may keep through youth and manhood, and through the grave, and through all worlds to come, the tender and childlike heart, which we too often have hardened in ourselves by bigotry and superstition, and dead faith, and lip-worship!  And I can have good hope that God will grant it.  I can have hope that God will teach our children and our children’s children truly to know Him whose name is Love and Righteousness, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, as long as I see His providence preserving for us this old Church Catechism, to teach our children what we forget to teach them, or what we have not faith enough to teach them.

Yes, I can have hope for England; and hope for those mighty nations across the seas, whose earthly mother God has ordained that she should be, as long as the Catechism is taught to her children.

For see.  This Catechism does not begin with telling children that they are sinners:  they will find that out soon enough for themselves, poor little things, from their own wayward and self-willed hearts.  Nor by telling them that man is fallen and corrupt:  they will find out that also soon enough, from the way in which they see people go on around them.  It does not even begin by telling them that they ought to be good, or what goodness and righteousness is; because it takes for granted that they know that already; it takes for granted that The Light who lights every man who comes into the world is in them; even the Lord Jesus Christ Himself, stirring up in their hearts, as He does in the heart of every child, the knowledge of good and the love of good.  But it begins at once by teaching the child the name of God.  It goes at once to the root of the matter; to the fountain of goodness itself; even to God, the Father of lights.  It is so careful of God’s honour, so careful that the child should learn from the first to look up to God with love and trust, that it dare not tell the child that God can destroy and punish, before it has told him that God is a Father and a Maker; the Father of spirits, who has made him and all the world.  It dare not tell him that mankind is fallen, before it has told him that all the world is redeemed.  It dare not talk to him of unholiness, before it has taught him that the Holy Spirit of God is with him, to make him holy.  It tells him of a world, a flesh, and a devil:  but he has renounced them.  He has neither part nor lot in them; and he is not to think of them yet.  He is to think of that in which he has part and lot, of which he is an inheritor.  He is to know where he is and ought to be, before he knows where he is not and ought not to be:  he is to think of the name of God, by which he can trample world, flesh, and devil under foot, if they dare hereafter meddle with his soul.  In its God-inspired tenderness and prudence, it dare not darken the heart of one little child, or tempt him to hard thoughts of God, or to cry, ‘Why hast thou made me thus?’ lest it put a stumbling-block