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of labour that we owe the rapid strides that have lately been made in the arts and sciences. We find the same principle taken advantage of in education, and with the like beneficial results. Thus, there are teachers for languages, for mathematics, for music, for drawing, &c.,-men who are specially fitted for teaching these branches by natural aptitude or long study. In like manner, in order to the right teaching of religion, and the proper developing of the religious side of our nature, which we hold to be the highest of all education, special qualifications are necessary in the teacher, as well as special modes of teaching and special surroundings.1

It is one of the evils resulting from the attempt to combine religious and secular education-from having religious instruction imparted at the ordinary day schools and by the ordinary teacher-that those who are the natural and proper religious teachers of the young consider that they shoes for ourselves, we commissioned certain persons to spend their whole lives in making coats and shoes for us, the result was that we got better coats and shoes than we could have ventured to imagine before, because they were now made by persons whose genius specially inclined them to this pursuit, and by persons whose skill was perfected by perpetual practice." -(Prof. SEELEY: Lectures and Essays.) Genius," says Dr. Brown, "is a peculiar nature, aptitude, or tendency to any one calling or pursuit over all others."-(Hora Subseciva.)

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As the first rule to be observed by anyone who will give something is, that he must himself have it, so it is true that no one can teach religion who has it not."—(J. P. RICHTER.) "Every man judgeth according to that he hath, and not according to that he hath not; piety is discerned by piety, true knowledge by true knowledge." (HENRY MOORE.) "The man who is most competent to teach the arts of reading and writing, and the most skilled in arithmetic, may not be the fittest person to impart religious instruction," even granting that he is a religious man. "The labour alone which is imposed upon him by his other duties is sufficient to prevent that life and earnestness so necessary in explaining a subject of the first importance, especially to children."-(Colloquies on Religion.) "It were extremely to be wished that things were so ordered, that in all considerable schools, at least, one person of serious piety, of gravity and experience in Divine things, or more, according to the number of the scholars, should be fixed on and have a competent encouragement allotted to them, whose only or chief task should be to converse with the youth about their spiritual concerns, to instruct them in the principles of religion, and to guide them in the exercises of devotion, and in the practice of a holy life."(GEORGE MONRO: Essay upon Christian Education, 1712.) "Care, watchfulness, earnest cultivation it requires, but that cultivation is of a different kind, as its objects are different from that which trains the intellect and the imagination, and it cannot be directly taught in colleges and schools."--(Prof. SHAIRP: Religion and Culture.)

acquit themselves of their responsibility by devolving it upon others.1 Thus parents and churches neglect their duties, and devolve them upon the schoolmaster, in addition to his proper duties; and it cannot be wondered at that they are all very indifferently performed.2

Parents are the natural, and, we believe, ought to be the principal, moral and religious educators of their children.3 While they may, and in general must, delegate the secular education of their children to others, it may well be questioned how far they are at liberty to do so with their moral and religious training. God has for this purpose given them advantages

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Many a man being ignorant of the duty incumbent on him for the instruction of his family, casting the whole weight of it on the public teaching, is, by the deceitfulness of sin, brought into an habitual sloth and negligence of duty."-(OWEN.) "O how sweetly would the work of God go on if we would but all join together in our several places to promote it." "A family is the seminary of Church and State; and if children be not well principled there all miscarrieth. A fault in the first concoction is not mended in the second. If youth be bred ill in the family, they prove ill in Church and Commonwealth." (Introduction to Confession of Faith.)

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"To train the schoolmaster to deal with peculiar doctrines so much of their time that the other branches of knowledge are not sufficiently studied by them, and subjects very essential to the future success of the pupils in the world are badly taught or altogether omitted."—(Dr. NEIL ARNOTT.)

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"The law of the New Testament is that parents are to educate and bring up their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. The proper religious training of the young of a Christian family is a duty resting primarily and directly on Christian fathers and mothers."-(Rev. T. BINNEY.) "Domestic instruction in religion I have always considered as the best and most successful form of it."-(Dr. T. BROWN: Sermons.) "It is the indispensable duty of parents to attend with the utmost diligence to the pious and virtuous education of their children. It is a duty of infinite importance; a duty they are called to by every argument; a duty on which the support of society, as well as the usefulness and happiness of their offspring, depend."-(Dr. A. KIPPIS.) "Those who are professedly religious are under peculiar obligations to train up their children in the way they should go; and that this is practicable may be inferred from the precept-God enjoins nothing that He does not communicate the power to perform." (JOSEPH BENSON.) "It is at home, even more than at school (because at home it may be done earlier and more effectually than at school), that religious motives and feelings should be implanted, and a knowledge of the truths of religion acquired."-(Report of Her Majesty's Commissioners on Education.)

