by night as well as day, for he used to be let down from a window of the dormitory by a blanket. Still, one half-year after another was he sent back to take his chance, because custom sanctioned this recklessness on the part of friends, and like their neighbours they preferred blind guides to the trouble of using their own eyes. Had they made reasonable enquiry, and compared the provisions for the safety of pupils at that school with the provisions of other old endowments, they might have found a good school and a trustworthy dame together; and had they further considered the state of the child's mind and habits, they might at least have stopped in time; because, with no school, whether public or private, can a parent ever be discharged of the duty of examining and forming an opinion of the improvements of his son. I do not mean, as to the pages of grammar he has learned, but as to the habits he has formed. If his character, mental or moral, is changing for the worse, it is time the effect should be traced to its cause. No master can fully perform the part of a parent. The best of all human provision for the safety of youth seems to be secured when a boy, living under his father's roof or his father's occasional observation, is at the same time submitted to the discipline and tuition of a public school.

It is not my present object, though my ever present desire, to teach the whole duty of parents. I can teach how to plant, and how to water, leaving to themselves to pray to God to give the increase. My argument is not, that family care and devotion

Does he

is ordained to be of little avail, but that Divine blessing cannot be expected, unless we set our hearts on our heavenly as on our worldly treasures, and exercise the most fervent watchfulness and cautious judgment on both alike. Because you teach holy things-because you instil religious habits, you must not take for granted that there is a corresponding improvement. How do you act as to your worldly treasure? If you trust the child with money, you examine his little account. If you teach him worldly knowledge, you try how well he can read, write, or cypher by himself. Why do you not examine his spiritual improvement? For, this too has its criterion. grow more exact in truth, more mild in temper, more attentive in prayer, more interested in religious knowledge? Many a child is sent to school after every attempt at spiritual impression, but little or no provision for spiritual action. If he encounters the usual temptations, he has no one for six months together to admonish him to apply the good lessons he has been taught he has not been used to apply them-he has rarely been wrong, and then corrected; and if he suffers himself to be borne blindly forward by the mere impetuous and turbid part of the current, he has none to arrest his headlong course. Were his parent occasionally near him with encouragement and advice, the principle of self-command might be formed, and the pursuit of virtue would be not the less invigorating because under difficulties. With this parental care a child may be blessed

with spiritual security at nearly all of the public schools; without it we are tempting Providence in expecting he should be safe anywhere.

A friend has reminded me, that from the schools of which I complain many very excellent and distinguished men have come forth unsullied. Certainly, it must be a baneful atmosphere, indeed, which some constitutions do not resist. I only contend, that their purity was in spite of, and not by virtue of, any chastening influences that prevailed around them. I have here another argument in favour of my original assertion, that our moral safety is less at the mercy of extraneous circumstances than is commonly supposed. On asking my friend how large a proportion of these were boarders, or subject to the parental supervision that I have so strongly recommended, I was answered, that though this was hard to determine, three youths to whom he more particularly referred as having come forth intact, lived at home, and from the purer influences of the family circle felt more disgust than temptation with what they witnessed at school. On the chaste and chastening influence of the domestic sphere, on the unsullied thoughts and sympathies of mothers and sisters, depends the character of the future man; depends the tone of moral taste. On their firmness, judgment, and constancy in well-doing, depends the strength of his Christian principle. The child who has been conscious of these sympathies, and revered these principles, may be driven from his course in the voyage of life, but his thoughts, like

Ulysses, are ever drawn to home; should Syren spells allure, already he is bound to the mast, or if lulled for awhile by the charm of dissipation, in his heart is a chord that needs but to be touched, to call up a train of early recollections, to awaken chaste associations of infant prayers at a mother's knees which, like ghosts of departed virtue, rise and usurp their former sway, and haunt the guilty to relieve a burthened conscience at that throne of mercy which but for nursery lessons he had never

known.

PART III.

ON THE SPIRITUAL EDUCATION OF YOUTH.

Or spiritual improvement, of wisdom unto salvation, though the plan which I proposed, of recording faithfully matters of personal experience forbids me to say much, still I cannot be wholly silent. My plan was to give hints both to the parent and to the master: each has many purer sources from which to learn spiritual things. My plan was also to relate simple facts which my vocation has given me peculiar means of knowing. "Then," I shall be asked, "have you attended so little to the progress of the Soul that you have nothing to say of it while you write a whole volume on the culture of the Mind?" This question is more captious than fair. I would tell such reasoners to select from all the schools in the kingdom masters of the soundest judgment and most fervent piety, and to ask them what their experience has taught as to the spiritual improvement of youth-what results they have to shew-what lessons or practices they can mention as having benefited the soul as evidently as lectures and exercises have the mind? When this question has been asked, and answered with a full and succinct treatise on the religious education of youth, founded on fact and experience-for to this