Date: 2026-08-15T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Pastoral

Note on the Religious Education of Children

Saint Innocent of Alaska

Royal Archives

2026

Copyright

The modern English translation and the cover design are © 2026 Royal Archives. All rights reserved.

The underlying source text is in the public domain.

Published by Royal Archives

First published 2026

Translated by Royal Archives

Source: Записка о детском воспитании

Cover: Mental Arithmetic. In the Public School of S. A. Rachinsky by Nikolai Bogdanov-Belsky (Russian, 1868–1945), Tretyakov Gallery (via Wikimedia Commons), which is in the public domain.

Edition identifier: urn:royalarchives:note_on_childrens_education:en:1

Introduction

St Innocent of Alaska

He was born on 26 August 1797 in Anginskoye, a village in the Irkutsk region of eastern Siberia, and christened John—the son of a church sacristan who died when the boy was six. Poverty and early loss shaped him; so did the seminary at Irkutsk, which he entered at nine and a half. There, according to a custom of the time, he was given a new surname in honour of the recently reposed Archbishop Benjamin of Irkutsk, and so John Popov became John Veniaminov, the name by which the Church would come to know him before his monastic tonsure. He married, was ordained deacon in 1817 and priest in 1821, and was serving a prosperous parish at the Church of the Annunciation in Irkutsk—respected, comfortable, and by every worldly measure well placed—when the decision came that would carry him to the far edge of the world.

In 1823 he left Irkutsk for Russian America, arriving on the Aleutian island of Unalaska in the summer of 1824. What followed is among the great missionary careers of the modern age. For fifteen years he lived among the Aleut (Unangan) people, learned their language, devised an alphabet for it, compiled a grammar, and translated the Gospel and the catechism into their tongue. In 1833 he wrote, first in Aleut, the little spiritual classic that became famous across Russia in translation, Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven. In 1834 he transferred to Sitka to work among the Tlingit. He built churches with his own hands, kept clocks and made instruments, studied the weather and the peoples he served, and travelled by boat, sledge, and on foot across distances that still seem scarcely credible.

The turn of his life came in the late 1830s. Travelling in Russia to press the cause of the Alaskan mission, he learned that his wife had died. He was tonsured a monk in 1840, taking the name Innocent after St Innocent of Irkutsk, and within weeks was consecrated the first Bishop of Kamchatka, the Kuril Islands, and the Aleutians—a diocese stretching from Siberia across the sea to the Alaskan mainland. Raised to archbishop in 1850, he extended his labours to the Yakut and other peoples of the Russian northeast. In 1868 he was called, unexpectedly, to the highest post in the Russian Church, succeeding his friend Metropolitan Filaret as Metropolitan of Moscow. Even then his missionary heart did not cool: in 1870 he presided over the founding of the Orthodox Missionary Society, which gathered support for missions until the Revolution, and he encouraged the young Nicholas Kasatkin, the future apostle to Japan. He reposed on Holy Saturday, 31 March 1879, and was buried at the Trinity–St Sergius Lavra. In 1977 the Russian Orthodox Church, at the request of the Orthodox Church in America, glorified him as a saint, and he is honoured as Equal-to-the-Apostles, Enlightener of the Aleuts, and Apostle to America.

The six short writings gathered here belong to this life at its various stages—the working priest, the field missionary, the reigning bishop, the aged hierarch composing his last words. None is a treatise. Together they let us hear, in his own unguarded voice, the practical wisdom of a man who spent forty-five of his eighty-two years in journeys for the Gospel.

Occasion and Purpose

These are minor pieces by design, and they are best read together—not as a system but as a set of samples from a single, coherent pastoral mind. They were not composed as a book, and they come from widely separated occasions.

The two Instructions to missionaries are the earliest in spirit and the most celebrated. Both grow directly out of Innocent’s own field experience in Alaska. The Instruction to the Nushagak Missionary, Hieromonk Theophil was written in 1842, when the newly consecrated bishop dispatched a mission to the Nushagak redoubt on the Bering seacoast—a place he himself had first visited as a priest years before. It is a concrete field order to one man setting out for one station. The longer Instructions to the Priest Appointed to the Conversion of Non-Christians is a generalized redaction of the same counsel, expanded and reordered so as to serve any missionary priest; its opening chapters run almost word for word with the Nushagak text before broadening into a fuller manual. Taken together they form the document that later readers have regarded as a small classic of Orthodox missiology—the distilled method of a missionary who never disturbed the customs of a people without first understanding them.

