[Peep-develop] me in my own language with great fluency, though, as was to

[Guerriero S. <dr...@ju...>]

Ntages may be still held out in extenuation of their practice, but I
cannot help feeling that this cloying attendance on chapel must be
altogether pernicious. His religion is not to be flogged or forced into
a boy, like so much Latin and Greek, or even to be instilled into him by
a comparative stranger. Until he comes to be able to inquire or think
about it for himself, the duty of instructing him is exclusively
incumbent on his parents, or on those who are in more immediate contact
with him than the tutors of a college can be. The superior and
sufficient influence of the former, in this respect, may be evidenced by
the fact of a little Catholic boy whom I knew, duly attending church
with the rest of us, and afterwards leaving the school, and remaining to
this day as stanch a Papist as ever entered the confessional. Out of the
six or seven hundred boys present during divine service, should only
fifty of them have their minds properly disposed, there would be
something to advance in support of the practice; but that even this
cannot be urged, I would appeal not only to every old Etonian, but to
every boy of the present day. With the exception of Sunday, to which, of
course, I am not now alluding, a boy, in my time, would almost as soon
think of bringing a cricket-bat into church with him as a prayer-book;
and if the prayers attracted our attention at all, it was but
momentarily, and that merely to ascertain whether the