, and contemn, gravely or
jeeringly, the obsolete practice of "going through" the Bible yearly
by reading a given number of chapters every day. We assume that those
were mechanical contrivances which, at the best, filled the mind with
an undigested mass of Biblical matter and made sacred things trite.
They who censure or sneer take no exception to the story that
Demosthenes translated the works of Thucydides eight times, and also
committed them to memory, that his style might be informed with the
spirit and tone of his favorite exemplar. We cannot do away with the
pregnant truth that the Bible-reading child of 1845 so steeped
imagination and memory in the Holy Word tha