"The proposition, 'It is the duty of parents to educate their children,' is in danger of being ignored, and its place usurped by the poor substitute, It is the duty of parents to provide education for their children."" "The true relation of the professor to the parent is that he is employed to perform such parts of his work as cannot be undertaken personally." (Eclectic Review.) By "the habit which fathers have of delegating alto

which no other or after teacher of the child can possess.1 Their charge is committed to them during the most tender and susceptible period of its existence; they are bound to

gether to others the education of their children

they become guilty of a neglect the immediate consequences of which are sometimes startling, and the less direct and obvious consequences beyond calculation. I scarcely know any cause from which the community suffers so much. The teaching of special subjects may be delegated; but there is much in education which cannot be delegated, very much which can only be done at home, and a great deal which can be done only by the father. . . . His neglect of this duty to a great extent paralyses the schoolmaster; . the teacher can do little for the pupil for whom his parents have done nothing." -(Prof. SEELEY: Lectures and Essays.)

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"Let parents remember that, as the paternal is the most honourable relation, so it is also the greatest trust in the world, and that God will be a certain and severe exacter of it; and the more so, because they have such mighty opportunities to discharge it."-(Dr. SOUTH: Sermons.) "Home is the first and most important school of character. It is there that every human being receives his best moral training or his worst; for it is there that he imbibes those principles of conduct which endure through manhood, and cease only with life."-(SMILES: Character.) "The relation of parent and child is the strongest that can exist between human beings: and the duty of reverence towards parents is, therefore, justly accounted as one of the first of nature's laws, as standing at the head of the moral duties of mankind, and as one of the brightest in the constellation of the virtues." (Lord KAMES.) "A mother's teachings have a marvellous vitality in them; there is a strange, living power in that good seed which is sown by a mother's hand in her child's heart in the early dawn of the child's being, when they two are alone together, and the mother's soul gushes forth on her child, and the child listens to his mother as to a god."-(Dr. W. L. ALEXANDER.) 'One good mother," says George Herbert, "is worth a hundred schoolmasters." "What the child will eventually become mainly depends upon the training and example which he has received from his first and most influential educator (the mother)." (S. SMILES.) Holily preserve," says Richter, addressing parents, "childlike trust, without which there can be no education. Never forget that the little dark child looks up to you as to a lofty genius, an apostle full of revelations, whom he trusts altogether more absolutely than his equals; and that the lie of an apostle destroys a whole moral world." (LEVANA.) "As children have everything to learn, it is absolutely necessary that there should be one quarter in which they may and must place implicit confidence. And how singularly providential is the adaptation of this infant's mind to your instructions, when it is observed that mere testimony or affirmation is all that is wanted; for upon your simple affirmation he confidently and without hesitation relies." (ANDERSON: Domestic Constitution.) "The child is placed under parental authority for the very purpose, it would seem, of having the otherwise abstract principle of all duty impersonated in his parents, and thus brought home to his practical embrace."-(Dr. BUSHNELL.)

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2 The parent receives the child in a condition perfectly fitted to be moulded and stamped. The child sees everything through the parent's seeing; hears everything through the parent's hearing; believes everything through the parent's believing. It is sympathetic,

it by the strongest ties of love and affection;1 and towards them are first called forth those feelings and emotions that subsequently enter into the service of God.2 To the child its parents stand at first in the place of God, and God himself can assume no higher or dearer relationship to His people than that of "Father."

Failing the parents, and in addition to them, the duty, to our mind, clearly devolves upon our churches and congrega

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truthful, and imitative."-(H. W. BEECHER.) "The child opens into conscious life under the soul of the parent streaming into his eyes and ears, through the manners and tones of the nursery. farther on it is observed that a smile awakens a smile, any kind of sentiment or passion playing in the face of the parent awakens a responsive sentiment or passion. Irritation irritates, a frown withers, love expands a look congenial to itself, and why not holy love?"-(Dr. BUSHNELL.) "The parent's action is upon minds that are soft like wax to receive impressions, and that are apt to become hard like marble to retain them." -(Rev. D. THOMAS.)

