'The Church Catechism!' some here will say to themselves with a
smile, 'that is but a paltry medicine for so great a disease--a
pitiful ending, forsooth, to such a severe sermon as this, to
recommend just the Church Catechism!' Let those laugh who will, my
friends. If you think you can bring up your children to be
blessings to you,--if you think you can live so as to be blessings
to your children, without the Church Catechism, you can but try. I
think that you will fail. More and more, year by year, I find that
those who try do fail. More and more, year by year, I find that
even religious people's education of their children fails, and that
pious men's sons now-a-days are becoming more and more apt to be
scandals to their parents and to religion. If any choose to say
that the reason is, that the pious men's sons were not of the number
of the elect, though their fathers were, I can only answer, that God
is no respecter of persons, and that they say that He is; that God
is not the author of the evil, and that they say that He is. If a
child of mine turns out ill, I am bound to lay the fault first on
myself, and certainly never on God,--and so is every man, unless the
inspired Scripture is wrong where it says, 'Train up a child in the
way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.'
And the fault _is_ in ourselves. Very few people really teach their
children now-a-days the Church Catechism; very few really believe
the Church Catechism; very few really believe that God is such an
one as the Church Catechism declares to us; very few believe in the
Lord, in whose image and likeness man is made, whose way John the
Baptist prepared by turning the hearts of the fathers to the
children. They put, perhaps, religious books into their children's
hands, and talk to them a great deal about their souls: but they do
not tell their children what the Church Catechism tells them,
because they do not believe what the Church Catechism tells them.