Hell is not preached to-day as it was in those days, and in consequence perhaps the Church of convention has partly lost its hold upon the public, while at the same have.
Suddenly a whisper ran through the church, passing from pew to pew, heads turned, and a man stood up, and the congregation rising, stampeded, leaving the parson and his discourse literally in the air.
Just Convention News had come that the Queen's yacht was in sight (it was Ques Vietoria's second visit to Ireland), and these good people did not, T am sure, east religion to the winds in their eagerness to satisfy a consuming curiosity, but just convention, The same convention that took me as an unwilling child through the Sundays of many a Jong year and the same church, to it bored through many a long ser~ mon, unable to cut it short because queen's yacht was in sight.
Convention, I imagine, takes a good many people to church, but of this Tam sure, that it takes all, or nearly all, children, for I cannot imagine @ normal child washing itself and dressing itself in its best, and proceeding of its own free will to sit for two hours or so in a stiff pew, listening to a service it can only partly understand; a service that enjoins it, among other things, to pray may be saved from the sin of coveting its neighbour's wife, of murder, and of adultery.
Something Dressed up Tam just talking out of my own experience, As a child the words "God," "religion," "church," "Sunday," "clergyman," all became re-Jated, and each expressive of something I did not care for, something to do with "form" and stiff collars, something I could not understand, something mirthless, limb stiffening, and at times terrifying, as when they sang that frightful hymn which includes the lines:—
Oh, what eternal horrors hang Around that second death!
Tam not arguing against churchgoing for adults. I um only saying in the course of these remarks, and saying with conviction, that' the English church service is not adapted for children, and that the taking of a child to church as a matter of convention, Sunday after Sunday, is not the surest way to induce in its mind the love of God— but, perhaps, the surest way to induce the fear of Him, as a rigid disciplinatian, a Person before whom it is wicked to shuffle one's feet oF to smile, and Who may act to us not at all in a fatherly fashion.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.