The Value of Learning The Shorter Catechism

John Murray, the great 20th-century theologian, once spoke to the children in his Sunday School on the surpassing value of The Shorter Catechsim,^{1, 2, 3} saying,

Now everyone of you children should know The Shorter Catechism from the beginning to the end without a mistake by this age. Now that’s without joking at all. At the age of twelve you ought to know The Shorter Catechism from beginning to end without even making a mistake. You don’t know what you are missing! Get down to learning it, if you haven’t already learned it! It will not only give you the most perfect human compendium of Christian truth that there is in the whole world but it will be the finest mental exercise and it will lay a foundation in your mind and in your life for a hundred other things as well as for true religion. The mere mental discipline of learning it with exactness down to each preposition is one of the best disciplines that we know of in this world in the field of education. The primary reason is to learn it for the purpose of having in your mind a comprehensive compendium of Christian truth, but even apart from that there are a hundred by-products. It will be invaluable to you through your whole life, and not only in this life but in the life which is to come.