The Homilies for Fasting Penitents belong to the parish and the confessional. They are four short sermons—with an opening dedication prayer—addressed to govelshchiki, the faithful keeping a fast in preparation for confession and Holy Communion. Here Innocent is not the strategist of missions but the ordinary pastor, catechizing plain people in the barest essentials of the Christian hope.

The Note on the Religious Education of Children comes from the end of his life, written at St Petersburg on 13 February 1869, when he was Metropolitan of Moscow. It addresses not a frontier but the Russian heartland, and takes up a question then much debated: how are the great mass of ordinary people, and above all their small children, actually to be taught the faith?

The Autobiographical Note (1863) and the Spiritual Testament (dated 14 December 1869) are the most personal. The first was provoked by a published article about him that he judged inaccurate and, worse, flattering; he set out to correct it, and in doing so left almost the only first-person account of his early years. The second is his literal last will—the practical and spiritual dispositions of a man preparing to die. What unites all six is the sensibility of a working missionary bishop who never lost the parish priest’s directness, and who insisted, again and again, that the whole work is God’s and the labourer only an instrument.

The Six Writings

The two instructions to missionaries may be treated as one work in two forms, and they are the centre of gravity of this collection. Both open with the same solemn preamble: to leave one’s homeland for wild and comfortless places in order to enlighten those still in darkness is “a work truly holy and equal to that of the Apostles,” blessed for the faithful labourer and terrible for the negligent one who makes his converts “sons of Gehenna, twofold more than himself.” Both cite the imperial edict of 1777 warning that hasty baptism without instruction is “an abuse of one of the greatest sacraments.” From there the counsel unfolds in numbered rules. Preparation comes first, and it is inward before it is outward: begin with prayer; keep “a modest and humble disposition of spirit,” promising oneself no guaranteed success, for grace is not given to the proud; approach the work calmly and never with carelessness; and above all preach with love, “for love alone builds up.” Practical wisdom follows—go to people when they are gathered, never begin the services in a new place without first offering at least a brief word, choose a devout interpreter and keep the same one. Then comes the heart of the method: “Christianity is a need, satisfaction, and consolation of the heart above all, not of the intellect alone,” and so one must “act more upon the heart than upon the mind” and “speak from the heart.” The order of teaching is to follow the order of Providence itself—first the Creator known from the visible world, then the moral law written on every heart, then the consequences of keeping or breaking it, and only then the Gospel proper, beginning as Christ began, with the call to repentance. The fuller Instructions to the Priest carries this into further chapters on the conduct of church services, on bearing patiently with new and imperfect Christians, and on relations with the local civil authorities; the Nushagak text divides its matter explicitly into the priest’s “spiritual” duties as a preacher and his “external” duties as a member of the settlement’s ordered society.

The Homilies for Fasting Penitents open with a shepherd’s prayer—“O Jesus Christ! My Good Shepherd!… teach me to do Thy will”—and then move through four brief sermons of rising sequence. The first, On the Kingdom of Heaven, begins with the largest question a plain person can be asked: “For what was man created?” Not to be born, toil, and vanish like the animals, Innocent answers, but for blessedness—and no earthly thing, not even Solomon’s wealth and wisdom, can supply it; only the Kingdom of Heaven, which is simply “life with God,” and which the poor and unlettered may reach as surely as the great. The second homily turns to the receiving of the Holy Spirit and to repentance; the third lays out, with a catechist’s clarity, the five conditions for a fruitful confession; the fourth prepares the penitent for Holy Communion. The movement is exactly that of the preparing soul—from the goal of life, through repentance and confession, to the Eucharist itself.

The Note on the Religious Education of Children is a short piece of pastoral argument. Innocent asks who is really responsible for teaching the faith—parents, godparents, or clergy—and observes, without bitterness but without illusion, that parents mostly do not, godparents never, and so the whole burden falls on the pastors, whose sermons and school lessons reach only those already able to understand them. The great mass of the people, and above all children under six or seven who cannot yet enter any school, are left in “ignorance of the most necessary matters of the faith.” Schools alone cannot answer this, he argues, because they “enlighten and cultivate only the mind, and not the mind and heart together,” and because they will take generations to reach everyone. His remedy is the Church herself, “that most loving of mothers,” and above all the ordinary parish priest, who needs no special learning to gather the little children and teach them the sign of the cross, the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and the commandments “in simple words.” It is the mature reflection of a man who had spent his life teaching the unlettered.

