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exhortation. Besides, as to maxims, ever remember, that between those which you bring forward to their use, and those by which you direct your own conduct, children have almost an intuitive discernment; and it is by the latter they will be mainly governed, both during childhood and their future existYour example will educate them; your conversation with your friends, the business they see you transact, the likings and dislikings you express-these will educate them; the society you live in will educate them; your domestics will educate them; and whatever be your rank or situation in life, your house, your table, and your daily behaviour there these will educate them."-Anderson.

Nor will God suffer his ordinances to be despised with impunity. He has appointed, as we have observed before, certain duties annexed to certain relationships; because they are types or patterns of the relationships which he has assumed for the purpose of benefitting his creatures. If his blessing were to accompany a violation or abandonment of the duty growing out of any given

relationship, he would bless a lie; a thing that had not a reality; a thing that might, or that might not be; and, therefore, the same motive which should induce him to bless the observance of his ordinance, must induce him to curse the violation or abandonment of it. The curse on the violation setting out by the negative the same truth that the blessing on the observance sets out by the positive.

While, however, the practice is to torment young children to the imminent danger of their health, especially girls, by the length of time they are required to devote in learning music-an equally, or perhaps more, pernicious custom is to consider them as arrived beyond the reach of parental control at the age of sixteen or seventeen: whereas, from that time to twenty or twenty-five is the most valuable period for embodying and bringing into due harmony and proportion all that has been acquired previously. It is at that period only that the true beauty of poetry can be tasted, the philosophy of history understood, or the deeper metaphysical mys

teries of the Christian religion be duly appreciated.

I was myself sent for upwards of nine years to one of our largest public schools, and, subsequently, to the most numerous college at one of our universities, and I am, therefore, well qualified to judge of their merits and demerits. But it does not rest upon individual testimony, but upon the evidence of common sense, when it is asserted, that wherever a number of boys are congregated, without the presence of a controlling superior, every form of profligacy and vice may manifest itself; and that the only limit to its exercise is the physical power of the boys themselves. There is not, there can be not, one single form of vice in the world which may not be, and which is not, practised in our public schools; and, if any deny it, it is only because they are ignorant of the practices which are there carried on.

The public schools of England, as they have been constituted for nearly the last century, have no parallel in the world. Cruel and barbarous as was the treatment which

boys received in the schools that were established after the revival of learning, the parents were poor, and had no power to protect their offspring; but at least they never wholly lost sight of them by sending them to a distance. It was a thing unheard of in former times for children to be sent, sometimes hundreds of miles, from their parents' homes, to take the chance of the companionship of associates whose very names, far more dispositions and propensities, were unknown to those who sent them. It is beyond dispute that example has a far greater influence upon all human beings than precept, and that the influence of those of the same age is much more powerful than that of those who are older or younger. "The children reason thus:-My parents tell me, that their chief anxiety is for my salvation, and the formation of my religious character; but how does this comport with their selecting for me a school where religion is the last thing attended to? With their instructing me in some things, which as religious people I hear them condemn? How is it, that all the anxiety of their conduct,

whatever their words may say, appears to be to make a fine scholar? I am told that religion is the first thing, but I am educated for the world."-James.

The masters of the public schools have never pretended to exercise any habitual control over the boys, but have avowed that the system was confined to the acquisition of two dead languages alone. Their principal support has been derived from two sources: first, the wilful distaste of parents to fulfil their duties towards their children, and finding them impediments to their getting so much money in their various businesses, or hindrances to that round of ceaseless frivolity in which the more opulent classes dissipate their time. The second source is vanity, and an anxiety for some advantage which is supposed to accrue from having been at school with noblemen. In the olden time instruction was wont to be conveyed by the schoolmaster of the parish, or by one resident in the families of the more wealthy; but the parents' home was the alone residence of their offspring. The present practice marks more

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