one thing, and practising another, they will learn to fancy that all godly people do the same.  If they see your religion a sham, they will learn to fancy all religion false also.  Oh! woe, woe, most terrible, to those who thus harden their own children’s hearts, and destroy in them, as too many do, all faith in God and man, all hope, all charity!  Woe to them! for the Lord Himself, who came to lay the axe to the root of the tree, said of such, ’If any man cause one of these little ones to offend, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depths of the sea.’

So it is too often now-a-days, and so it will be, until people condescend to learn over again that simple old Church Catechism which they were taught when they were little, and to teach it to their children, not only with their lips but in their lives.

‘The Church Catechism!’ some here will say to themselves with a smile, ’that is but a paltry medicine for so great a disease—­a pitiful ending, forsooth, to such a severe sermon as this, to recommend just the Church Catechism!’ Let those laugh who will, my friends.  If you think you can bring up your children to be blessings to you,—­if you think you can live so as to be blessings to your children, without the Church Catechism, you can but try.  I think that you will fail.  More and more, year by year, I find that those who try do fail.  More and more, year by year, I find that even religious people’s education of their children fails, and that pious men’s sons now-a-days are becoming more and more apt to be scandals to their parents and to religion.  If any choose to say that the reason is, that the pious men’s sons were not of the number of the elect, though their fathers were, I can only answer, that God is no respecter of persons, and that they say that He is; that God is not the author of the evil, and that they say that He is.  If a child of mine turns out ill, I am bound to lay the fault first on myself, and certainly never on God,—­and so is every man, unless the inspired Scripture is wrong where it says, ’Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.’  And the fault is in ourselves.  Very few people really teach their children now-a-days the Church Catechism; very few really believe the Church Catechism; very few really believe that God is such an one as the Church Catechism declares to us; very few believe in the Lord, in whose image and likeness man is made, whose way John the Baptist prepared by turning the hearts of the fathers to the children.  They put, perhaps, religious books into their children’s hands, and talk to them a great deal about their souls:  but they do not tell their children what the Church Catechism tells them, because they do not believe what the Church Catechism tells them.