The Autobiographical Note is unlike the rest—occasional, wry, and self-effacing. Correcting a laudatory article, Innocent disputes small facts (the day of his birth, the age at which he first read the Epistle aloud in church) precisely in order to prevent anyone thinking “something extraordinary” of him. But the corrections become the occasion for a remarkable confession of Providence. He recounts how every human calculation had counted against his going to America—a good parish, esteem, his own house, a larger income—and how he refused the appeal of the old Aleut settler Ivan Kryukov, until one day, overhearing the same man speak to the bishop of the Aleuts’ zeal for prayer, he was “suddenly and, one might say, wholly inflamed with the desire to go to such a people.” Even the accident of a spring ice-break, which cut the seminary rector off from the city and let the young Veniaminov marry, he reads as the hand of God turning him from the Academy toward Alaska. The refrain of his life sounds here plainly: “from the Lord are a man’s paths made straight,” and “all of us, servants of His Church, are nothing other than instruments in His hands.”

The Spiritual Testament, the shortest of the six, is his literal last will, written in 1869 as his eyesight failed. It begins with thanksgiving to God and a full, mutual forgiveness—of all who had wronged him and by all whom he had wronged—and then disposes of simple matters: burial in the common brotherly cemetery, no funeral orations, no monument beyond “a plain cast-iron slab with a most simple and brief inscription.” Strikingly, the same text he asked to be preached from in the Instruction and the Autobiographical Note returns here as the only permitted eulogy: if anyone must speak, let him speak from “From the Lord are a man’s paths made straight,” pointing to the departed only as an example, “to the glory of God, but without any praise of me.” A metropolitan of Moscow arranges to be buried like the humblest monk.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

For all their variety of occasion, these pieces are held together by a single conviction, stated most fully in the missionary instructions but present in every one of them: that the salvation of a soul depends “in no wise on us or on our skill, but directly and solely on God,” and that the preacher is “nothing other than an instrument in the hands of God.” This is the theological root of Innocent’s famous humility, and it is not false modesty but a working doctrine of grace. It frees the missionary from anxiety about results and forbids him pride in success; it makes prayer, not eloquence, the first tool of the trade; and it grounds the astonishing patience of his method.

That method is the collection’s most enduring contribution. Against every temptation to force or hurry conversion—a temptation the 1777 edict itself had condemned—Innocent insists that Christianity is first a matter of the heart, that one must “speak from the heart” to reach the heart, and that the faith must be unfolded gradually, in the order in which God Himself unfolded it to humankind, meeting people where their own conscience and their own dim memories of the truth already stand. He assumes that the “natural law” is written on every heart, even the most primitive, and that the missionary’s task is partly to “awaken this feeling” and build upon it rather than to demolish. This respect for the person being evangelized—his language, his understanding, his pace—is what has led later readers to regard the Instructions as a small classic of Christian missiology, and it anticipates by more than a century much of what the wider Church would later say about the inculturation of the Gospel.

The pastoral and personal writings translate the same convictions into other keys. The homilies show the doctrine of the Kingdom made plain enough for a fisherman or a child; the Note on Children’s Education shows the same pastoral realism turned on the Christian heartland, refusing to trust that mere schooling can form the heart; the Testament and Autobiographical Note show a man who preached that the labourer is only an instrument, and who then arranged his own death and reputation to say exactly that. Read together, they are an unusually unified witness: the theology of the instructions is simply the life of the man, seen from the inside.

Reception and Influence

Innocent’s missionary method outlived him. The Orthodox Missionary Society he founded in 1870 carried his approach into the wider Russian Church, and his counsel directly shaped the young missionary Nicholas Kasatkin, later the apostle to Japan, whom he urged to master the Japanese language exactly as he himself had mastered Aleut. His larger devotional work, Indication of the Way into the Kingdom of Heaven, became beloved across Russia; the shorter writings gathered here, long available in Russian in his collected Works, have circulated more quietly, chiefly among those interested in the history and practice of mission. His glorification in 1977—jointly cherished by the Russian Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Church in America—set the seal of the Church’s veneration on the whole of this labour, and secured for these modest documents a permanent place among the memorials of one whom the Church now numbers among the equals of the Apostles.

