guide her advances, we must first be guided by them. We must lead her movements by first watching their direction, then stepping before her, and clearing the road for her progress. Any attempt to change her course will but check, perhaps stop her advances. We need but clear the path of her own choosing from obstructions, and screen her progress from collateral deflections. Above all we should guard against attempting to kill that which, if let alone, will either die soon enough of itself, or be transformed, and appear in a shape of beauty and excellence. Even the suckers cannot always be pulled without injury to the principal stalk; and, if left to themselves, will often die down into nourishment for that which is better. The mind, in short, must be left in the soil of nature, that garden of God. We may pull away the weeds, to let in the sunshine and the breeze; we may gather around it the aliment of truth, and water it with the dews of affection; but we must not attempt to transplant it. What though its first up-springing be unlovely and unpromising, nevertheless touch it not; despair of it not: all the colors and riches of Paradise are sleeping in its bosom; and a little fostering patience, a little of the awakening sunshine of love, will in due time disclose the heavenly dower!

Various figures have been employed to illustrate the process of education, the only objection to which is, that they are altogether false, and convey altogether false ideas. For example, the mind has been compared to a vessel, into which knowledge is to be poured, as water is poured into a cistern. Again, it has been likened to a store-house, in which ideas, or bundles of ideas, nicely done up and labeled, are to be stowed away, to be called into use as occasion may require. Now these expressions not only convey no truth, but they convey positive error, and, what is worse, practical error. The mind is not a cistern to be filled, but a principle to be developed. Education is not a stuffing-in, but a drawing-out; not a filling-up from without, but an evolution from within. The mind is not to be jugified into a receptacle of intelligence, but openedout into a perennial, up-gushing fountain of intelligence; a well of thought springing up into everlasting truth. It must be made to think, to originate and issue thoughts, not merely to receive

and circulate them. What we want is, not truths, or bundles of truths on a given subject or set of subjects, stowed away for occasional use, but the power to seize, to appropriate and expound the truth on whatever subject may come before

us. In brief, we want, not stored-up cargoes of thoughts, but the faculty of thinking closely, severely, profoundly. Truth, or facts containing truth, must indeed be presented to the mind, but only that the mind may take up, and assimilate, and incorporate the truth with itself; for the mind is essentially veriform, and grows but by absorbing truth. We may lumber in facts, nothing is easier than to lumber in facts, till we suffocate the mind's assimilative power, and leave it without insight to distinguish, or comprehension to unite them. In this way a man may, perchance, if he be all memory, become a mere walking library; but a keensighted, far-seeing, truth-discerning intelligence he cannot become. Talk not, therefore, of enveloping the student in an encyclopedia of objects to be seen and remembered; your encyclopedic envelope shuts out the very light that is to render its contents discernible. First give the student an eye to see for himself, and then he will find nature an infinite and everlasting encyclopedia. Stuff him not with a cargo of mere remembered, hear-say truths, to prattle about and trade with in the business of life, but discipline him into that depth and ubiquity of insight, which, meeting truth everywhere, face to face, may always discern and embrace her as an allsufficient, omnipresent friend and guide.

From what has been said, the proper materials and method of instruction may doubtless be easily inferred. The basis of all right education must of course be laid in severe intellectual discipline; for keenness and clearness of vision are the key to all true knowledge. The perceptive and reflective powers must first be drawn out into vigorous, healthful activity. It is this training and initiating of the intellect, which gives both insight to discern and comprehension to grasp the principles of things-which enables the mind to strip off the husk, and rive the heart of a matter, and lay bare its living laws,-it is this which brings success, and the want of which brings defeat, on all our other means of education. But intellectual discipline is not all. There is a much wider and

