most part, causes animals to be born in the peculiar region and place suited to provide them with the support of life. The work of Education is very small in them indeed.

But in man, on the contrary, the Instinct is very small, and the Understanding, or mental faculty, very great. And hence do we see the time during which men are placed under the direct influence and guidance of their parents, to be very long indeed, and to bear a large proportion to the whole of life, compared with the same period in other animals. Man's growth to maturity is exceedingly slow, the period of subordination and parental control exceedingly long. That which other animals learn by instinct, with only brief hints from the experience of parents, man learns. slowly and gradually by the process of mental growth and mental development, through experience, imitation, instruction, example, emulation, sympathy.

Now, taking the Understanding, or the Animal Reason, as that whereby we reason and think upon things visible and perceptible by the senses, it will be manifest this is the faculty that does in man what instinct, with a few hints from experience, does for the animal nature, when separated from its parents-enables it to continue life, and support itself after this separation.

There is then, manifestly, a duty bounden upon the parents, an express obligation so to educate and train the Mental Powers of children, that they shall be enabled, after separation from their parents, to support themselves honestly and reputably; although the measures and limits of this are manifestly very indefinite.

And the child has a right to that Education, and that training of its mental powers, and may claim it by law, and the law may enforce it. And it does do so, so far that if parents rear their children as vagabonds, or in occupations evil and immoral, the Law will then step in, take away the children from the parents, and place them under persons who shall give them that training.

The parents, therefore, are under the obligation to give such an Education. The Children have a legal right to it. The State can enforce that right. But still the Laws of most nations, while they acknowledge the right, seem very little to enforce it, save in such cases as those we have mentioned, or save in the case wherein a parent teaches his children doctrines, that, practically, interfere with Life and Property, and those Rights which the State enforces,

and the Wrongs that she forbids. If the parent taught the child systematically and practically, thieving, murder or adultery, so that the children were instructed in these crimes as a part of education, it seems that the Law can step in and put a stop to such Education. But with regard to anything else, it seems the State can hardly interfere.

In fact, as to the interference of the State in Education, it seems, as it has the office of establishing Rights and forbidding Wrongs, as far as concerns Life and Property, so to have the negative power of forbidding all education that shall train men to Crime. Education in crime it can forbid; a negative and prohibitory power it has to prevent Criminal teaching, so that it can interfere to prevent men being trained to break the Law, this seems to be the limit of the moral teaching of the State, in regard to parents and children.

But the State cannot interfere with Conscience, or with Religion, or with the Morality taught by the parents on any other grounds than these. The State has no control over the consciences of men. It can neither, under the pretence of Union with the Church, usurp to itself her offices of religious teaching, and thereby make heresies crimes, and opinions penal, and doctrines laws, and dogmas statutes, and compel all to religion by statutory enactments, and by the sanctions of law, fines and imprisonment. Nor can it reach the same end by a different route, pretending that the State is a Moral Teacher, a Religious Institution, for the purpose of instructing in religion, as the old theory of Pagan Rome, the new theory of Dr. Arnold, has it. The Church has to deal with Religion, Doctrine, and Spiritual Government and Instruction: these are HER sphere. Her punishments touch neither Life nor Property, but are spiritual. Sin, not Crime, is the transgression of her law; and although a Sin may be a Crime, and a Crime a Sin, it is only as Sinful that she deals with it, not as Criminal.

In fact, the Church is wholly and entirely separate from the State by nature and by the Law of this land. Hence, the State cannot interfere with education given by parents to children, so as to teach any doctrine, or to forbid any doctrine to be taught, except that the doctrine, over and above its character as doctrine, be also criminal. I conceive, then, the right of the State in interference with the education of children to be such that, first, it

can require an education that will enable the child in after-life to get its bread honestly and reputably; and, secondly, that the edu cation given shall not be criminal. Without these limits, the State cannot touch the Parent in his education of his children.

Such an education the child can legally claim of the Parent as a right: the parent is bound to give and the Law bound to

enforce it.

This is the second class of rights of Parents and Children; what may be called their Mental Rights.

