what they actually want to teach, when the right has been secured. It
is not the controversy but the fruits of it that are here in question,
the echoes of battle and rumours of wars serve to enhance the
importance of the matter, the duty of making it all worth while, and
using to the best advantage the opportunities which are secured at the
price of so many conflicts.

The duty is twofold, to God and to His children. God, who entrusts to
us their religious education, has a right to be set before them as
truly, as nobly, as worthily as our capacity allows, as beautifully as
human language can convey the mysteries of faith, with the quietness
and confidence of those who know and are not afraid, and filial pride
in the Christian inheritance which is ours. The child has a right to
learn the best that it can know of God, since the happiness of its
life, not only in eternity but even in time, is bound up in that
knowledge. Most grievous wrong has been done, and is still done,
to children by well-meaning but misguided efforts to "make them
good" by dwelling on the vengeance taken by God upon the wicked, on
the possibilities of wickedness in the youngest child. Their
impressionable minds are quite ready to take alarm, they are so small,
and every experience is so new; there are so many great forces at work
which can be dimly guessed at, and to their vivid imaginations who can
say what may happen next? If the first impressions of God conveyed to
them are gloomy and terrible, a shadow may be cast over the mind so
far-reaching that perhaps a whole lifetime may not carry them beyond
it. They hear of a sleepless Bye that ever watches, to see them doing
wrong, an Bye from which they cannot escape. There is the Judge of
awful severity who admits no excuse, who pursues with relentless
perseverance to the very end and whose resources for punishment are
inexhaustible. What wonder if a daring and defiant spirit turns at