he very essentials of Religion.

Again you wonder, if the clergymen are all such very good men as you are
taught to believe, why it is that every little while people will be
trying to send them off, and very anxious to prove that, instead of
being so good, they are in fact very stupid and bad men. At that day you
have no clear conceptions of the distinction between stupidity and vice,
and think that a good man must necessarily say very eloquent things. You
will find yourself sadly mistaken on this point, before you get on very
far in life.

Heaven, when your mother peoples it with friends gone, and little
Charlie, and that better Friend who, she says, took Charlie in his arms,
and is now his Father above the skies, seems a place to be loved and
longed for. But to think that Mr. Such-an-one, who is only good on
Sundays, will be there too,--and to think of his talking as he does of a
place which you are sure he would spoil if he were there,--puzzles you
again; and you relapse into wonder, doubt, and yearning.

--And there, Clarence, for the present, I shall leave you. A wide, rich
heaven hangs above you, but it hangs very high. A wide, rough world is
around you, and it lies very low!

I am assuming in these sketches no office of a teacher. I am seeking
only to make a truthful analysis of the boyish thought and feeling. But
having ventured thus far into what may seem sacred ground, I shall
venture still farther, and clinch my matter with a moral.

There is very much religious teaching, even in so good a country as New
England, which is far too harsh, too dry, too cold for the heart of a
boy. Long sermons, doctrinal precepts, and such tediously-worded dogmas
as were uttered by those honest but hard-spoken men, the Westminster
Divines, fatigue, and puzzle, and dispirit him.

They may be well enough for those strong souls which strengthen by
task-work, or for those mature people whose iron habit of self-denial
has made patience a cardinal virtue; but they fall (_experto crede_)
upon the unfledged faculties of the boy like a winter's rain upon spring
flowers,--like hammers of iron upon lithe timber. They may make deep
impression upon his moral nature, but there is great danger of a sad
rebound.

Is it absurd to suppose that some adaptation is desirable? And might not
the teachings of that Religion, which is the aegis of our moral being, be
inwrought with some of those finer harmonies of speech and form which
were given