Judges are not expected to form an estimate of the child’s character until a certain time has elapsed and the reports of the different officers have been examined and compared.  Their decisions are then registered, to be again examined and compared with subsequent reports.

The results obtained through the medium of the Amusement Gallery greatly aids the Character-divers and others occupied with education, in rightly directing the child’s steps.  The imposition of useless tasks, fatiguing to the children and perhaps injurious to the young intelligence, is thus avoided.

XXXV.

PRAYER.

     “Forget not the source whence all blessings come.”

While stating that the prayers said by girls after their early meal are short, I ought to have added that the same rule is followed with regard to children of both sexes.

We even vary our forms of worship and services to suit different ages.  Before my reign adults and children went to the same places of worship, repeated the same prayers, and listened to the same discourses, most of which being perfectly unintelligible to those of tender years, the evils and inconveniences resulting from the practice were very great.  The children, finding the routine irksome, the constrained decorum required of them during a time which seemed to them never ending (for the services were then very long) was painful in the extreme, though they were sometimes relieved by turning their thoughts in other directions, perhaps to subjects irrelevant if not opposed to the ostensible object of the meeting.

Thus pain and weariness became then and in after life naturally associated with the most sacred of duties, and generally those, who at an early age had been obliged to attend most regularly to an unintelligible and irksome routine, were in after life those who absented themselves most frequently from the place of worship.  I have known some, and this will scarcely be credited, who from an early age had in obedience to their parents’ commands attended church with what was to them painful and monotonous regularity, and who, as soon as they were old enough to leave the parental jurisdiction, never entered a place of worship again until the day of their death, so great had been their stifled repugnance, created by the unnatural surfeit which had been inflicted upon them.

This was not all:  the repugnance thus engendered often extended even to the faith itself which the prayers and discourses had been intended to inculcate, and led the way in after life to doubt and disbelief.

There was another though a secondary evil, attendant upon these old formalities.  In our climate, where children are very susceptible, it happened that when on rare occasions any striking observation attracted their attention, they would put questions very difficult for their parents or preceptors to answer.