long since,
referring to this part of his life, "that to force childhood to
associate religion with such dry morsels is to violate the spirit, not
only of the New Testament, but of common sense as well. I know one
thing, that if I am 'lax and latitudinarian,' the Sunday Catechism is to
blame for a part of it. The dinners that I have lost because I could not
go through 'sanctification,' and 'justification,' and 'adoption,' and
all such questions, lie heavily on my memory! I do not know that they
have brought forth any blossoms. I have a kind of grudge against many of
those truths that I was taught in my childhood, and I am not conscious
that they have waked up a particle of faith in me. My good old aunt in
heaven--I wonder what she is doing. I take it that she now sits
beauteous, clothed in white, that round about her sit chanting cherub
children, and that she is opening to them from her larger range sweet
stories, every one fraught with thought, and taste, and feeling, and
lifting them up to a higher plane. One Sunday afternoon with my aunt
Esther did me more good than forty Sundays in church with my father. He
thundered over my head, and she sweetly instructed me down in my heart.
The promise that she would read Joseph's history to me on Sunday was
enough to draw a silver thread of obedience through the entire week; and
if I was tempted to break my promise, I said, 'No; Aunt Esther is going
to read on Sunday;' and I would do, or I would not do, all through the
week, for the sake of getting that sweet instruction on Sunday.

"And to parents I say, Truth is graded. Some parts of God's truth are
for childhood, some parts are for the nascent intellectual period, and
some parts are for later spiritual developments. Do not take the last
things first. Do not take the latest processes of philosophy and bring
them prematurely to the understanding. In teaching truth to your
children, you are to avoid tiring them."

"The greatest trial of those days," says Mrs. Stowe, "was the Catechism.
Sunday lessons were considered by the mother-in-law as inflexible duty,
and the Catechism as the _sine qua non_. The other children memorized
readily, and were brilliant reciters, but Henry, blushing, stammering,
confused, and hopelessly miserable, stuck fast on some sand-bank of what
is required or forbidden by this or that commandment, his mouth choking
up with the long words which he hopelessly miscalled, was sure to be
accused of idleness or