*The death of Socrates, peaceably philosophising with his friends, is the most pleasant that could be desired! That of Jesus, expiring in torments, outraged, reviled, and execrated by a whole nation, is the most horrible that could be feared. Socrates, in receiving the cup of poison, blessed the weeping executioner, who presented it; but Jesus in the midst of excruciating torture, prayed for his merciless tormentors, Yes! if the life and death of Socrates were those of a sage, the life and death of Jesus were those of a God. Shall we say that the evangelical history is a mere fiction-it does not bear the stamp of fiction, but the contrary. The History of Socrates, which no body doubts, is not as well attested as that of Jesus Christ. Such an assertion in fact only shifts the difficulty, without removing it. It is more inconceivable that a number of persons should have agreed to fabricate this book, than that one only should have furnished the subject of it.

"The Jewish authors were incapable of the diction, and strangers to the morality, contained in the gospel, the marks of whose truth are so striking, so perfectly inimitable, that the inventor would be a more astonishing man than the hero." Rousseau's Emilius, Bk. 4.

The following sentiments from the pen of Fisher Ames will be read with interest, in connection with the admirable encomium of Rousseau. Fisher Ames' opinion of the Bible as a School Book. Should not the Bible regain the place it once held as a school book? Its morals are pure, its examples captivating and noble. The reverence for the sacred book that is thus early impressed, lasts long; and probably, if not impressed in infancy, never takes firm hold of the mind. One consideration more is important. In no book is there so good English, so pure, and so elegant; and by teaching all the same book, they will speak alike, and the Bible will justly remain the standard of language, as well as of faith. A barbarous provincial jargon will be banished, and taste, corrupted by pompous Johnsonian affectation, will be restored."

NOTE E. p. 79.

It seems to me very manifest, that if Christians had done their duty all along, as to religious education, Sunday Schools would never have been employed, except for the instruction of the poor. This, indeed, was their original object; but they now embrace the children of every part of the community. The primitive Christians took vast pains in the religious instruction of the young: and to this cause must be undoubtedly assigned great influence, in the propagation of Christianity. But the neglect of this wise and benevolent scheme, led eventually to such a state of things, that in Christian countries, children, because they happened to be born of Christian parents, seemed to be regarded as scarcely, if at all, in need of religious education. After providing them with a brief catechetical course, and requiring their attendance on public worship, it appeared to be thought, that the Bible had no more to do with their education, than the Koran, or the Zendavest, or the Veda. Independently of all other considerations, I regard Sunday Schools and Bible Societies as invaluable; because they are preparing the way for the Bible to become the handmaid of all education, from the infant School to the University. In a few generations, the influence of the Sunday School on this great subject, the combination of religious and secular education, will be felt through the whole community. Then will Robert Raikes, the founder of the system, be looked back upon, as

one of the wisest of Philanthropists, and one of the noblest benefactors of his species.

I hope I may be pardoned for adding here the following extracts from my Address at the dedication of the Depository for Bibles, Tracts, and Sunday School Books, in Charleston, delivered April 8, 1829.

Let me rather turn to the excellent founder of Sunday Schools, and offer to the benevolent Robert Raikes, the homage of virtuous admiration and gratitude. Compared to him, what are the heroes of ancient and modern times, the illustrious statesmen, the founders of empires! Who that comprehends the true dignity of man, his solemn responsibility to God, and his fellow men, the blessedness of doing good, the beauty of holiness, the pure, elevated, noble wisdom of Love to God and Man, would for a moment compare with Robert Raikes, Alexander or Cæsar, Alaric or Attila, Wolsey or Richelieu, Charles the XII. or Bonaparte! To illustrate this, let us draw a parallel between the benevolent author of Sunday Schools, and the Lawgiver of Sparta, and the Founder of Rome.

Lycurgus exclaimed, as he rode through the country of Laconia, that it looked like the patrimony of brothers. It was, indeed, the patrimony of a family; but that family was degraded and brutalized by institutions, whose sole object was the destruction of their fellow creatures. Sparta regarded peace, the natural condition of man, as disgraceful; war, his unnatural state, as honorable. The Spartan had no feelings, no sentiments, but those of a soldier; no conception of glory, but as military fame: no happiness or duties at home, but in warlike education, no joy or ambition abroad, but in the camp, the march, or the battle-field. To receive his wounds in front; to die sword in hand; to be carried homeward upon his shield, were the limit of his desires, the highest satisfaction, of which he was capable. The character of man was stretched on the iron bed of Procrustes; that of woman was degraded, and her tenderness, delicacy, and loveliness, were broken as on the wheel of a ruthless tyranny; while the infant, if unfit for the bloody work of destruction, was cast out to perish in the fields. Under such institutions, the Spartan was a savage, scarcely more elevated than the Indian of North America. Such were the boasted institutes of Lycurgus; and what a commentary on the character of them and their author, is found in the fact, that he should have cheated the people, by a miserable trick, into their perpetual observance.

