"[6-A]
A contract was also made in the same year with "sundry intended ministers
for catechising, as also in teaching, or causing to be taught the
Companyes servants & their children, as also the salvages and their
children."[6-B] Parents, especially the mothers, were continually
exhorted in sermons preached for a century after the founding of the
colony, to catechize the children every day, "that," said Cotton Mather,
"you may be continually dropping something of the _Catechism_ upon them:
Some Honey out of the Rock"! Indeed, the learned divine seems to have
regarded it as a soothing and toothsome morsel, for he even imagined that
the children cried for it continuously, saying: _"O our dear Parents,
Acquaint us with the Great God.... Let us not go from your Tender Knees,
down to the Place of Dragons. Oh! not Parents, but Ostriches: Not
Parents, but Prodigies."_[6-C]
Much dissension soon arose among the ministers of the settlements as to
which catechism should be taught. As the result of the discussion the
"General Corte," which met in sixteen hundred and forty-one, "desired
that the elders would make a catechism for _the instruction of youth in
the grounds of religion_.
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