The parish lesson behind the intellectual adventure
things that I might have learnt from my catechism--if I had ever learnt it
The Church of England's Book of Common Prayer provides a concrete comparison for the elementary teaching imagined here. Its catechism prepares children for confirmation through questions and answers covering the Apostles' Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Lord's Prayer and the sacraments. Its concluding directions assign instruction to the parish curate and require children to learn these materials before confirmation. Catechism and parish church thus belong together as an ordinary, local means of encountering Christian belief. See A Catechism, especially the Creed and concluding directions.
This makes the joke more pointed than a general contrast between ignorance and education: the wandering intellectual arrives at what children could already be taught. It also prepares the next paragraph's identification of his subject with the Apostles' Creed. The qualification about never having learnt the catechism keeps the passage from becoming a claim that he simply recovered remembered lessons. The Prayer Book is a relevant historical comparison, not an identification of a particular book he personally studied; the sentence names no edition or denomination.
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