By attempting, however, to exceed them, the confidence of parents is destroyed or weakened, and the door is closed.
In this way, injury to a very great extent has been done in many parts of our country.

Parents are led to associate with the very idea of religion, indirect and perhaps secret efforts to influence their children in a way which they themselves would disapprove.

They transfer to the cause of piety itself the dislike which was first awakened by exceptionable means to promote it; and other teachers, seeing these evil effects, are deterred from attempting what they might easily have accomplished.

Before, therefore, attempting to enforce the duty and to explain the methods of exerting religious influence in school, I thought proper distinctly to state with what restrictions and within what limits the work is to be done.
There are many teachers who profess to cherish the spirit and to entertain the hopes of piety, who yet make no effort whatever to extend its influence to the hearts of their pupils.

Others appeal sometimes to religious truth merely to assist them in the government of the school.
They perhaps bring it before the minds of disobedient pupils in a vain effort to make an impression upon the conscience of one who has done wrong, and who can not by other means be brought to submission.