The Text and This Edition

The six writings in this volume are presented together in a fresh modern English translation prepared for this edition and rendered from the Russian originals as preserved in the public-domain text of St Innocent’s collected works. Each piece was translated on its own terms—the numbered rules of the instructions, the plain homiletic flow of the sermons, the argumentative prose of the note on education, the personal registers of the autobiography and the testament—with care to keep the directness and warmth of the saint’s own voice rather than to smooth it into a uniform style.

This edition follows the house conventions of the series. The author is named as the Church receives him—St Innocent (Veniaminov) of Alaska—and any who assisted in bringing the text into English are credited as translators, never as authors. Scripture and chapter references are given in the modern style. Where the original divides a work into parts, chapters, or numbered points, those divisions are preserved so that the reader can follow the structure the saint himself gave. Because these are minor pieces, best introduced and read as a group, they are gathered under a single introduction; but each retains its own integrity, and the reader may take them in any order—beginning, perhaps, with the Autobiographical Note, to meet the man before hearing his counsel, or with the missionary Instructions, to encounter first the work for which he is most remembered.

Note on the Religious Education of Children

There is no need to say that every Orthodox Christian is obliged to study the Law of God, or knowledge of his duties toward God, his neighbor, and himself; but we wish to draw attention, first of all, to who precisely has the obligation to teach the people. This obligation rests, in the first place, on parents, then on godparents, and finally on the pastors of the Church.

How does this business presently go in general? Among parents, very, very few fulfill this obligation; on the contrary, very, very many fulfill it poorly or not at all. As for godparents, there is nothing to say: everyone knows how they instruct their godchildren. Thus the obligation to teach the people the Law of God now rests almost entirely on the pastors alone. And how is this obligation fulfilled by them? Thanks be to God, although there are very few, there are pastors who fulfill it as well as one could wish. But, speaking generally, we see the fulfillment of this obligation on the part of the pastors in their teaching of the Law of God in schools, in the delivery or reading of sermons from the ambo (which are moreover printed in books), and besides this, since 1841 so-called catechetical instructions have been established in many churches (which, however, the people do not distinguish from ordinary sermons); and if to this we add the private instructions of priests given at confession and on other occasions, one may say that on the part of the pastors, if not everywhere, then all that is possible is being done, and it remains only to wish that this were done everywhere.

But does all this—that is, teaching in schools, sermons, and instructions—achieve its aim? (We shall speak of the first subject below.)

There is no doubt that sermons and instructions are more or less beneficial. But to whom do they bring, or can they bring, benefit? Only to those who are able to understand what they read and hear.

And if this is so—and it truly is so—then the rest of the people, the greatest part, with few exceptions, remain not only without edification, but even in ignorance (and in what ignorance!) of the most necessary matters of the faith. And this is not at all surprising; it is not even a cause for reproach, for the majority of our people simply cannot understand sermons and instructions, on account of their low level of education.

And if this is so (and it truly is so), then what is to be done so that our people might understand and know what it is necessary for them to know? Establish schools, spread literacy—one hears this from everywhere. Against this, no one will argue, and it has long been a topic of discussion. But however useful schools and literacy may be, we cannot rest all our hopes on them alone, for several reasons.

1) Present-day schools, including even the highest, enlighten and cultivate only the mind, and not the mind and heart together, as is well known to all. This would seem to be contradicted by the fact that there are not a few persons who have completed the course of study in schools and who, by their moral qualities, are exemplary members of society; but upon close examination it turns out that these are people who, in addition to school education, have had an upbringing, either at home or through other circumstances of life. In any case, for every such person one can cite ten or more who have passed through the schools but have not advanced a step in their moral development—and sometimes have even gone backward.

Therefore, the hope of reforming our people morally by means of schools is very weak.

In schools generally, students are taught only to know; and the doing… is left to each person’s own will. Let us add further: in schools, the Law of God is taught not exclusively, but among and alongside other subjects; and as a result, in the minds of the pupils, lessons in the Law of God appear on the same level as lessons in arithmetic or grammar, and have neither more authority nor more practical influence on morality and the heart.

2) Let us suppose that the teaching of the Law of God in schools will, in time, achieve its aim; but many, many years will pass before schools (properly organized) will exist everywhere in our country, and all children of all classes will be educated in them. But meanwhile, generation after generation is growing up without any real moral education, and this is a great, a very great loss.

