systematically dispensed with; we have examined there children who passed muster most creditably on such of the facts of the New Testament as were proposed to them, but who could tell nothing about Daniel and the lion's den, and the reason of this we found to be that they had never read a word of the Old Testament. It is too generally imagined that the New Testament is better adapted for the young, the weak, the half-taught than the Old; and if only one of the two great sections of the sacred volume can be bestowed on any one, few would hesitate about preferring the latter. The issue of what are called Testaments, shows this.

We do not know whether this evil may have been corrected in the school in question since then, or whether it has even been remarked by any one else; but it seems to us a very great one, and we wish that our able contemporary, "the English Journal of Education," would entertain the subject. If the Old Testament in its various stages was an education necessary to train men's minds into a capacity for the fulness of time; if the ideas it awakened, and the associations to which it gave rise, were necessary in order that the heavenly truths of the New Testament might have meaning attached to them; if the whole structure of the Israelitish covenant and history served as "a schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ," a knowledge of them, of their order, and their significance must be similarly requisite for any individual Christian now. We do not, of course, mean that the reading of the Old Testament must always precede that of the New; for the two may well go together in time, with the young, even as they do with the elder members of the Church; but, were we reduced in any case to the alternative, we should expect far more advantage from giving a child or a poor person the Old Testament only to read, accompanying the boon with oral instruction in New Testament truth, than from the common reversal of the process. And this for the plain reason that the New Testament presumes throughout the state of mind which is produced by the Old--the conceptions of God's being and man's duty which are supplied by that, and the impressions which the mercies and judgments narrated there are calculated to make. The New Testament is addressed to Jews,-whether such by natural or spiritual birth, anyhow to Jews, to the seed of Abraham; and, therefore, in order to enter into its meaning, we must take care to be Jews, to be filled with the feelings and associations of Jews. How necessary this is, if we would understand the Epistle to the Hebrews, in which the institutions, furniture, and ritual of the tabernacle are employed as a vocabulary, so to speak, whereby to express the transcendant mysteries of the gospel, all will readily acknowledge. And that it is no less necessary to our gaining an insight into the profound Epistle to the Romans, will be admitted by every one

who has seen the mischief occasioned by men's taking up that Epistle with none but modern associations, with no sense of how a Jew felt in reference to the law, or how one who entered largely into those feelings would endeavour to meet the perversion of them.

These, however, it may be said, are not the portions of the New Testament which one would naturally put into the hands either of the young or the half-instructed. As a fact, however, the latter Epistle is considered by many to be suitable food for both, being beyond all question the favourite one of our age. Happy, indeed, would that age be were such a preference the way to understand it! But we do not confine our principle to the two documents which we have cited. We venture to say that St. Matthew's Gospel, the Pentecostal gift, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles of Sts. James and Peter, besides much else, so much as to leave little if any part of the New Testament excepted, cannot be understood by a mind unpossessed by Old Testament ideas and associations. It is in the progress of the elder covenant and history that those feelings are awakened, which the New contemplates and satisfies; and the latter must needs be a dead letter without the former.

We will content ourselves with one illustration of the evil proceeding from the present state of matters. Would the doctrine of conversion, as understood and delighted in by the poor, have such a hold on them, if they had been early trained to view God's designs and dealings with us, as marked not by abrupt anomaly, but as developed in a beautiful and instructive order,-as never for one moment arbitrary, and least of all in that dispensation wherein they have been fully expanded? had they been trained to the notion of a kingdom of God into which men are brought, and a solemn covenant by which they are to abide ;-and of all blessedness being connected with the fellowship of this kingdom, and abiding by this covenant? It is not meant, of course, that either children or the unlearned will in words either express or gainsay what we have now been dwelling on, but they can feel and be practically persuaded one way or another notwithstanding.

Lastly, with all reverence be it asked, can the holy Eucharist be well understood by those in whom a Jewish spirit (in the best and truest sense) has not been cultivated?

But it is high time to have done with negation, and come to something positive, to leave off the contemplation of other people's errors, and see what we can ourselves do in the matter; a far harder work than has hitherto engaged us. Nor have we, we must confess, so much to say on this part of the subject as the former. At the outset we laid it down that the religious development of children was one of the great problems given to this age to solve; not meaning thereby that it had never

been solved before; but that it remains for solution in the present circumstances, and under the existing conditions of our social and ecclesiastical state. If so, much progress towards such solution can hardly be demanded of a single mind. A satisfactory result in such a case cannot be looked for, except from some general development of the Church in this direction. Meanwhile, however, we may throw out a few hints, which, we flatter ourselves, are far from impractical at present, and the following out of which would, we think, be a movement in the right direction.

It may seem to those who read our former article, that we considered the right development of children to be confined to the pale of their own families. And so, on the whole, we think it is, as regards the hourly course of the Christian life,the week-day tasks and duties. We opposed this, their appointed sphere, to the perversion which would turn the young into miniature public characters, or as a condition of their being Christians indeed, would impress on them the stamp of peculiar fashions. But it remains written that out of their mouths God has ordained strength; from the moment of their baptism they have had larger relations than those which Nature conferred on them. Some sense and recognition of this ought to accompany their earliest movements of conscious religion,-they have a place as children, not merely in the family and the nation, but in the Catholic Church of Christ, and we must find that place for them, and make them fill it.