deeper culture, a far broader and higher discipline, which embraces our whole many-sided being, and of which intellectual discipline is but the corner-stone, altogether indispensable, indeed, but altogether insufficient. It is a discipline of humanity, producing a confluence and co-operation of all the feelings and faculties in one and the same movement. The perceptive, reflective, creative, sensitive, and elective powers should all be drawn out into harmony and convergence. It is this blending and interfusion of all the rays, that produces the pure white light of a well-cultivated mind. Besides, it is vain to disclose noble objects to the mind, unless, at the same time, we give it noble impulses. And in the crowded markets of the world, skill to select is quite as important as wealth to purchase. Moreover, to spread the earth before the eye of the soul, avails not, unless it have a faculty to converse with the heavens; for it is only by the stars that we can direct our course aright on the earth, and nothing less than the everlasting sun çan give us light sufficient even for our worldly pursuits. The severe, elective energy of a well-disciplined taste, and the perfusive, vivifying grace of a well-disciplined imagination, are really among the usefulest as well as beautifulest results of human culture. For it is as important to discern the social and moral fitnesses of things, as to perceive their relations; to recognize "the Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty" of nature, as to trace her laws and connections. The follies and failures of men spring quite as often from want of sentiment, as from want of understanding: and the richest ores that lie about us are useless without the fire of noble passions to burn off the dross from the precious substance. To converse with the higher objects, and pursue the higher aims of human existence; to be dignified in submission and humble in command; to be modest in prosperity, and self-reverent in adversity; to be inflexibly just without cruelty, and unflinchingly brave without audacity; to meet the just courtesies of society without scanting our duties to ourselves; and to recognize the divine beauty of human life without forgetting the fearful guilt and degradation of human character:-all this, assuredly, requires the intervention of other faculties than the mere understanding. To quicken, therefore, and subdue the feel

ings; to temper yet intensate the passions; to chasten, and beautify, and enrich the imagination; to give energy and discrimination to the taste; and to unfold that indefinable power of sentiment which acts with almost the quickness and sureness of instinct ;-these are really as necessary as to deepen and strengthen the intellect, and are essential parts of that profound and compre hensive discipline which every just and generous plan of education contemplates.

The means of mere intellectual discipline are as various as the objects of human knowledge. Of these means, however, the mathematics are, doubtless, the most perfect in respect of the understanding alone; but then they are the most imperfect in respect of the co-ordinate faculties, and their unfitness for purposes of general discipline lies in their tendency to make mere abstractionists and dialecticians. Their relation to various arts and sciences of course renders a knowledge of them indispensable as a preparation for certain branches of professional labor; but as a discipline of humanity, in the proper sense of the term, they are rather a hindrance than a help. For the evenness and entireness of culture, of which we have been speaking, the experience of several centuries has fully tested, and, doubtless, permanently assigned the study of the Greek and Latin Člassics. Whether as an introduction to the study of modern literature, or as "eternal forms of the human mind,” they evidently merit the unquestionable and almost unquestioned dictinction they have attained. To a profound and generous culture, they have long been, and must long continue to be, indispensable; for, in so universal a matter as education, what time has set up innovation does not easily blow down; the experience of ages is not easily set aside by the theories of a day; and the latter, various as they have been, have as yet offered no prac ticable escape from the former. But, aside from this consideration, the Greek language and literature itself is, perhaps, the most perfect transcript of the human mind in existence. The mastery of it probably involves a more thorough and universal discipline than any other single study whatever. Itself a full-length portrait of our many-gifted nature; the world's excelling model,

both of thought and of style, both of grace and of power; the mould in which the mind of modern nations has shaped, and the mirror in which it has dressed itself; the awakening and creative genius of modern civilisation, and the shaping and informing spirit of modern culture; the study of it, in its principles and its structure, affords at once a full development of almost everything within us, and a full disclosure of almost everything without us. It was when the minds of both sexes were first formed by the mastery of this divine language, and then enriched from the store-house of nature herself; when Homer, and Plato, and Sophocles, and Demosthenes, formed at once the labor of the closet and the entertainment of the chamber; and when they supplied the places both of our fashionable novels and of our useful-knowledge libraries, that England produced her loveliest women and her wonderfulest men. Whether, therefore, we consult the reason of the thing, or the results of general experience, or the suffrages of the most competent judges, we may safely assert that, aside from the mathematics and strictly elementary branches of English education, the study of the Classics alone might be substituted, with far less cost and far more profit, for the whole long array of studies and text-books and professorships which swell the catalogues of our academies and colleges. After the mind has been thoroughly formed and disciplined by these studies, the inexhaustible stores of nature and of modern literature will not be open to it in vain. It can then go nowhere without meeting splendid visions, and search nowhere without finding precious gems. In short, the mind will then have, itself, the key to the whole panorama of nature, and science, and art; and can select and appropriate, at will, such treasures as are most consonant to its taste, or most es

sential to its aims.

