last and stands at bay against the resistless Avenger, and if in later
years the practical result is--"if we may not escape, let us try to
forget," or the drifting of a whole life into indifference, languor of
will, and pessimism that border on despair.

Parents could not bear to be so misrepresented to their children, and
what condemnation would be sufficient for teachers who would turn the
hearts of children against their father, poisoning the very springs of
life. Yet this wrong is done to God. In general, children taught by
their own parents do not suffer so much from these misrepresentations
of God, as those who have been left with servants and ignorant
teachers, themselves warped by a wrong early training. Fathers and
mothers must have within themselves too much intuition of the
Fatherhood of God not to give another tone to their teaching, and
probably it is from fathers and mothers, as they are in themselves
symbols of God's almighty power and unmeasured love, that the first
ideas of Him can best reach the minds of little children.

But it is rare that circumstances admit the continuance of this best
instruction. For one reason or another children pass on to other
teachers and, except for what can be given directly by the clergy,
must depend on them for further religious instruction. This further
teaching, covering, say, eight years of school life, ten to eighteen,
falls more or less into two periods, one in which the essentials of
Christian life and doctrine have to be learned, the other in which
more direct preparation may be made for the warfare of faith which
must be encountered when the years of school life are over. It is a
great stewardship to be entrusted with the training of God's royal
family of children, during these years on which their after life
almost entirely depends, and "it is required among stewards that a man