Get up your lessons beforehand—­but teach as familiarly and as much with no book but the Prayer-book and Bible as you can.

Then you might take the Lessons in a similar fashion, and the Collects, etc.

Excuse all this ramble.  I have no doubt I have bored you with a great deal of chaff—­but I hardly know quite what you want to know.  As to the subject—­it is a Hobby with me—­so excuse rhapsodies!

I don’t believe you can confer a greater kindness than to make them well acquainted with their Prayer-books.  I believe you may teach every scrap of necessary theology from it—­the Life of Jesus in the Collects, and special services from Advent to Trinity—­Practical duties and the morale of the Gospel in the twenty-five Sundays of Trinity.  Apostles—­Martyrs—­the Communion of Saints—­and the Ministry of Angels in the rest.  As to the History of Liturgies—­it is simply the History of the Church.  I believe the Prayer-book contains Prayer, Praise, Confession, Intercession and Ejaculation fitted to every need and occasion of all conditions of men!—­with very rare if any exceptions.  I believe in ignorance of the Prayer-book the poor lose the greatest fund of instruction and consolation next to the Bible (and it is our best Commentary on that!) that is to be got at.  And people’s ignorance of it is wonderful!  You hear complaints of the shifting of the services—­the arrangement of the Lessons—­and a precious muddle it must seem to any one who does not know—­that Isaiah is skipped in the reading of the Old Testament—­that as the Evangelical Prophet he may be read at the Advent and Nativity of Christ—­that we dip promiscuously into the Apocrypha on Saints’ Days—­because those books are read “for example of life and instruction of manners”—­and not to establish doctrine, etc., etc.  Somebody has compiled a straight ahead Prayer-book, and I fancy it will be found very useful—­about the same time that we get a royal road to learning—­or that services compiled on the most comprehensive and comprehensible system by men of the highest and devoutest intellect for every age, class, sex, and succeeding generations of the Church of a whole country, can be made at the same time to fit the case of every ignoramus who won’t take the trouble to do more than lick his thumb and turn over a page!!!  If people would but understand that the shortest way to anything is to get at the first principles!!  When one humbles oneself to learn those, the arrangement of the Liturgy becomes as beautiful and lovable a piece of machinery as that of Nature or God’s Providence almost! and is just as provocative of ignorant complaint and sarcasm if one doesn’t.

Oh!  Eleanora!  What will you say to this sermon!!—­My “lastly” is—­teach your bairns the “why” their great-great-great-(very great!) Grandfathers put all these glorious Prayers together in their present order—­and “when they are old they will not” ... need any modern wiseacres to help them to get blindfold from the Venite to the Proper Psalms.