In regard to the proper method of instruction, we have room to say but little. In this age of abstractions, the great trouble with most teachers is, that they aim to instruct, not individual minds, but only the abstract idea of a mind. The alleged necessity of educating all, forces us upon a thousand shifts and expedients for shortening and cheapening the process. In our rage for system, we must have not only the matter,

but even the manner of instruction reduced to formularies; it is so much cheaper and quicker to turn and tend some teaching machine, gotten up on scientific principles, than to study individual character and aptitude. We must turn sinners into saints, and dunces into sages, by machinery; else how can we work fast enough to satisfy our huge philanthropy? A knave can distribute tracts as well as a saint, provided he be paid for it; and with a suitable contrivance, such as modern wisdom proffers, a dunce can teach as well as a sage. Surely, then, a scheme that should supersede the necessity of saintship and sageship, would be a most valuable acquisition! Doubtless we have laid Providence under vast obligations by our systematic patronage. There are those who seem to think that even Christianity lay bound up in the crysalis until our scientific researches and philosophical speculations hatched her out into the butterfly. Within our own recollection, system after system has been proposed, all equally arrogant, and all equally impotent, yet seeking votes by showing immediate results, and whose only effect has been to cultivate a passion for system, in a sphere where all systematic operations must perforce be worse than useless. It would, doubtless, make much for the hopes of mankind, if some teaching-jenny could be devised, to educate the abstract idea of a mind, and which the most ordinary hand could turn and tend as well or better than the most extraordinary head. What with our system of black-boards, and text-books with questions, and approved code of pedagogy, have not dunces, always so plenty, and sages, always so scarce, been brought nearly to the same level for all practical purposes? One very obvious advantage of this method is, that it dispenses with all personal sympathy, and acquaintance between teacher and pupil. One man can thus teach five hundred without even knowing their names, as well as he can teach twenty with a full knowledge of their individual characters; and, in this way, increase the profits to himself, while diminishing the costs of his employers. To preclude the necessity of discrimination in finding and rewarding teachers, by thus locating their qualifications in their pockets and schoolrooms, is certainly a glorious achievement; glorious alike for

its economy and its benevolence. And whether we secure good disciplinarians of course matters not; since, under this dispensation, pupils soon become wise enough to govern themselves. Happily, the system of pedagogical puttery, inseparable from this state of things, has now nearly cracked its own cheeks; and the fire, which threatens us, is fast getting smothered with its own smoke. Now, it so happens, unfortunately, that nature gives us no abstract ideas to educate, but only individual minds; and it would be well for us to remember, that to educate the abstract idea of a mind, is, after all, but to exercise the abstract idea of education. The truth is, no person can possibly teach another, or be taught by another, until and so far as they are personally and individually acquainted with each other. In vain do we try to secure good instruction by systematic arrangements; the same system which takes from teachers the power to go wrong, also makes it impossible for them to go right. The sooner, therefore, we throw our abstractions into the fire, and make our instruction an individual process, the better. Our schoolroom clock-work not only does nothing towards supplying the place of brains to teachers who have them not, but is sure to obstruct and paralyze the brains of teachers who have them. The teacher and pupil can give and receive instruction, just so far and no farther than they are brought to study and know each other. An immediate intercourse, therefore, between them is indispensable; and the teacher is but separated from the pupils by the media through which he tries to operate. A mind cannot possibly be produced in the same way as a watch. Mechanical arrangements cannot assist the process of vegetation. The apparatus, by which we try to stretch a tree, will only pull it up by the roots; so that we shall only make it look taller by stunting or killing it. In short, our abstract method is a perfect outrage on nature, and cannot choose but miseducate. We might as well have all our coats cut to a common shape, such as the abstract idea of the human form, and then fill out or pare down our bodies to fit the coats. But in this matter all of course know that the dress is to be fitted to the form, not the form to the dress. And undoubtedly that method of instruction is best, which most adapts itself to the wants and peculiarities of its sub

jects. The true teacher is an artist, not an artisan; he works by inspiration, not by mechanism; and to proceed by system is to degrade teaching from an art into a mere handicraft. It is with the teacher, as with the painter, whose subject, when he succeeds, always seems to paint itself; and his work is never good for anything when he knows how he does it. It may even be questioned whether the dependence we place upon books is not worse than to be entirely without them; just as the circulation of the Bible and of tracts is thought by many to have done injury, by seeming to preclude the necessity of the Church: and our present rage for text-books is, perhaps, the best evidence that the true idea of instruction is well nigh lost. At all events, of this we may be assured, that true instruction always proceeds, and always must proceed, not by a fixed inflexible system, now shrinking or stretching, and now bending or straightening its subjects, to suit its own preadjustments; but by “a slow, tentative process, requiring a patient study of individual aptitudes, and a constant variation of means to suit the endless varieties of mind."

