I, as the son of a London Rector, can
bear my testimony to the excellent working of that Board; and it is
with grief I hear that, in spite of the vast work which it has done
since 1846, and which it is still doing, on an income which is now
not 300 pounds a year--proving thereby how cheaply and easily your
work may be done when it is done in the right way--it is with grief,
I say, that I hear that it is more and more neglected by the
religious public.
With grief: but not with surprise. For the religious public, even
the Church portion of it, has of late been more and more inclined to
undervalue the organization and the teaching of the Church of
England, and to supply its place with nostrums, borrowed from those
denominations who disagree with the Church, alike in their doctrines
of what man should be, and of what God is. How have their energies,
their zeal, their money (for zealous they are, and generous too)
been frittered away! But I will not particularize, lest I hurt the
feelings of better people than myself, by holding up their good
works to the ridicule of those who do us no good works at all. But
I entreat them to look at their own work; to look at the vastness of
its expense, compared with the smallness of its results; and then to
ask themselves, whether the one cause of their failure--for failures
I must call too many of the religious movements of this day, in
spite of their own loud self-laudations--whether, I say, one cause
of these failures may not be, that the religious world is throwing
itself into anything and everything novel and exciting, rather than
into the simple and unobtrusive work of teaching little children
their Catechism, that they may go home as angels of God and
missionaries of Christ, teaching their parents in turn as they have
been taught themselves, and so awakening that sacred family life,
without which there can be no sound Christianity.
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