Is any weak soul frightened, that I should write of the Religion of the boy? How indeed could I cover the field of his moral or intellectual growth, if I left unnoticed those dreams of futurity and of goodness, which come sometimes to his quieter moments, and oftener to his hours of vexation and trouble? It would be as wise to describe the season of Spring with no note of the silent influences of that burning Day-god which is melting day by day the shattered ice-drifts of Winter,—which is filling every bud with succulence, and painting one flower with crimson, and another with white.

I know there is a feeling—by much too general as it seems to me—that the subject may not be approached except through the dicta of certain ecclesiastic bodies, and that the language which touches it must not be that every-day language which mirrors the vitality of our thought, but should have some twist of that theologic mannerism, which is as cold to the boy as to the busy man of the world.

I know very well that a great many good souls will call levity what I call honesty, and will abjure that familiar handling of the boy's lien upon Eternity which my story will show. But I shall feel sure, that, in keeping true to Nature with word and with thought, I shall in no way offend against those highest truths to which all truthfulness is kindred.

You have Christian teachers, who speak always reverently of the Bible; you grow up in the hearing of daily prayers; nay, you are perhaps taught to say them.

Sometimes they have a meaning, and sometimes they have none. They have a meaning when your heart is troubled, when a grief or a wrong weighs upon you: then the keeping of the Father, which you implore, seems to come from the bottom of your soul; and your eye suffuses with such tears of feeling as you count holy, and as you love to cherish in your memory.

But they have no meaning when some trifling vexation angers you, and a distaste for all about you breeds a distaste for all above you. In the long hours of toilsome days little thought comes over you of the morning prayer; and only when evening deepens its shadows, and your boyish vexations fatigue you to thoughtfulness, do you dream of that coming and endless night, to which—they tell you—prayers soften the way.

Sometimes upon a Summer Sunday, when you are wakeful upon your seat in church, with some strong-worded preacher who says things that half fright you it occurs to you to consider how much goodness you are made of; and whether there be enough of it after all to carry you safely away from the clutch of Evil? And straightway you reckon up those friendships where your heart lies; you know you are a true and honest friend to Frank; and you love your mother, and your father; as for Nelly, Heaven knows, you could not contrive a way to love her better than you do.

You dare not take much credit to yourself for the love of little Madge,—partly because you have sometimes caught yourself trying—not to love her; and partly because the black-eyed Jenny comes in the way. Yet you can find no command in the Catechism to love one girl to the exclusion of all other girls. It is somewhat doubtful if you ever do find it. But as for loving some half-dozen you could name, whose images drift through your thought, in dirty, salmon-colored frocks, and slovenly shoes, it is quite impossible; and suddenly this thought, coupled with a lingering remembrance of the pea-green pantaloons, utterly breaks down your hopes.

Yet you muse again,—there are plenty of good people, as the times go, who have their dislikes, and who speak them too. Even the sharp-talking clergyman you have heard say some very sour things about his landlord, who raised his rent the last year. And you know that he did not talk as mildly as he does in the church, when he found Frank and yourself quietly filching a few of his peaches through the orchard fence.

But your clergyman will say perhaps, with what seems to you quite unnecessary coldness, that goodness is not to be reckoned in your chances of safety; that there is a Higher Goodness, whose merit is All-Sufficient. This puzzles you sadly; nor will you escape the puzzle, until, in the presence of the Home altar, which seems to guard you, as the Lares guarded Roman children, you feel—you cannot tell how—that good actions must spring from good sources; and that those sources must lie in that Heaven toward which your boyish spirit yearns, as you kneel at your mother's side.

Conscience too is all the while approving you for deeds well done; and—wicked as you fear the preacher might judge it—you cannot but found on those deeds a hope that your prayer at night flows more easily, more freely, and more holily toward "Our Father in Heaven." Nor indeed later in life—whatever may be the ill-advised expressions of human teachers—will you ever find that Duty performed, and generous endeavor will stand one whit in the way either of Faith or of Love. Striving to be good is a very direct road toward Goodness and if life be so tempered by high motive as to make actions always good, Faith is unconsciously won.

Another notion that disturbs you very much, is your positive dislike of long sermons, and of such singing as they have when the organist is away. You cannot get the force of that verse of Dr. Watts which likens heaven to a never-ending Sabbath; you do hope—though it seems a half wicked hope—that old Dr. —— will not be the preacher. You think that your heart in its best moments craves for something more lovable. You suggest this perhaps to some Sunday teacher, who only shakes his head sourly, and tells you it is a thought that the Devil is putting in your brain. It strikes you oddly that the Devil should be using a verse of Dr. Watts to puzzle you! But if it be so, he keeps it sticking by your thought very pertinaciously, until some simple utterance of your mother about the Love that reigns in the other world seems on a sudden to widen Heaven, and to waft away your doubts like a cloud.

It excites your wonder not a little to find people, who talk gravely and heartily of the excellence of sermons and of church-going, sometimes fall asleep under it all. And you wonder—if they really like preaching so well—why they do not buy some of the minister's old manuscripts, and read them over on week-days, or invite the clergyman to preach to them in a quiet way in private.

----Ah, Clarence, you do not yet know the poor weakness of even maturest manhood, and the feeble gropings of the soul toward a soul's paradise in the best of the world! You do not yet know either, that ignorance and fear will be thrusting their untruth and false show into the very essentials of Religion.

Again you wonder, if the clergymen are all such very good men as you are taught to believe, why it is that every little while people will be trying to send them off, and very anxious to prove that, instead of being so good, they are in fact very stupid and bad men. At that day you have no clear conceptions of the distinction between stupidity and vice, and think that a good man must necessarily say very eloquent things. You will find yourself sadly mistaken on this point, before you get on very far in life.

Heaven, when your mother peoples it with friends gone, and little Charlie, and that better Friend who, she says, took Charlie in his arms, and is now his Father above the skies, seems a place to be loved and longed for. But to think that Mr. Such-an-one, who is only good on Sundays, will be there too,—and to think of his talking as he does of a place which you are sure he would spoil if he were there,—puzzles you again; and you relapse into wonder, doubt, and yearning.

—And there, Clarence, for the present, I shall leave you. A wide, rich heaven hangs above you, but it hangs very high. A wide, rough world is around you, and it lies very low!

I am assuming in these sketches no office of a teacher. I am seeking only to make a truthful analysis of the boyish thought and feeling. But having ventured thus far into what may seem sacred ground, I shall venture still farther, and clinch my matter with a moral.

There is very much religious teaching, even in so good a country as New England, which is far too harsh, too dry, too cold for the heart of a boy. Long sermons, doctrinal precepts, and such tediously-worded dogmas as were uttered by those honest but hard-spoken men, the Westminster Divines, fatigue, and puzzle, and dispirit him.

They may be well enough for those strong souls which strengthen by task-work, or for those mature people whose iron habit of self-denial has made patience a cardinal virtue; but they fall (experto crede) upon the unfledged faculties of the boy like a winter's rain upon spring flowers,—like hammers of iron upon lithe timber. They may make deep impression upon his moral nature, but there is great danger of a sad rebound.

Is it absurd to suppose that some adaptation is desirable? And might not the teachings of that Religion, which is the Ægis of our moral being, be inwrought with some of those finer harmonies of speech and form which were given to wise ends,—and lure the boyish soul by something akin to that gentleness which belonged to the Nazarene Teacher, and which provided not only meat for men, but "milk for babes"?