That we, of the present day, have failed in the duty we have just mentioned, is apparent at a glance. We take our children to church, no doubt, as soon as they are old enough to remain quiet during the service; and in this remaining quiet, we suspect most parents consider their whole part to consist. And a preliminary of course it is most needful to be learned. But what we complain of is, that we rest on it rather long. Take a child from six to twelve, and what does he find ever done in church which has any immediate relation to him, in which he, just as he is, in reference to his age and condition, is especially concerned; or which may be naturally counted on as interesting to him. We do not say, God forbid! that parents may, and do not often succeed in interesting their children in the services of the Church as they are now performed; but it must surely be allowed that no especial facilities are given them for this. And yet such ought to be given, for it is one of the distinctive glories of the Gospel dispensation, that under it praise and strength are ordained out of the mouth of very sucklings; and it is here, in the services of religion, that a place may be assigned them free from all the evils which we have hitherto been considering; a place which need neither elate the religious child with a sense of peculiar distinction, nor fail to give scope to those wants and

feelings to the enthusiasm, the sympathy, the wonder, the awe, and yet rejoicing-which may be demanded by his temperament, and to the exercise in some form of which his baptism may be considered as entitling him.

It is obvious that our Church both contemplates the presence and supposes the interest of her younger members in the public services of the sanctuary. The injunction to sponsors to call on their god-children "to hear sermons," presumes, as has been well argued, that sermons are at least frequently such as they can understand, and feel themselves concerned in. But how few clergymen are at any pains that this should be the case! How few sermons are preached in which it would be at all reasonable to demand of our children that they should be interested! Would not many of our popular preachers think it too great a condescension habitually to address the children before them in such wise as that they should listen and enter into his meaning? Would not many fear that by doing so frequently they would alienate and disgust their adult congregations? How far the clergymen who are unwilling to preach the gospel, and the laymen who are unwilling to hear it preached, to Christ's little ones, can be said to have become like little children, we must leave themselves to determine. But we think that a clergyman who feels the icy fetters of a doctrinalism brought on, it may be, by his necessary occupations, but still no healthy consequence thereof, may be glad to avail himself of this, as one especial way of freshening religious truth in his mind, of ceasing for a while to view it in its logical and antagonistic relations, and of announcing and making himself to feel it in its liveliness and its power. And what applies to the preacher applies to his congregation likewise. In an age of controversy and doctrinalism, they, too, may be benefited by having Heavenly Truth presented to them, not only in the liveliest, but in the universally true and applicable form, the form in which we should look at them supposing there had been no controversies about them. And that this effect may be counted on, is perhaps to be inferred from the sudden and earnest attention of the whole congregation whenever preacher tries the experiment. May it not be thought, too, that by insisting on the duties of children, we can hardly fail to call attention also to those of their parents towards them, correlatives as these for the most part are? Surely, then, the experiment is worth trying; surely, too, it is not very hard to try. The festivals of the Church give abundant materials for addressing ourselves to children from the pulpit, granting that doing so may not at present be generally convenient on ordinary Sundays. Christmas, the Holy Innocents, the Epiphany, the Annunciation, the Ascension, and All Saints give obvious facilities, and supply abundant thoughts to lay before the young.

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But besides that our preaching was obviously designed to take their interests into consideration, there is an ordinance of the Church expressly appointed for her younger members, and neglected (most sinfully we think,) by a fearful majority of the clergy-that of catechising. The ends of the Church Catechism are by no means accomplished, nor the consciences of the priesthood clear in regard to it, merely by taking order that it be learned by the young of our flocks, or even explained up to the usual amount by masters and Sunday-school teachers, as we trust now to show.

If we wished to vindicate the English Reformation from the all but unmixed censure to which it is now sometimes subjected, we might, out of a copious selection of materials, be contented with appealing to the Church Catechism as one of its results.* That surely could have been no such uncatholic time, as we have heard it pronounced, which produced so noble a digest of catholic truth, so comprehensive a summary of saving knowledge. Never before was any branch of the Church entrusted with so wonderful an organ of her prophetic office as the Anglican received in the fifteenth century, when this invaluable document was placed in her hands. The theology of the Catechism will, we are sure, be found to grow on us in proportion as it is studied; and whoever may complain of receiving no benefit from it, it will never be the devout and earnest catechist himself. Now here is a post assigned to the young, and a provision made for them, in the services of the sanctuary, of which they are shamefully defrauded. It is not enough to say that the children of the poor learn their Catechisms at school, and those of the rich at home; for good as that may be in itself it is no substitute for what the Church intended the ordinance of catechising to be.

In the first place, what we want is to find a place in church for our children of whatever rank. Simply as Christian children, there would, as we think all will admit, be little use in sending those of the rich to a Sunday-school; for no real union between them and those of the poor would be effected thereby, and no instruction imparted such as they would not probably receive far more satisfactorily elsewhere. And-shall we confess the truth?-Sunday-schools are not especial favourites of ours. We deny not their necessity in populous places, where the principles and habits of parents are often such as to make it desirable for their children to pass the Lord's Day anywhere but under their roof. But this argument for them, valid though it be where it applies at all, presumes anomaly and evil. It is itself false in principle to separate a child from his parents and family during more than half the Sunday. And then what a

All but the last section of the Catechism was produced during the crisis which we call the Reformation.