THOUGHTS.

I

EDUCATION.

F ever there was a cause, if ever there can be a

cause, worthy to be upheld by all of toil or sacrifice that the human heart can endure, it is the cause of Education. It has intrinsic and indestructible merits. It holds the welfare of mankind in its embrace, as the protecting arms of a mother hold her infant to her bosom. The very ignorance and selfishness which obstruct its path are the strongest arguments for its promotion, for it furnishes the only adequate means for their removal. It is worthy, therefore, to be urged forward over the dead obstacles of listlessness and apathy, and against the living hostility of those sordid men who oppose its advancement for no higher reason than that of the silversmiths who trafficked in the shrines of the goddess Diana, and who would have quenched the holy light of Christianity for all mankind rather than forego their profits upon idol worship.

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Ν

SHALL WE GO ON?

IN regard to intellectual education, no man can

offer a single reason for arresting its progress and confining it where it now is, which would not be equally available for reducing its present The useful and elegant arts, that

amount.

minister to the comfort of man, and gladden his eye with beauty; poetry and eloquence, that ravish the soul; philosophy, that comprehends the workmanship of the heavens, and reads in the present condition of the earth, as in the leaves of a book, the records of myriads of ages gone by; language, by which we are taught by all the generations that are past, and by which we may teach all the generations that are to come, - all these would be sunk in oblivion, and all the knowledge possessed by the descendants of Bacon, and Newton, and Franklin would be to chatter and mow, to burrow in a hole, and crack nuts with the teeth. Such is the catastrophe to which we should come, could those prevail who would make the present horizon of human knowledge stationary.

PHYSICAL

PHYSICAL EDUCATION.

HYSICAL-education is not only of great importance on its own account, but in a certain

sense it seems to be invested with the additional importance of both intellectual and moral; because, although we have frequent proofs that there may be a human body without a soul, yet, under our present earthly conditions of existence, there cannot be a human soul without a body. The statue must lie prostrate without a pedestal; .and in this sense the pedestal is as important as the

statue.

ASSIMILATION.

OW can a work, at once so vast and delicate

HOW

as a symmetrical development of the human faculties, be conducted, without the deepest science

in the preparation of means, and exquisite skill in applying them? The infant mind grows, not by accretion, but through organization. Intelligence, and wisdom, and virtue, cannot be poured out of one mind into another, as water from a vessel. The increment comes by assimilation, not transfusion. Ideas, knowledge, may be brought within reach of the mind, but if they are not digested, and prepared by a process of the spirit itself upon them, they give no more vigor and power to the mind than sacks of grain nourish the jaded beast when they are fastened to his back.