No wonder that no book outside of the Bible has been translated into so many languages, or circulated so widely.  Thirty-seven years after its publication one hundred thousand copies were in circulation.  The first book translated into any of the dialects of the American Indian, it was from its pages that the red man read his first lessons concerning the true God, and his own relations to that God.  At the present day it is taught in ten different languages in our own land.

And yet how sadly neglected and abused, even by those who bear its author’s name!  It is neglected, if not entirely ignored, in countless Lutheran homes and Sunday-schools.  It is even neglected by many so-called Lutheran pastors.  They set at naught the testimony of nearly four centuries.  They set their own opinions above the testimony of the wisest, as well as the most deeply spiritual and consecrated witnesses of their own Church.  They prefer the baseless, shallow, short-cut methods of this superficial age.  Some of them have even joined in the cry of the fanatic, and called all catechisation in the Church dead formalism!  Fortunately, their number is growing rapidly less, and many, who were for a while carried away with the tide of new measures, are asking for and returning to the good and tried old ways.

Not only is this Catechism neglected, but it is and has been much abused.  Abused, not only by its enemies, who have said hard things against it, but it has been and still is abused, like all good things, by its professed friends.  And doubtless it is the abuse by its friends that is largely responsible for the neglect and contempt into which it has sometimes fallen.  Thus in the family, it is still too often taught as a mere task.  The home teacher often has no higher aim than that the children should learn it by rote—­learn to rattle it off like the multiplication table, or the rules of grammar.

Worse than this, it has often been used as an instrument of punishment.  A child has done something wrong.  It is angrily told that for this it must learn a page or two of the Catechism!  The task is sullenly learned and sullenly recited; and the Catechism is hated worse than the sin committed.  Then too, it is slurred over in the Sunday-schools, without an earnest word of explanation or application.  The learner does not realize that it is meant to change the heart and influence the life.

This same sad mistake is also made by many pastors in the catechetical class.  Strange as it may seem, this mistake is most commonly made by those very pastors who profess to be the warmest friends of and the most zealous insisters on the catechisation of every lamb in the flock.  Thus we find not a few pastors who catechise their classes after the schoolmaster fashion.  They go through the exercise in a perfunctory, formal manner.  They insist on the letter of the text, and are satisfied if their pupils know the lessons well by rote!  To urge