No doubt the form of education generally adopted in non-Catholic countries has been a great cause of indifferentism. The fostering of parental indolence by States which profess to relieve it of the duty of religious as well as the expense of other teaching, cannot tend to promote religious education. To take our own country for an example, fathers, who would make it a duty to instil as well as they were able the principles of their own faith into the minds of their children if the board schools were not supposed to teach Christianity, doubtless neglect that task in the existing conditions, a fact which makes it quite easy to understand why congregations are so largely made up of elderly people, while boys and girls, not young enough to be haled unwillingly to the parental pew, and young men and maidens, young wives and husbands "educated" on the prevailing system, tend more and more to amuse themselves, not in irreligion but in indifference. The squabbles of the sects have made it impossible to invest Christianity in board schools, unless the law be flagrantly violated, with any of the importance necessary to the foundation of a genuinely religious spirit; and the very children find that religion is treated as a thing of much less importance than sums or a good handwriting. No one struggles and wrangles about the right way to do long division. Long division, therefore, is a settled thing and important. But everybody quarrels and snarls as to who shall teach his particular kind of religion. Religion, therefore, is a doubtful sort of thing, 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.