taken up with any spirit; and might now have been deferred for another century but for the bill of Sir James Graham! The announcement of that measure found nearly the whole country in a state of slumber; and probably, had its provisions been less stringent and galling, we had still indulged our apathy. The philanthropy of the Apostles was quite adequate for the work of universal education; but they lacked the means. We possess the means, but have hitherto been destitute of the benevolence essential to the proper accomplishment of this great Christian enterprise. Happily, the Reports of the Poor Law Commissioners, of the Factory, the Mines and Colliery Commissioners, of the spread of Puseyism and Socialism, in connection with Sir James Graham's bill, have all burst upon us like thunder, and have made us blush for the

reality. All should possess an Apostolic | spirit, or little good will be done. To nurse every child for God must be the ruling passion, or the work will be a failure. Now there has been a great lack of this spirit in the ages that are gone by; and even in the present day it is far from being common. It is true our Sunday-school teachers are imbued with it to a great extent; but then their labours are for the most part confined to the Sabbath. Indeed, many have thought that piety is not essential even to Sabbathschool teachers; and therefore we need not wonder that few people have dreamt that evangelical love and zeal ought to be prominent characteristics of those who conduct our boarding and day schools. Christian parents not unfrequently commit their children to the tuition of preceptors who know nothing of vital godliness, and then become almost broken-hearted if their off-past, and tremble for the future; and we spring exhibit any proofs of alienation from God. Some wax bold enough to refer the whole to the sovereignty of Divine mercy! Why does not the farmer who neglects to cultivate his fields impute the want of a crop to the interposition of Sovereign grace? The one would be as rational as the other.

A great deal has been said and written about the evils of an ungodly ministry; but this is hardly a more fatal bane to the country than to have ungodly teachers for the rising generation. The latter allow the | population to be poisoned at the fountainhead; indeed, not a few public teachers are the guilty agents in this work of destruction. The Puseyite or infidel schoolmaster can do as much mischief as the heterodox priest. There is no work that calls for more Christian principle and philanthropy than the education of the young; and to the want of this qualification we are indebted for the present degraded condition of so large a portion of the people. We have had sympathy for almost everything but our own offspring. Thousands have wept over the fetters of the slave who have never felt one tender emotion for the mental and moral thraldom to which so many myriads of children are doomed. The brute creation have shared our compassion; and Parliament has almost shed tears over the inhumanity of putting a dog in harness; and did this the very same session in which it was proposed to enslave the young with the most galling yoke. How few have as yet felt as they ought for the complete tuition and emancipation of the immortal spirit of infant man? We have not had benevolence enough to educate our own countrymen and countrywomen, and therefore millions are still "in the gall of bitterness and bond of iniquity." What a remarkable fact it is, that the year 1844 should have dawned before this most important of all our Christian efforts was

have reason to believe that the result will be, the arousing of the people of God to attend to that most important and most interesting of all the Saviour's commandments-"Feed my lambs."

The education of the people must not be a mercantile affair, must not be a State, a political, or a sectarian business, but must be the work of pure Christian love. The political priest and political schoolmaster are twin brethren in iniquity. The bigot in the pulpit or in the school-room is equally hateful to God, and destructive to man. They have no charity; and therefore Revelation tells us, that in religion they are "nothing." In the work of poisoning the minds of young and old they may be giants, but in Christianity they are ciphers. He who teaches a school for the sake of the income is as unfit for his station as he who seeks the priest's office for" a piece of bread." We never expect that the man who enters the Church for a living will be any blessing to himself or the people of his charge. His only motive is mammon:

"Mammon led them on : Mammon, the least-erected spirit that fell From heaven."

