Frampton’s inability to take the oaths had caused his deprivation, the one public ministerial act in which he delighted to take part was to gather the children about him during the afternoon service, and catechize them, and expound to them the sermon they had heard.[1232] It seemed to them all that no preaching could take the place of catechizing as a means of bringing home to the young and scantily educated the doctrines of the Christian faith and the practical duties of religion, and that it was also eminently adapted to create an intelligent attachment to the Church in which they had been brought up.  Such arguments had, of course, all the greater weight at a time when elementary schools were as yet so far from general, and the art of reading was still, comparatively speaking, the accomplishment of a few.

A vigorous but not very effectual attempt was made by many bishops and clergymen to enforce the canon which required servants and apprentices, as well as children, to attend the catechizing.  Bull, for example, and Fleetwood, not only urged it as a duty, but charged the churchwardens of their dioceses to present for ecclesiastical rebuke or penalty all who refused to comply.[1233] In the Isle of Man the commanding personal influence of Bishop Wilson succeeded in carrying the system out.  But elsewhere pastoral monitions and ecclesiastical menaces were generally unavailing to overcome the repugnance which people who were no longer children felt to the idea of submitting themselves to public questioning.[1234] Bishop Bull, at Brecknock, practically confessed the futility of the effort by giving a dole of twelve-pence a week to old people of that town on condition of their submitting to the ordeal.

Richard Baxter, in the seventeenth century, had said of confirmation that, so far from scrupling the true use of it, there was scarce any outward thing in the Church he valued more highly.  But he liked not, he added, the English way.  Dioceses were so vast that a bishop could not perform this and other offices for a hundredth part of his flock.  Not one in a hundred was confirmed at all; and often the sacred rite wore the appearance of ‘a running ceremony’ and ’a game for boys.’[1235] Half a century later, in 1747, we find exactly the same reproach in Whiston’s ‘Memoirs.’  ‘Confirmation,’ he said, ’is, I doubt, much oftener omitted than performed.  And it is usually done in the Church of England in such a hurry and disorder, that it hardly deserves the name of a sacred ordinance of Christianity.’[1236] Fifty years again after this a clergyman, speaking of the great use of confirmation fitly prepared for and duly solemnised, describes it as being very constantly nothing better than ’a holiday ramble.’[1237] If, as Secker in one of his Charges said, the esteem of it was generally preserved in England,[1238] it certainly retained that respect in spite of circumstances which must inevitably have tended to bring it into disregard and contempt.