Let us now turn to the Founder of the Roman monarchy. In him we behold a man, who slew his brother with his own hand, who violated the sacred laws of hospitality, who inveigled by fraud the Sabine women into his power, and seized them by force. What other morality, indeed could have been expected of a fratricide, the captain of robbers, and murderers and outlaws! Such was the man who laid the foundations of Rome, called, in the boastful language of her people, the Eternal City. And what were her institutions, from beginning to end, but those of war? What was her sole employment, from the cradle to the grave, but rapine and murder? She died, as she had lived-by the sword; and as she had carried fire and carnage, with unrelenting fury and insatiable ambition into all the neighboring countries, she perished at last, not in the lists of chivalry, with the gallant, the civilized, and the polished, but by the hands of barbarians, who rolled backward over the Alps upon her beautiful Italy, the deluge of blood, which had overflowed Helvetia and Germany, Gaul and Belgium, and Britain. Such has been the fate

of every people, with scarcely an exception! How just and awful are the judgments of God! for all of them arose and flourished by rapine and bloodshed. Shall I be told that Rome carried her arts with her arms, and civilized the independent states, which she enslaved? What then shall we say to the thief and assassin, who should act in like manner? Shall we regard it as a merit, that after slaying the parent, they have educated the child out of his father's property? After invading the peace of a family, laying waste its heritage, seizing all its property, and murdering or imprisoning its natural protectors, is it matter of commendation, that they should restore and improve agriculture and the arts, out of its own wealth, more especially since they delivered that family to the charge of oppressive strangers? Such were the principles, and such the conduct of kingly, of republican, of imperial Rome. Romulus, then, was the founder of a state whose whole life of twelve hundred years, was devoted to carnage and rapine. Lycurgus was the author of a petty scheme of violence and destruction; Romulus of a vast system of selfishness and ambition, of fraud, bloodshed and ruin. Each had the merit, and only the merit of creating a Nation of Murderers and Plunderers.

O! how consolatory, how delightful, how refreshing, to turn from such monsters, and contemplate the serene and benevolent life, the diffusive charity, and wide-spreading usefulness of Robert Raikes! If it were possible for him to meet in the world of spirits, Sesostris and Pericles, Hannibal, Alcibiades and Lucullus, how would they stand rebuked in his presence, and look upon his form of light, and his angel countenance, as Satan beheld Zephon

"Abashed the devil stood,

And felt how awful goodness is, and saw
Virtue in her shape how lovely!"

The institutions of Raikes were those of peace and love, of justice and order. Their principle was obedience to God, good will to man; their means the improvement of the mind and heart, their end-the temporal and eternal good of mankind. They have sent forth soldiers into ev ery land; but these were the soldiers of the Cross. Their armies have gone forth, throughout the earth, conquering and to conquer, but it is in the name and to the glory of the Prince of Peace. They have inva ded the little sanctuary of home, the social circle of the village, the crowded streets of the city, and the vast community of nations. But they have gone forth, in the spirit of faith and love, to bless and not to curse, to ransom the captive, and not to enslave the free, to comfort the afflicted, to enlighten the ignorant, to gladden the wilderness and solitary place, and bid the desert to rejoice and blossom as the rose. Pyrrhus exclaimed, as he walked over the battle-ground on the banks of the Liris, O! with what ease could I conquer the world, had I the Romans for soldiers, or they me for their king! The Christian knows that there shall be but one universal Conqueror, and one universal Empire. That Conqueror, Isaiah beheld in the visions of prophecy, glorious in his apparel, traveling in the greatness of his strength; he that speaks in righteousness, mighty to save. That empire is the Kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, the Holy Church Universal. The Bible, the Missionary and the Tract, are the invincible army, that go forth, under the banners of the Lord of Hosts, to achieve this conquest, so full of glory to God, and of blessing to man. And what is the Sunday School, with its youth

ful bands, the joy of parents, the hope of their country, but the van guard in this Holy War, arrayed in the panoply divine of early piety?

Note F. p. 83.

