B. B. Warfield knew full well that Christianity isn’t caught, it must be learned. And even though it must be learned, as he puts it, it is “not very easy to learn. And very certainly it will not teach itself.” Since Christianity (Bible knowledge and basic doctrine) is the sort of knowledge people ought to possess, this is why the authors of the Westminster Shorter Catechism “were less careful to make it easy than to make it good.”

Here are a couple of gems from this short essay on the value of the Shorter Catechism.

An anecdote told of Dwight L. Moody will illustrate the value to the religious life of having been taught these forms of truth. He was staying with a Scottish friend in London, but suppose we let the narrator tell the story. “A young man had come to speak to Mr. Moody about religious things. He was in difficulty about a number of points, among the rest about prayer and natural laws. ‘What is prayer?,’ he said, ‘I can’t tell what you mean by it!’ They were in the hall of a large London house. Before Moody could answer, a child’s voice was heard singing on the stairs. It was that of a little girl of nine or ten, the daughter of their host. She came running down the stairs and paused as she saw strangers sitting in the hall. ‘Come here, Jenny,’ her father said, ‘and tell this gentleman “What is prayer.” ‘ Jenny did not know what had been going on, but she quite understood that she was now called upon to say her Catechism. So she drew herself up, and folded her hands in front of her, like a good little girl who was going to ‘say her questions,’ and she said in her clear childish voice: “Prayer is an offering up of our desires unto God for things agreeable to his will, in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins and thankful acknowledgment of his mercies.” ‘Ah! That’s the Catechism!’ Moody said, ‘thank God for that Catechism.’ ”

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