And the teacher who turns public instructor for pelf is not a whit behind his clerical competitors in the arena of avarice. The education of the young, like the ministry of the Gospel, is a holy and benevolent work, and those who engage in it for the sake of its worldly emoluments are too base and grovelling to be able to elevate the minds of their pupils from earth to heaven. Worldly priests produce a worldly people; and schoolmasters who worship mammon will never teach their scholars to worship God. It is not enough to have "the schoolmaster abroad;" we must have him enlightened and refined by the gospel, before we can have a religious po

pulation. Evangelical academies and schools | I could write a volume. Enough has been are just as necessary as evangelical preachers. said to show that the want of real Christian Unless the soul of the teacher travails in philanthropy towards the young has been a birth for the souls of his scholars, he is unfit very great impediment in the way of popular for his office. The instructors of youth ought education. to be viewed as among the most important ministers of religion, and to have all the requisite talents and accomplishments for their high vocation.

12. We ought not to omit here, that the efforts which have already been made towards the enlightenment of the people have been greatly impeded by a multitude of These qualities have not hitherto been de- counteracting influences. It is important, manded or deemed at all necessary for the first, to glance at this subject, because there work of juvenile tuition. Indeed, our public are those who, from not attending to this schools and colleges have been the shrines point, have arrived at the conclusion, that of avarice and ambition, rather than the education is a failure. They often exclaim, temples of truth, virtue, and religion; and "Schools! why you have tried schools already, private seminaries have been but too closely and yet look at the iniquity that still abounds assimilated to these public models. As for in the country!" Some positively assert the schools of the people, any superannuated that we have had too many schools, that we being has been considered abundantly qua- have taught too much, that the people are lified for their superintendence. To broach getting too wise, and, as a consequence, are the opinion that none but minds of the becoming more wicked. A millennarian, highest order, of general information, and and Plymouth Brother, told me, that he was profound piety, are fit for the office of Pa- quite rejoiced at this result, because it conrochial, British, or National School instruc-firmed him in his opinion, that "God was tors, would even now, in many a circle, expose one to ridicule and contempt. Indeed, some of the first philanthropists in the country have not as yet made up their minds as to the expediency of having day-schools for the whole population. The writer not three years ago was literally abused by some of the most zealous professors of religion in London for daring to ask for assistance to erect a day-school. They said, "If we give to schools, London will be inundated with school cases;" and though some had just come from their knees, where they had been praying "thy kingdom come," yet they shrunk back with indignation from the thought of being called upon to contribute a mite from their abundance to hasten so glorious an event. I came to them with my school case, as an angel, to tell them that God was willing to answer their prayers, and set up his kingdom in the hearts of the young; but they refused to entertain my suit, or bid me God speed. One gentleman, just come home from a prolonged revival meeting, became quite wrathful at my making such an irruption on his holy meditations and devotional feelings. Some said, "Bring us a chapel case and we will give to it, but we cannot patronise schools." Such language translated into plain English is this-" Allow the people to be brutalized by ignorance and depravity; let them be trained in the school of Satan, until they are grown old in iniquity; let the best, the very prime of their days, be given to the Prince of Darkness; and then, if you please, build a chapel, appoint a minister, and try to convert them, and our guineas are at your disposal; but to dare to bring them into Christ's school early is such an innovation on past usage that we can by no means allow." But I need not enlarge further on this point, or

just about to wind up the present state of things." It does not require any lengthened argument to meet these objections. The fact is, we have done a little, a very little indeed, towards the education of the people in Christian truth; but though we have done so little, we have indulged the most flattering and exaggerated expectations respecting the results of our puny efforts, and, in our zeal to magnify our wishes into the most presumptuous hopes, we have forgotten to calculate the various counter agencies with which our enterprise would have to contend. It is said that astronomers expected the arrival of Halley's comet some considerable time before it made its actual appearance, and for a while some were at a loss to discover the cause of their disappointment. At length it was perceived that comets, like all other bodies in the solar system, are subject to the laws of gravitation, and that, in crossing the orbits of the other planets, the comet, from the common principles of attraction, would be impeded in its course; and as soon as these counteracting influences were duly calculated, the whole mystery became plain. Our educational speculators have subjected themselves to a similar disappointment. They opened Sunday-schools in almost every church and chapel; some went so far as to add a dame-school, or perhaps some other day-school, but generally premising that the children should not be taught too much, and therefore not deeming it at all important for these week-day seminaries that the master should be intelligent or pious; and having gone thus far in the great work of popular education, the most sanguine anticipations were indulged, and consequently disappointment ensued; and from this frustration of their unreasonable hopes, many are sitting down in despair. Some have abandoned all