"The natural affection of parents for their children is unequalled in strength by any other feeling among living beings. It begins with the birth of the child, and never afterwards slumbers. By night as by day, in sickness as in health, it is always on the alert. Corresponding

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to this parental care there grows up gratitude and love in the child. This love shows itself strikingly in the implicit confidence with whichthe child accepts as truth whatever lessons the parent teaches, and, above all, what is taught as the true religion."-(Dr. NEIL ARNOTT.) 2" Family government is never conceived in its true nature except when it is regarded as a vicegerent authority, set up by God and ruling in his place. The parents are to fill in this manner an office strictly religious, personating God in the child's feeling and conscience, and bending it thus to what, without any misnomer, we call a filial piety. So that when their unseen Father and Lord is Himself discovered, there is to be a piety made ready for him-a kind of house religion, that may widen out into the measures of God's ideal majesty and empire."-(Dr. BUSHNELL: Christian Nurture.) "Excepting in the article of worship, the duty of children to their fathers and mothers, as prescribed in the Scriptures, consists in the same particulars as our duty to God-viz., in love, honour, and obedience."-(Mrs. TRIMMER.)

"As regards mankind in general, whatever be your station, low or high, as parents unquestionably you are next to God." (ANDERSON: Domestic Constitution.) "Religion is that state of mind towards God which a good child exercises toward a parent. It is the same principles and the same affections fixing themselves on an infinitely higher object."—(H. WARE: Christian Formation.) "Earthly parents are, in respect of their children while in an infant state, the representatives of their heavenly Father; and parental authority is a proper type or shadow of the Divine authority." (Mrs. TRIMMER.) "If you know how to love father and mother' you know how to love your greater Father in heaven.”—(H. W.BEECHER.( "By our blessed Saviour we are taught to contemplate God as the universal parent, and to address our devotions to Him under the endearing title of our Heavenly Father. And we may consider earthly parents, the

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tions of seeing to and providing for the religious education of the young. They undertake to provide for the religious wants of the people, of whom the young form a most important part; and hence by neglecting them they are overlooking a chief portion of their work. If, in place of neglecting the young, as is so generally the case at present, and trusting simply to such instruction as they may receive at the ordinary schools, they would make special and adequate provision for their proper religious training, we believe

father and the mother, as the joint delegated representatives of the great Parent of the universe to their offspring till the latter can be made sensible of the relation they stand in to their Heavenly Father.-(Mrs. TRIMMER: Christian Education.)

"God has given the religious culture of the child into the hands of the parent and the Church; and the highest idea of a national education would be secular instruction in the school-the Church, as it ought to do, taking care of the religious culture."-(Rev. T. BINNEY.) "The responsibility (as to their religious training) is common both to the parents and the Church-to the parents directly, to the Church indirectly, as represented by its chosen and accepted pastor."-(Dr. R. HALLEY.) respect to irreligious parents who neglect domestic religious training, there the Church should come in with its benevolent agency in the form of Sunday-schools and Bible-classes, which might open to receive and welcome those who needed them."-(Rev. T. BINNEY.)

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2"Every Christian Church being a witness for Christ, a pillar and ground of truth, is under the most sacred obligation to impart the knowledge of Christian truth to all who are placed under its instruction. . . The Church is bound to feed Christ's lambs-to take care of the education of the young. By administering baptism to them it engages to do this work and labour of love."-(Rev. Dr. R. HALLEY: On the Duties of Churches to Baptised Persons.) In country districts, "where the people convene to the doctrine but once in the week, then must either the reader or the minister there appointed take care of the children and youth of the parish, to instruct them in the first rudiments, especially in the Catechism." --(First Book of Discipline.) "The curate of every parish shall diligently, upon Sundays and Holy days, after the second lesson at Evening Prayer, openly in the church instruct and examine so many children of his parish sent unto him as he shall think convenient, in some part of this Catechism." -(Book of Common Prayer.) "There is in our exercise of the ministry no systematic plan on which people are taught and brought on gradually towards the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.' And the results are most mischievous; piety degenerates into a series of shallow emotions, which evaporate in the absence of stirring appeals to the conscience."-(Dr. E. M. GOULBURN: On Personal Religion.) "Much of the time and labour which is spent (in the pulpit) might be much more profitably bestowed in catechising youth from the desk." (Dr. R. SOUTH: Sermons.) "It is to a well or ill-managed education that the Church, in a great measure, owes her successes or disappointments, either in her pastors or people."- (GEO. MONRO: Essay upon Education.)

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