“But, apart from all this, the chief business of instruction in this department may be the committing to memory of portions of the Divine Word. The most rigidly orthodox will not object to this, for they believe every portion of the Bible to be the _word of God which liveth and abideth forever_, and that _all Scripture is profitable for doctrine_, _reproof_, _correction_, _and instruction in righteousness_; and the liberal, though they may not sympathize in the high orthodox view of the divine excellence of the Word, yet regard it as, on the whole, the best of books, and the more of it their children have treasured up in their minds, the better it must be for them. If the parent chooses, he can always himself select the portions to be committed by his child, or he may leave it to the discretion of the teacher, or he may give general directions, as selections from the Gospels, the Proverbs, the Psalms, &c. It is not at all essential that all the children of the same school, or even of the same class, should recite the same passages. Each child may be called upon, in turn, to recite what each one has committed, and the recitation may or may not be accompanied by remarks from the teacher, as circumstances may seem to justify or require. “But there is another difficulty. The Roman Catholics, it is said, do not desire that their children should be instructed in the Scriptures; they receive the apocryphal book as a part of Scripture, and contend that we have not the whole Bible unless we include the Apocrypha; and they object to our common English translation. “In reply to this, I remark, in the first place, there are many parts of our land where there are no Roman Catholics, and, of course, the difficulty will not occur in those places. “Secondly, if Roman Catholics choose to exclude their children from a knowledge of the Bible, they have a perfectly legal right to do so, and we have no legal right to prevent it; nor should we desire any such legal right, for the moment we desire any such legal right, we abandon the Protestant principle and adopt the Papal. Catholic parents are perfectly competent to demand that their children should be excused from the Bible recitation, and this demand, if made, should be complied with; but they have no right to demand that the Bible should be withheld from the schools because they do not like it, nor do their objections render it necessary or excusable for Protestants to discard the Bible from schools.