But at the same time, although the State cannot interfere to enforce any above these "rights of maintenance," which are corporeal or animal, and "rights of education," which are mental, and cannot interfere as regards religion, still the father and the mother have a Spiritual Nature, and this puts them under the obligation to give a religious education, and to instruct Spiritually in every thing that shall exercise and bring to maturity the Conscience, the Spiritual Reason, the Affections, the Will. The training of these powers in the children, this is Religious and Moral Education; and the parents are bound to this by the Law of God and the Moral Law of their position. For the Family is a Moral and Religious institution by its very constitution; and the parents who are deficient in this culture are deficient in the duties of their position. And the children, too, by the Law of God and by their position, have the right to this Spiritual Education,-are by their position fitted to receive it, and have by their nature capabilities for it that they never have at any other period of their lives.

So that the whole obligation of parents, human and divine, shall correspond to the three parts of nature, and be three in number: Maintenance-Mental Cultivation-Religious or Spiritual Cultivation. These three must go on simultaneously; and without fulfilling these three, the duty of the parent to the child shall not be completely and entirely done; nor, without this, shall the fulness of the relation be felt and acted upon by either parent or child.

We purpose to follow out these remarks by some observations upon the spiritual and moral education of children by their parents, which will be most conveniently discussed in another chapter.

CHAPTER V.

The Right of the Child to a Spiritual Training, from its being always a Moral Being, and from the Needs of its Nature.-That Right extends to, 1st, Direct Instruction as to its own Nature and Position, i. e. Ethical Teaching— 2d, As to the Nature of God, i. e. Religious Teaching-3d, Personal Sanctity in the Father and Mother-4th, Practical Guidance and Governance— 5th, Baptism, or Covenant with God.-The Perfection of the Home is Love.

WE have shown, in the last chapter, the claims of the child upon the parent in reference to the Body and the Mental Powers. In this, we shall examine his rights in relation to his Spiritual being.

Now, the claim for bodily Maintenance, the claim for education of the mental powers, these come from the needs of the child—his having faculties which require them; the situation of the parent producing at once the responsibility and the capability of fulfilling that responsibility. These four,—on the part of the child, the faculties and their needs-on the part of the parent, the duty and the capability,-manifestly are the foundation of the natural right of the child and the obligation of the parent in reference to the supply of bodily food and of mental training.

Let us take the child, then;-and long before the mental powers awake, there is in it, alive and vigorous in its being, the sense of Right and Wrong. This sense the Conscience awakens as an instinct, at the slightest hint. The Will is seen in the mere child; the Spiritual Reason, too; and, chiefly, the Affections. The whole experience of the Human Race manifests that at that precise period when the mental powers, owing to the rapid growth of the frame and the corresponding feebleness of the brain, are weakest and most unsuitable to exertion or to training, then are these most susceptible of impression, most capable of emotion.* So much so, indeed, that men shall often

* All physicians of knowledge or eminence are now well agreed upon the doctrine that mental education begun before the seventh year is of itself

look back with feelings of wonder, and almost of awe, to the high and radiant glory that they feel to have shed its beams upon their infant soul,-the glow, undoubtedly, of the moral powers in their first awaking. Of this emotion in the child, Wordsworth the poet speaks in his celebrated ode:

"There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more:
The rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the rose,

The moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare;

Waters on a starry night

Are beautiful and fair;

But yet I know, where'er I go,

That there hath pass'd away a glory from the earth.”

This glory, which the great poet so justly and beautifully attributes to infancy and childhood, we recognise as the first awaking glow of the moral affections of the child, demanding that spiritual food and support to them which the parent is authorized to give; that training which they are then best qualified to receive.

highly destructive, as prematurely exciting the nervous system, and laying the foundation for many diseases. The physiological considerations upon which this is founded, I omit. I shall only remark that this hot-bed forcing of the childish mind into premature action, produces mental feebleness in advancing years; and in many cases it causes mental oddity and distortion; just as the forcing a young tree to bear fruit before its maturity, stunts and dwarfs it. No child should learn a letter of the alphabet before seven years of age. People, then, will say, What shall we do with them? Shall we give them no education till then?

I say, there is an education that dwarfs not the infant mind, but invigorates its powers and enlarges its calibre-the training, that is, of the moral faculties. At that time of life, parents are teachers of God appointed, to that end; and viva-voce moral teaching is worth ten times all the reading done before that age by children even of the most cultivated mental powers. This, I conceive, is answer enough to the objection. The parent will find the subject further carried out in the text.