y agreed in this.[1231] Sherlock, Kettlewell, Bull,
Beveridge, Sharp, Fleetwood may be mentioned as others who, both by
precept and example, insisted upon its importance. After Bishop
Frampton's inability to take the oaths had caused his deprivation, the
one public ministerial act in which he delighted to take part was to
gather the children about him during the afternoon service, and
catechize them, and expound to them the sermon they had heard.[1232] It
seemed to them all that no preaching could take the place of catechizing
as a means of bringing home to the young and scantily educated the
doctrines of the Christian faith and the practical duties of religion,
and that it was also eminently adapted to create an intelligent
attachment to the Church in which they had been brought up. Such
arguments had, of course, all the greater weight at a time when
elementary schools were as yet so far from general, and the art of
reading was still, comparatively speaking, the accomplishment of a few.

A vigorous but not very effectual attempt was made by many bishops and
clergymen to enforce the canon which required servants and apprentices,
as well as children, to attend the catechizing. Bull, for example, and
Fleetwood, not only urged it as a duty, but charged the churchwardens of
their dioceses to present for ecclesiastical rebuke or penalty all who
refused to comply.[1233] In the Isle of Man the commanding personal
influence of Bishop Wilson succeeded in carrying the system out. But
elsewhere pastoral monitions and ecclesiastical menaces were generally
unavailing to overcome the repugnance which people who were no longer
children felt to the idea of submitting themselves to public
questioning.[1234] Bishop Bull, at Brecknock, practically confessed the
futility of the effort by giving a dole of twelve-pence a week to old
people of that town on condition of their submitting to the ordeal.

Richard Baxter, in the seventeenth century, had said of confirmation
that, so far from scrupling the true use of it, there was scarce any
outward thing in the Church he valued more highly. But he liked not, he
added, the English way. Dioceses were so vast that a bishop could not
perform this and other offices for a hundredth part of his flock. Not
one in a hundred was confirmed at all; and often the sacred rite wore
the appearance of 'a running ceremony' and 'a game for boys.'[1235] Half
a century later, in 1747, we find exactly the same reproac