3) And finally, one must remember that children younger than six or seven years cannot enter schools. Therefore, even with schools everywhere and with the best possible organization of them, very many children may still remain without any education whatsoever. What is to be done with them?

They say: the concern for this is properly the business of parents (and of godparents no one even speaks). Society can do nothing here.

Yes! Society cannot, and parents will not or also cannot. But the Church can—that most loving of mothers, who receives all children into her arms from their very birth. The Church both can and must take care of this.

Before we speak of who should teach, what, when, where, and so forth—we shall say first that this business, that is, the business of teaching small children the knowledge of their duties (or, to call it more simply) the Law of God—is far from as difficult as it may seem at first glance. This business, if it is entered into with love and zeal, may be done easily, pleasantly, and with success by every parish priest, even without any special learning or rhetorical art.

From the foregoing it can already be seen that this is the direct business of parish priests; for to teach one’s parishioners is one of the three principal duties assumed by them at their very ordination, under pain of the judgment of God. But can any of the present-day priests do this? Without a doubt. Whatever may be said about the intellectual level of our rural clergy, there is no priest so simple as not to know how to make the sign of the cross, to recite the Lord’s Prayer, the Symbol of Faith, the Ten Commandments, and the most necessary prayers—and to explain them in simple words.

If this business is regarded as it should be, then no Christian child can be excused from the obligation of attending the spiritual instructor’s conversations—even if some of them are educated in schools or at home; but taking into account that such children are few, and also that the instruction given at home and at school bears more the character of a science, while here it bears the character of the Church—the advantage of having all together is apparent.

To the question: is it not too early to make four-year-old children attend children’s conversations?—It is not too early. An example is the pious, wise mother. Her child of three, or even younger, knows how to make the sign of the cross, can distinguish an icon from an ordinary picture, can say “Lord, have mercy” or something like it. And all this the child not only knows but has imbibed from infancy, and it is for this reason so firmly engraved upon it. This is precisely what the Church-teacher of children must strive to achieve.

Such a question is entirely superfluous for a father who desires, in a Christian spirit, temporal and eternal good for his children. His loving heart will always tell him what and how his children should be taught. The same should be said of the pastor of the Church, who fully understands his calling and has a genuine love for his flock.

One should begin the instruction precisely as a good mother begins: for example, as said above, with how to make the sign of the cross, how to stand at prayer, how to enter the church, how to stand in it, how to make prostrations, and so forth—observing a gradual progression from the simpler to the more complex, and proceeding from the known to the unknown.

One may often occupy the children with the reading or narration of the lives of the saints, or from sacred history, with explanations and moral applications.

Of course, however simple this business may be, printed guides would not be superfluous for ordinary priests; and one may hope that they will be compiled, if children’s conversations come to be numbered among the obligatory pastoral duties. But it seems that in no case should any programmes or schedules be established: the priest-teacher should be left entirely to his own free judgment, with only the overall rule: that the children should understand everything they hear, and should be able to repeat what they have heard.

Since the pupils, if not all, then the great majority, will be illiterate, it goes without saying that for them to retain what is taught, the same thing must be repeated to them several times, and moreover each conversation should begin with the repetition of the last lesson.

The time of the conversations must be short; otherwise the children will grow tired and then bored.

As an aid to teaching children in appropriate cases, instead of books, icons and sacred images may serve—which, as is well known, were introduced into our churches with this very purpose primarily in view, and which in greater or lesser number may always be found in every church.

Extreme care must be observed in the last case: that is, icons must by no means be handled casually, as one may handle pictures and especially simple prints, if any such are found. And even pictures on which Jesus Christ is depicted should not be confused with other sacred images: the difference between them must be explained to the children.

It should not be forgotten that children of a young age are more perceptive than we think. Sometimes from a single movement of the hand they understand what is being spoken of.

Children of middle age can distinguish words spoken in earnest from those spoken in jest. But children of young age—that is, infants—take every word spoken by a priest as earnest; and from this it is evident how careful the priest must be in his words when in the presence of children.

Much more could be added here; but all that might be said on the subject would be no more than what is said in the plans and guides for ordinary schools. Here we shall say something particular and at the same time very important.

