we have in the Thirty-nine Articles, which are not meant for
children, not even for grown persons, excepting scholars and
clergymen. Of course every grown person is at liberty to study
them; but no one in the Church of England is required to agree to
them, and to swear that they are true, except scholars at our old
Universities, and clergymen, who are bound to have studied such
questions. But for the rest of Englishmen all the necessary
articles of belief (so the old divines considered) were contained in
the simple old Apostles' Creed.

And why? Because, it seems to me, they were what Englishmen ought
to be--what too many Englishmen are too apt to boast of being in
these days, while they are not so, or anything like it--and that is,
honest men and practical men. They had taught the children to say
that they were members of Christ, children of God, and inheritors of
the kingdom of heaven; and they had taught the children, when they
said that, to mean what they said; for they had no notion that 'I
am,' meant 'I may possibly be;' or that 'I was made,' meant 'There
is a chance of my being made some time or other.' They would not
have dared to teach children to say things which were most probably
not true. So believing really what they taught, they believed also
that the children were justified. For if a child is not justified
in being a member of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the
kingdom of heaven, what is he justified in being? Is not that
exactly the just, right, and proper state for him, and for every
man?--the very state in which all men were meant originally to be,
in which all men ought to have been? So they looked on these
children as being in the just, right, and proper way, on which God
looks with satisfaction and pleasure, and in which alone a man can
do just, right, and proper things, by the Spirit of Christ, which He