If teachers do universally confine themselves to the limits which I have been attempting to define, they may accomplish within these limits a vast amount of good.  By attempting, however, to exceed them, the confidence of parents is destroyed or weakened, and the door is closed.  In this way, injury to a very great extent has been done in many parts of our country.  Parents are led to associate with the very idea of religion, indirect and perhaps secret efforts to influence their children in a way which they themselves would disapprove.  They transfer to the cause of piety itself the dislike which was first awakened by exceptionable means to promote it; and other teachers, seeing these evil effects, are deterred from attempting what they might easily have accomplished.  Before, therefore, attempting to enforce the duty and to explain the methods of exerting religious influence in school, I thought proper distinctly to state with what restrictions and within what limits the work is to be done.

There are many teachers who profess to cherish the spirit and to entertain the hopes of piety, who yet make no effort whatever to extend its influence to the hearts of their pupils.  Others appeal sometimes to religious truth merely to assist them in the government of the school.  They perhaps bring it before the minds of disobedient pupils in a vain effort to make an impression upon the conscience of one who has done wrong, and who can not by other means be brought to submission.  But the pupil in such cases understands, or at least he believes, that the teacher applies to religious truth only to eke out his own authority, and of course it produces no effect.  Another teacher thinks he must, to discharge his duty, give a certain amount, weekly, of what he considers religious instruction.  Pie accordingly appropriates a regular portion of time to a formal lecture or exhortation, which he delivers without regard to the mental habits of thought and feeling which prevail among his charge.  He forgets that the heart must be led, not driven to piety, and that unless his efforts are adapted to the nature of the minds he is acting upon, and suited to influence them, he must as certainly fail of success as when there is a want of adaptedness between the means and the end in any other undertaking whatever.

The arrangement which seems to me as well calculated as any for the religious exercises of a school is this: 

1.  In the morning, open the school with a very short prayer, resembling in its object and length the opening prayer in the morning at Congregational churches.  The posture which, from some considerable experience, I would recommend at this exercise, is sitting with the head reclined upon the desk.  The prayer, besides being short, should be simple in its language and specific in its petitions.  A degree of particularity and familiarity which would be improper elsewhere is not only allowable here, but necessary to the production of the proper effect.  That the reader may understand to what extent I mean to be understood to recommend this, I will subjoin a form, such as in spirit I suppose such a prayer ought to be.