1) Priests, as pastors of the Church in the full sense of the word, have not only the obligation but also the right and authority not only to instruct and teach those children of the Church entrusted to them, but to insist upon and therefore to oversee that the children endeavor to fulfill what he teaches them. For example, if he notices that one of his young students is making the sign of the cross improperly, the priest must and may correct this immediately—and not only in church, but also outside it, when he happens to meet the child.

2) If anywhere and at any time, then especially before his own pupils, the priest-teacher must show by example the fulfillment of what he teaches. However much a priest may urge that the sign of the cross be made correctly, if he himself makes it in a frantic manner—as the Old Believers say—then all his instruction will be in vain.

Where and when to teach?

The place for conversations with children must of necessity be the church. The attentive know what a difference there is between hearing the Word of God in church and hearing it in homes. We believe that in the church, as in a consecrated place, the grace of God abides at all times. Consequently, greater success and greater fruits may be expected from instruction given there than from instruction given anywhere else.

The time of the teaching must be only before or after divine service, and never in the middle of it. And it seems that the best and most convenient time for this is the time before the later Liturgy. However, this should be left to the judgment of each teacher or rector of the church.

In those places where priests are not personally occupied with farming or field work, these conversations may take place on every Sunday. As for rural priests, it may be considered sufficient if they engage with the children at least thirty times a year. And in that case, in the course of five or six years, even without any system, a child could learn everything that is essential for a Christian to know.

On the basis of the foregoing, it would be appropriate to call such conversations: Sunday Conversations with Children.

Will any inconveniences or obstacles be encountered in establishing Sunday Conversations with Children?

In those parishes where all the parishioners live beside or near their church, hardly anything of the kind can arise, apart from the unsympathetic attitude of some parents who cannot understand the benefit of such conversations; to them this may appear as an innovation or a notion of the priest without which their fathers, grandfathers, and they themselves got along perfectly well. But such parents will be found opposing every good undertaking, and they should not be heeded.

But here is the most important and almost insuperable obstacle: how to gather small children to the church in those parishes which consist of several villages lying three to twenty versts or more from the church, especially during the busy season or in winter?

In those villages where there are chapels, the priest can still come and gather the children, if only for a short while; but how is this to be done in ordinary villages? It is hard to say from the outside, and indeed one should not say it. Mutual zeal and diligence on the part of the priest and the parishioners can accomplish much and even more than seems possible beforehand.

There is yet another inconvenience, which however may soon, in one way or another, be removed, namely: in many rural parishes the practice has been established of baptizing children and performing other offices precisely at the time when it is proposed to converse with the children.

In conclusion let us say that, after everything said above, it seems there can be no question about the possibility of establishing Sunday Conversations with Children—if not everywhere, then at least in those settlements where there are churches, and if not on every Sunday, then at least on some of them. But let us say something further.

1) Is it necessary to establish Sunday Conversations where schools already exist?—It is necessary; firstly, because, as we said above, far from all children can enter school; and secondly, because even in the lowest of the schools, the duties of a Christian are not taught from the beginning, but so to speak from the middle—from the point where certain knowledge is already presupposed. And moreover, instruction in school bears a different character from that which it should bear in the Church.

2) Will Sunday Conversations bring all the benefit that may be expected of them?—It is our part only to plant and to water; but the increase is God’s work. And it cannot be that they bring no benefit at all, if only those who teach and those who are taught begin with God’s blessing. One may be assured that those who listen to such conversations from their childhood will in adult years come to confession and Holy Communion more willingly, more consciously, and with more benefit.

Finally, let us say that the establishment of Sunday Conversations, if not quickly and not to a great extent, will nonetheless without fail serve as one of the means toward the improvement of the condition of the clergy. A parishioner, whoever he may be, cannot remain indifferent to the needs of his priest, from whom (to say nothing of ordinary church rites) he has received and continues to receive unceasing spiritual benefit—with whom he has, so to speak, grown up together from childhood.

Colophon

Note on the Religious Education of Children
by Saint Innocent of Alaska.

This edition was produced by
Royal Archives.

The cover features
Mental Arithmetic. In the Public School of S. A. Rachinsky
by Nikolai Bogdanov-Belsky (Russian, 1868–1945), Tretyakov Gallery (via Wikimedia Commons), which is in the public domain.

The text is set in Palatino and Georgia.

The first edition of this ebook was released on
August 16, 2026.

Table of Contents

- Title Page
- Copyright
- Introduction
- Note on the Religious Education of Children
- Colophon