Another ill effect follows from regarding attendance at church as an act of religion in itself:--It is forgotten that a man cannot teach what he does not know. If you have more manhood than I, more religion; if you are the more humane and the more divine, it is idle for me to try and teach you divinity and humanity; idle in you to make believe you are taught. The less must learn of the greater, not the greater directly of the less. It is too often forgotten by the preacher that his hearers may be capable of teaching him; that he cannot fill them out of an emptiness, but a fulness. Hence, it comes to pass that no one, how advanced soever, is allowed to graduate, so to say, from the church. Perhaps it may do a great man, mature in Christianity, good to sit down with his fellows and hear a little man talk who knows nothing of religion; it may increase his sympathy with mankind. It can hardly be an act of religion to such a man so advanced in his goodness and piety; perhaps not the best use he could make of the hour. The current opinion hinders social tendencies. A man must not meet with his friend and neighbor, or if he does, he must talk with bated breath, with ghostly countenance, and of a ghostly theme. From this abuse of the Sunday comes much of the cold and unsocial character which strangers charge us with. As things now go, there are many who have no opportunity for social intercourse except the hours of the Sunday. Then it is forbidden them. So they suffer and lose much of the charm of life; become ungenial, unsocial, stiff, and hard, and cold. This notion hinders men, also, from intellectual culture. They must read no book but one professedly religious. Such works are commonly poor and dull; written mainly by men of little ability, of little breadth of view; not written in the interest of mankind, but only of a sect--the Calvinists or Unitarians. A good man groans when he looks over the immense piles of sectarian books written with good motives, and read with the most devout of intentions, but which produce their best effect when they lead only to sleep. Yet it is commonly taught that it is religion to spend a part of Sunday in reading such works, in listening, or in trying to listen, or in affecting to try and listen, to the most watery sermons, while it is wicked to read some "secular" book, philosophy, history, poem, or tale, which expands the mind and warms the heart. Our poor but wisdom-seeking boy must read his Homer only by stealth. There are many men who have no time for intellectual pursuits, none for reading, except on Sunday. It is cruel to tell them they shall read none but sectarian books or listen only to sectarian words.