A few words touching the utilitarian spirit, which has given birth to so much reforming and system-making, will close this article. Now, one of the greatest evils of utilitarianism in education is, that it is suicidal. "He who seeketh his life shall lose it," is as good in philosophy as it is in religion; and the seeming paradox, "he is oft the wisest man, who is not wise at all," is one of the profoundest truths. Too much anxiety to hit the apple agitates the nerves, and thus defeats the aim; looking too steadfastly at our interest, makes us unable to see it. Viewed objectively, indeed, and in reference to the last results, there is no antipathy between the wisdom of the serpent and the harmlessness of the dove; but, viewed subjectively, they are as antipathic as heaven and hell. The darkest cunning and the whitest innocence doubtless converge to the same ultimate point; but the crime and curse of the cunning is, that they never can see this. Self-interest comes by self-sacrifice; but the spirit of selfinterest and the spirit of self-sacrifice are utterly incompatible. Truth, if honestly sought, will always do more for us than we can do for ourselves; but when pursued as interest, the pur

suit inevitably defeats itself. If we seek first the kingdom of heaven, all things else shall be added unto us; but not if we seek the former for the sake of the latter. It is thus that we find our interest by forsaking it, and get salvation, here and hereafter, by selfrenunciation; while, by attempting to become our own saviours, we utterly lose ourselves. In short, all salvation that is worth the having, comes by faith; by faith in the Truth, not by foresight; by oblivion, not by calculation, of interest.

But the genius of utilitarianism of course aspires to a higher wisdom than is implied in working and waiting. Mammonism and modern philanthropy must climb up some shorter way to their ends, than the straight and narrow path of truth and nature. Instead of asking for wisdom and get ting riches, they ask for wisdom in order to get riches; and of course miss, as they deserve to miss, them both. Nature, to preclude the pride or vanity of well-doing, has wisely ordained, that the triumphs we gain in the service of truth should seem to us the truth's work, not ours; so that when we are doing the most good, we think we are doing the least, in the same way, and for a similar reason, that where there is the most wisdom, there is the least conceit of wisdom. Accordingly, the most useful men are always those who, from love and holy passion, pursue what the world esteems useless. And their merit is generally as unknown to us as to themselves; for, to us as to themselves, what they do seems the work of truth and nature; so that while bringing heaven down to us, they are often lost in the splendor of their gifts; and the blessings we owe to their labors appear to come of their own accord. Probably nothing, on the other hand, has done so much mischief to education, as the exclusive desire to be useful; for it is the misery and meanness of utilitarianism, that while calculating the profits of knowledge, it kills the passion for it. For example, the discovery of the occultations and emersions of Jupiter's Satellites, after being made, was found available for purposes of navigation. But if the discoverer had been in quest only of something to aid navigation, he probably would not have thought of looking in that direction, and therefore would not have

found anything so useful for that purpose. The true reformer, in like manner, always becomes such without knowing it; and those who set up for reformers, are generally the greatest pests and nuisances society is afflicted with. No men are so dark as those who are always trying to make their light shine; for they always make their bellows so strong as to blow the fire out, instead of blowing it up. Their hard tugging for truth's sake is but a more cunning form of conceit and selfwill, and proceeds not so much from a sense of obligation to truth, as from a desire to lay truth under obligation to them. Those who have deified their own ideas, of course think themselves qualified and commissioned to construct the world anew; and many a strutting sophomore has conceived himself wise enough to convert the Pope, and has mistaken the swellings and crowings of his own pride, for the expansion of the human mind under his instructions. Here, too, the effort and anxiety to do good and be useful, defeats itself. The true benefactor sheds out his influence unconsciously, and always loses it in proportion as he undertakes consciously to exercise it. Thus, nature cunningly hides from us the good we do, and wisdom, to prevent conceit and vanity, always steals into us, and steals out of us, without our knowledge. When we abandon ourselves to truth in love and faith, truth flows freely into us and through us, and heaven is with us in hours of self-oblivion, always finding us children, or making us so.

Nothing, then, is vainer than attempting to substitute convictions of interest and utility for noble passions; such convictions never can ensure, and never ought to ensure, the successful pursuit of knowledge or of any other good.. We have ourselves lived to see study well nigh banished from the closet by the perverse efforts of certain moral and intellectual financiers to make out a balance of economical motives in its favor.. By forcing in such motives we only force out, or shut out better ones. Those people who believe in going so much on the belly, and seeking truth for the stomach's sake, have they not yet learnt, that in the mouths of such seekers the fruits of the tree of knowledge always turn into ashes and bitterness? It is truly high time the money-changers were scourged out of the temples. What