So it was with the religion that was crammed into him.  There was no effort made to draw him to religion by its beauty and tenderness.  He rarely heard of the Saviour as the loving one who took little children in His arms and blessed them, but was taught to regard Him as a stern and merciless judge, as one who, instead of being “touched with the feeling of our infirmities,” makes those infirmities the means of wringing fresh sufferings from us.  Sunday was a day of terror to him, for on that day the Catechism was administered to him until he was more than sick of it.  “I think,” said he to his congregation, not long since, referring to this part of his life, “that to force childhood to associate religion with such dry morsels is to violate the spirit, not only of the New Testament, but of common sense as well.  I know one thing, that if I am ‘lax and latitudinarian,’ the Sunday Catechism is to blame for a part of it.  The dinners that I have lost because I could not go through ‘sanctification,’ and ‘justification,’ and ‘adoption,’ and all such questions, lie heavily on my memory!  I do not know that they have brought forth any blossoms.  I have a kind of grudge against many of those truths that I was taught in my childhood, and I am not conscious that they have waked up a particle of faith in me.  My good old aunt in heaven—­I wonder what she is doing.  I take it that she now sits beauteous, clothed in white, that round about her sit chanting cherub children, and that she is opening to them from her larger range sweet stories, every one fraught with thought, and taste, and feeling, and lifting them up to a higher plane.  One Sunday afternoon with my aunt Esther did me more good than forty Sundays in church with my father.  He thundered over my head, and she sweetly instructed me down in my heart.  The promise that she would read Joseph’s history to me on Sunday was enough to draw a silver thread of obedience through the entire week; and if I was tempted to break my promise, I said, ’No; Aunt Esther is going to read on Sunday;’ and I would do, or I would not do, all through the week, for the sake of getting that sweet instruction on Sunday.

“And to parents I say, Truth is graded.  Some parts of God’s truth are for childhood, some parts are for the nascent intellectual period, and some parts are for later spiritual developments.  Do not take the last things first.  Do not take the latest processes of philosophy and bring them prematurely to the understanding.  In teaching truth to your children, you are to avoid tiring them.”

“The greatest trial of those days,” says Mrs. Stowe, “was the Catechism.  Sunday lessons were considered by the mother-in-law as inflexible duty, and the Catechism as the sine qua non.  The other children memorized readily, and were brilliant reciters, but Henry, blushing, stammering, confused, and hopelessly miserable, stuck fast on some sand-bank of what is required or forbidden by this or that commandment, his mouth choking up with the long words which he hopelessly miscalled, was sure to be accused of idleness or inattention, and to be solemnly talked to, which made him look more stolid and miserable than ever, but appeared to have no effect in quickening his dormant faculties.”