The alphabet is made up of fifteen straight line and dozen curved line letters. The root of the fifteen straight line letters is J placed in various ways. The root of the eleven curved line letters is O or parts of O and I joined together.
A is made by two straight lines leaning against each other at the top, and a line across the middle.
H is made of two upright lines with a straight line between them.
V is made of two straight lines meeting at the bottom. If two upright lines are added to the V it becomes M.
Two V's put together make W. The letters L and T and X and Z make themselves, so easy is it to place the straight lines which compose them.
O makes itself. A short line makes it into Q. If the side of O be left open it is a C. If two half O's are joined together they make S. Half O and an upright line make D. An upright line and a half O make P. Another half added and B is made.
After a second or third time a child will understand the whole alphabet.
Such is the innate faculty of imitation and construction in children that they will put the letters together themselves when the method is made plain to them, and within a week will compose their own name and their mother's. At the same time they learn to read as well as to write. What they are told they are apt to forget, what they write they remember.
Reason is the faculty of seeing what follows as a consequence from what is, but to define distinction well is a divine gift. My one aim was to make things clear.
One of my suggestions to the young preachers, who had two sermons on Sunday to prepare, was that they should give all their strength to the evening discourse and arrange with their congregation to deliver the other from one of the old divines of English or Continental renown, which would inform as well as delight hearers. It would be an attraction to the outside public. Few congregations know anything of the eloquence, the happy and splendid illustrations and passages of thought to be found in the fathers of the Church of every denomination. Professor Francis William Newman, whose wide knowledge and fertility of thought had few equals in his day, told me that he should shrink from the responsibility of having to deliver a proficient and worthy discourse fifty-two times a year. Anyhow, for the average preacher, better one bright ruddy discourse, than two pale-faced sermons every Sunday.