upon God’s revealed Word than were the children and youth of fifty years ago.  Let me say here that I am personally responsible for this statement and what is to follow it.  Having been a Bible-class teacher and an active worker in religious and charitable societies for forty years, and numbering as I do between twenty-five and thirty clergymen among my near kinsmen, I do not speak idly or ignorantly upon this subject.  My appeal for corroboration of my testimony is to my contemporaries and co-workers.

The superficiality and glitter that are the bane of modern methods of education in our country have not spared sanctuary ordinances and family religion.  “The church which is in thy house” is an empty form of speech when applied to a majority of so-called Christian homes.  Early trains and late dinners, succeeded by evening engagements, have crowded out family prayers, and the pious custom, honored in all ages, of “grace before meat,” is in many houses disregarded, except when a clergyman is at the table.  Then the deferential bend of the host’s head in the direction of the reverend guest is rather a tribute to the cloth than an acknowledgment of the Divine Giver to whom thanks are due.  In the olden days it was the pupil who studied the Sunday-school lessons as needfully as he conned the tasks to be prepared for Monday’s schoolroom.  The portion of the old Union Question Book appointed for next Sunday was gone over under the mother’s eye, the references were looked up, the Bible Dictionary and Concordance consulted.  Then a Psalm or part of a chapter in the New Testament was committed to memory, and four or five questions in the catechism were added to the sum of knowledge to be inspected by the Sunday-school teacher and “audited” by the superintendent.

In writing the foregoing paragraph a scene arises before me of my father’s fine gray head and serious face as he sat at the head of the room, Bible and reference books upon the stand before him; of the dusky faces of the servants in the background, intent upon the reading and exposition of the Word as they came from the lips of the master of the household, who for the hour was also the priest.  I hear much, nowadays, of the “hard lines” that fell to the children of that generation, in that they were drilled after the manner I have described, and compelled to attend church twice or three times on Sunday.  I affirm fearlessly that we did not know how badly off we were, and that the aforesaid “lines” seemed to our unsophisticated imaginations to be cast to us in pleasant places.  The hour devoted each Sunday evening to the study of next Sunday’s lesson was full of interest, the prayer that preceded it and the two or three hymns with which the simple service closed, gave it a solemnity that was delight, not boredom.