Excerpt from Church Catechism: Its History and Contents, A Manual for Teachers and Students

During the years which I spent at Chester, it was my duty to instruct the first-year students in the Catechism. I then became strongly impressed with the very imperfect way in which it seems usually to be understood, and the, in my judgment, great defects of existing text books. The following book is the outcome of that experience. I have endeavoured to explain - not explain away - as clearly as I could the meaning of the Catechism, I have tried to show how much, not how little, sound teaching is involved in it, and further, to show that this teaching agrees with the teaching of our Lord and His Apostles. Above all, I have tried to connect the teaching of the Catechism with the life of the Catechumen. The divorce between life and teaching is, I fear, widespread, and seems to me to be the curse which accounts for the comparative failure of the enormous efforts which have been made by the Church on behalf of religious education. How far I have succeeded in these aims, I must leave others to judge.

At Chester, I used Dr. Maclear's Class-book of the Catechism as a text-book, and it is hard to say how much I owe to it, but I have not referred to it, or any of the other current manuals during the composition of my work. My great debt is to the life and writings of F. D. Maurice.

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