Points of Friction
to send their children to Sunday school. It was a perfectly good sermon, filled with perfectly sound exhortations; but the speaker "strayed." Sunday schools were not uppermost in the holy Mother's mind when she perceived and pitied the humiliation of her friends.
The banishing of the classics, the careful editing of the Scriptures, and the comprehensive ignorance of foreign languages and letters which distinguishes the young American, leaves only the field of British and domestic literature to enlighten or bewilder him. Now New England began to print books about the time that men grew restive as to the definition of temperance. Longfellow wrote a "Drinking Song" to water, which achieved humour without aspiring to it, and Dr. Holmes wrote a teetotaller's adaptation of a drinking song, which aspired to humour without achieving it. As a matter of fact, no drinking songs, not even the real ones
206
