216 ON INSTRUCTION BY CATECHISMS. by heart in their infancy the definitions and the rules of addi- tion, subtraction, division and proportion ? You may as well say, They will understand them in time, they will learn the meaning of them when they come to years of discretion. No, my friends, you are all wiser, and have more reason, than to trifle at this rate in other parts of knowledge which you would bestow on your children ; you endeavour to make them understand what they learn by heart, whensoever you think them fit to begin that part of learning: And why. should the noblest knowledge, even that of religion, be taught them in so irrational a manner ?. Why must they be forced to get into their me- mories such a number of religious sentences and phrases so many years before they can grasp the meaning of them, or so much as guess at the sense. But you say, «'They will come to understand the meaning of them hereafter." To which I IV. Inconvenience. They will not arrive at the meaning of those words the sooner or better for having learned them by heart without a meaning ; but the sound and chime of the words that has past over the ears and the tongue five hundred times, without any signification, will rather go on to pass over still in the saine mechanical manner, and will not seem to want a signi- fication afterward. Thus the children of Papists being taught from their infancy to say their pater - noster and ave-maria by rote, and to repeat theirprayers in Latin, continue always con- tented to say prayers in the same manner, anddo not want to know what the words mean. And when protestant children have learned certain bard words and phrases, which werd taught them as their religion, very early, it has been found too often by sad experience, that instead of learning the true meaning of these words and sen- tences at mature years, they content themselves with having once learned the words by heart, and perhaps entirely forgot them again, for want of knowing what they mean. It is five to one if ever they give themselvesthe trouble of reading and con- sidering the sense of them, when once their lessons are learned, and they have finished these painful tasks ofchildbood. Whereas if they understood the answers of a catechism when they had first learned them by heart, they would certainly have acquired some real and useful knowledge of God and Christ, and things of religion, and would much more effectually retain them in memory all their lives. Or if by virtue of a faithful memory persons should retain the wordswhich they have learned inchild- hood, they will vainly imagine themselves furnished with a set of principles of religion; though they feel no power of them upon conscience in the conduct of life ; and all this because these arti- cles do not lie in the heart, or even in the understanding, as a set
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