But what is the effect of this limitation of religious teaching? It must be remembered that these are all day schools. The children are present in school only during school hours. They are under the parental roof every night, at all their meals, and during the morning and evening of each day. The teacher, therefore, is not _in loco parentis_, as he is in the case of the child who boards and lodges with him, and is entirely entrusted to his care. The parents still have ample time and opportunities for all the religious instruction they desire to give their children, and then there is the Sunday, the Sunday-school, and the teaching of the ministers of religion. The question, therefore, as far as the primary schools are concerned, narrows itself to this—Is any irreligious effect produced by the absence of all direct dogmatic teaching from a school in which the children are only present a few hours a day, and where they go for the purpose of learning to read, write, and cipher, with a little geography and music? I do not think that much evil results from this, nor do I think that any very great amount of good would result from any attempt to alter the present system. In the grammar school, where the instruction is not so mechanical, the conditions of the question are somewhat different. But even here I do not think that the tendency of the system is irreligious. I cannot believe that the cultivation of the intellect, even if there be nothing addressed directly and formally to their spiritual instincts, is, in the case of children so circumstanced as these, necessarily evil and hostile to religion. It would be so if they were confined for all the year, except the vacations, to the walls of a boarding-school, and the subject of religion never alluded to. But here again, as was observed with respect to the scholars of the primary school, the influences of home, of the church, and of the Sunday-school, ought to render the silence of the week-day school in a great measure innocuous. And this is the more likely to be the case with the scholars of the grammar school, as their parents do for the most part belong to a higher grade in society. [Sidenote: _What is Really Taught._]