Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/195

 about which even grown-up people do not agree. It cannot be of much importance. If you ask father about it, he says it is the teacher's business to answer you. And in school, it has to be attended to at a certain time so as not to interfere with the real business of the day. Clearly it doesn't much matter; and the child resolves, as soon as it is old enough, to escape from the weekly boredom of sitting still for two hours in a stuffy church or chapel, saying the same things over and over again, and listening to a dull man in a sort of elevated and ornamented witness-box talking in a patronising tone about things not easy to understand, and not in the least practically useful when heard.

Of course this is not the only sort of influence which has been at work to produce a result likely to affect the attitude of the present century towards the question. If the facts are as I have stated them (which I do not think anyone will dispute) we see one very good reason why the younger generation is just now somewhat irreligious. I do not believe it is nearly as irreligious as many good people (on both sides) think. But I do believe that we, at all events, have as a nation been doing every thing we can to make it so. There is no surer way of preventing a thing's being done than for the State to make a show of doing it and then neglect it. If the school boards had