It

There is one consideration of vast importance in determining the best character of a scheme of education: and it bears directly on the question of the comparative merits of the Christian and Classical standards. It is this. The spirit of the Gospel is essentially the spirit of peace and humility, of love and forbearance. It is an amiable, conciliating, philan thropic spirit. It is full of moral dignity, and beauty, and courage. is essentially the spirit of duty, the spirit of God himself. But what is the spirit that lives and moves throughout the classical models? It is the spirit of war, foreign and civil, the spirit of ambition, and pride, of hatred, contempt, and oppression. It is a blood-thirsty, unforgiving, intolerant spirit. Take from the Iliad or the Æneid, its military scenes, and achievements, and heroes, and the poem is in ruins. Take the like from the Scripture Epic of Milton, and the great, the mighty whole is scarcely more impaired, than "Jerusalem Delivered," by discarding the Episode of Olindo and Sophronia. Take the like from the Classic Historians, and the sun-bright History of Greece and Rome, "in dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds." But take the same from the History of Europe, since the Reformation, and especially from the history of England and of these United States, and that remains, which we look for in vain among the Ancients, political, constitutional, commercial, literary and religious history, the history of principles, aud institutions, of society and government. WAR is the very soul of poetry and history in the classics. Does it not then become us to abandon them, as unfit means of instruction for youth; unless we mean practically to deny the incomparable superiority of the peaceful spirit of the New Testament? Can we doubt that the warlike spirit, which has desolated Europe, for eighteen hundred years, in spite of the religion of Jesus, is to be ascribed in a good measure, to the extravagant admiration of the classics, to the imitation of Greek and Roman, instead of Christian Heroes, and to the unchristian character of general education? Christianity has warred in vain against military ambition and military glory; since every educated man, has been thoroughly imbued with the military, that ruling spirit of Greece and Rome. Banish this spirit, and we shall see and hear less of war and more of peace, less of Heroes and more of Philanthro pists, less of Warriors and more of Statesmen, less of false glory and honor, and more of true, less of the spirit of the French Revolution, and more of the spirit of our own. rejoice that the spirit of the Age, and the spirit of our Country especially, are becoming more and more rational, peaceful, christian. Let this great change in education be made, and we may rest assured, that the rulers and politicians of all nations will be

Note G. p. 85.

I cannot but confess my surprise at a letter from the Rev. Jonas King, in which he urges the necessity of sending to Greece a printing press, for the express purpose of publishing Homer. Assuredly, Homer, and especially his Iliad, is one of the last books that can be valuable to the modern Greeks. Their ferocity and lawless character, their ignorance and superstition, demand far other books, than the works of Homer and the other Greek Poets. Let the New Testament be the basis of the civilization and education of the modern Greeks, and we have nothing to fear, on the score of their public and private happiness. But if they are now taught, and now is the crisis, to look for their models in ancient Greece, Christianity will languish and mourn there, as she has every where else, under the overruling influences of Paganism. To offer to Mr. King, as a friend of the Greeks, in their present degraded, darkened state, for their improvement, the works of Homer, would be in my judgment, like the Macedonian Monarch's invitation to a feast, given to the Athenian Ambassador, sent to negotiate for the ransom of his captive countrymen. Mr. King might appropriately reply, in the language of Ulysses to Circe, adopted by the Envoy of Athens, as a rebuke to the King of Macedon:

"Ill fits it me, whose friends are sunk to beasts,

To quaff thy wine, and riot in thy feasts;

Me wouldst thou please, for them thy cares employ,
And them to me restore, and me to joy."

For Mr. King as a personal acquaintance, I have a sincere regard, and for him as a Christian Missionary, respect and gratitude. But I would submit to himself the question, whether it be wise and humane, in the degraded state of the Greeks, as to religion, morals, and knowledge, to revive the influence of Paganism over the heart and understanding of youth. The Pantheon is inseparable from the study of the Greek Poets every where; but how transcendant would be its power in such a country as Greece! What would every good man say, if a book like the Pantheon were sent as a manuel to any people whatever, and such it must inevitably be to the Greeks? What would he say to such a collection of Biographies, so shocking from the wilful atrocities, so revolting from the loathsome pollutions, that deform and stain every page? What is the Pantheon, to speak in the plain, unvarnished language of Truth, but the Biography of the Tyrant and Rebel, of the Murderer and Robber, of the Adulterer and Adulteress, of the Seducer and Liar? What scene is there exhibited, in which you do not find, that crime, or vice, or meanness, stands forth in bold relief, with all the effrontery of impudent guilt, and all the recklessness of wanton folly? Is this the Book, which Christians ought to place with the Testament, in the hands of Grecian youth, as their daily manual? To be instrumental in establishing such a state of things, can never be the duty of the Christian Missionary. His office should be to enlighten the conscience, to purify the affections, to lead those who are dead in trespasses and sins, into the way of life, the ways of pleasantness, the paths of peace. But, surely, he can never reconcile it to himself to make the Pantheon the companion of the Testament, and thus to bind the dead to the living.