any right to expect. Our exertions have been so few and feeble, that they have been evidences of our parsimony, rather than of our zeal. But had they been as holy, as liberal, and as energetic as the magnitude of the work demanded, yet it must not be forgotten, that the religious education of the world is a mighty struggle of light with darkness. Prejudices, that have been flourishing for ages, have to be uprooted, and vices, that have the sanction of the remotest antiquity, and have seemed almost to become part and parcel of the immortal soul itself, have to be condemned and abandoned. In a word, everything that ignorance, crime, superstition, false religion, and unbelief could invent, has been arrayed against the gospel. All the legions, the malice, and the stratagems of the bottomless pit have been opposed to our enterprise; and these adverse influences have not been small. The Apos

Now all this disappointment has been the result of erroneous calculations. Had it only been remembered that Sunday comes but once a week, and Sunday tuition is not daily tuition, and that for every four hours spent in the school of Christ on a Sabbath, the majority of the children would pass nearly seventy hours in the school of Satan, we should certainly have moderated our hopes and our boasting. We ought also to have considered, that reading is not education, and that many of our Sabbath-school teachers are mentally disqualified to do any-tles had to battle with the old pagan dragon, thing more than teach the children to read. Some indeed can read but very imperfectly themselves. Then, our day-schools have been comparatively few in number; and those few, in a majority of cases, have been miserably superintended. And further, though the children had been taught by angels, yet, when out of school, not a few of them have had to associate with incarnate demons. And beside all this, there has been in the country an immense mass of that old leaven of ignorance, impiety, formality, infidelity, and blasphemy which has existed among us for ages, and which Christianity, for the want of more knowledge and piety in her professed adherents, has never expelled. Here then we have counteracting influences far more potent than those which impeded the progress of Halley's comet; and if we duly weigh the power of each and all of these baneful agencies, and a thousand others which might be named, instead of wondering that so little has been done, we may justly marvel that we have succeeded so well as we have, and exclaim, "What hath God wrought!" But for the omnipotence of truth, and the infinite power of God's Spirit which has attended it, we should have done nothing. In fact, the means used have been so feeble, and the opposition so mighty, that in our success we have a demonstration that the "excellency of the power is of God, and not of us.' Hence we perceive, that if knowledge and religion have not prospered to as great an extent as many had fondly hoped, yet they have made much more real and rapid progress than we had

and though they dealt him many a heavy blow, yet the vigour of his constitution was such that his deadly wound in some degree was healed, and his existence is to this day prolonged. Antichrist, to which the lives and doctrines of the Apostles proved such an impregnable "let," or barrier, is nothing more than the influence of ignorance and idolatry counteracting the gospel of Jesus Christ; and the corruption of the Church and exaltation of the Man of Sin was a natural consequence, which any one, who could have duly estimated the state of things in the days of the Apostles, might have foreseen. From that day until now, knowledge has been opposed by ignorance. What an immense host of enemies yet remains to be subdued! But our weapons are light and truth, and the battle is the Lord's; and the triumph of pure religion is secured beyond the shadow of a doubt. Past success and present advantages, combined with the promises and predictions of revelation, elevate us to a position which Patriarchs, Prophets, and Apostles would have risked a thousand martyrdoms to have occupied. Like Moses on Pisgah, we behold the glorious prospect stretched out before us, and there is now no prohibition from heaven, nor any obstacle more formidable than our own indolence, to prevent us from entering the promised land. In past ages truth has had every hindrance and every description of foe to grapple with, but it has "triumphed gloriously," and, compared with the past, its future course is plain, and its universal victory easy.