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Education to goodness and piety.

subject of an address, so that attention may be drawn to their meaning. Music should be carefully attended to, and the danger of irreverence at practices guarded against by never using sacred words more than is necessary, and by impressing on the singers the sacredness of everything connected with Divine worship. Questions combined with instruction may sometimes keep up boys' attention better than a formal sermon. Though common prayer should be frequent, this should not be supposed to take the place of private prayer. In many schools boys have hardly an opportunity for private prayer. They kneel down, perhaps, with all the talk and play of their schoolfellows going on around them, and sometimes fear of public opinion prevents their kneeling down at all. A schoolmaster cannot teach private prayer, but he can at least see that there is opportunity for it.

Education to goodness and piety, as far as it lies in human hands, must consist almost entirely in the influence of the good and pious superior over his inferiors, and as his influence is independent of rules, these remarks of mine cannot do more than touch the surface of this most important subject.*

§ 12. In conclusion, I wish to say a word on the education of opinion. Sir Arthur Helps lays great stress on

"What s education? It is that which is imbibed from the moral atmosphere which a child breathes. It is the involuntary and unconscious language of its parents and of all those by whom it is surrounded, and not their set speeches and set lectures. It is the words which the young hear fall from their seniors when the speakers are off their guard and it is by these unconscious expressions that the child interprets the hearts of its parents. That is education."-Drummond's Speeches in Parliament.

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How to avoid narrow-mindedness.

preparing the way to moderation and open-mindedness by teaching boys that all good men are not of the same way of thinking. It is indeed a miserable error to lead a young person to suppose that his small ideas are a measure of the universe, and that all who do not accept his formularies are less enlightened than himself. If a young man is so brought up, he either carries intellectual blinkers all his life, or, what is far more probable, he finds that something he has been taught is false, and forthwith begins to doubt everything. On the other hand, it is a necessity with the young to believe, and we could not, even if we would, bring a youth into such a state of mind as to regard everything about which there is any variety of opinion as an open question. But he may be taught reverence and humility; he may be taught to reflect how infinitely greater the facts of the universe must be than our poor thoughts about them, and how in adequate are words to express even our imperfect thoughts. Then he will not suppose that all truth has been taught him in his formularies, nor that he understands even all the truth of which those formularies are the imperfect expression.*

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* In what I have said on this subject, the incompleteness which is noticeable enough in the preceding essays, has found an appropriate climax. I see, too, that if anyone would take the trouble, the little have said might easily be misinterpreted. I am well aware, however, that if the young mind will not readily assimilate sharply defining religious formulæ, still less will it feel at home among the "immensities and "veracities." The great educating force of Christianity I believe to be due to this, that it is not a set of abstractions or vague generalities, but that in it God reveals Himself to us in a Divine Man, and raises us through our devotion to Him. I hold, therefore, that religious teaching for the young should neither be vague nor abstract. Mr. Froude, in commenting on the use made of hagiology in the Church of Rome, has shown that we lose much by not following the Bible method of instruction. (See Short Studies: Lives of the Saints, and Representative Men.)

XXII.

CONCLUSION.

§ 1. WHEN I originally published these essays (more than 22 years ago) the critic of the Nonconformist in one of the best, though by no means most complimentary, of the many notices with which the book was favoured, took me to task for being in such a hurry to publish. I had confessed incompleteness. What need was there for me to publish before I had completed my work? Since that time I have spent years on my subject and at least two years on these essays themselves; but they now seem to me even further from completeness than they seemed then. However, I have reason to believe that the old book, incomplete as it was, proved useful to teachers; and in its altered form it will, I hope, be found useful still.

§ 2. It may be useful I think in two ways.

First it may lead some teachers to the study of the great thinkers on education. There are some vital truths which remain in the books which time cannot destroy. In the world as Goethe says are few voices, many echoes; and the echoes often prevent our hearing the voices distinctly. Perhaps most people had a better chance of hearing the

A growing science of education.

voices when there were fewer books and no periodicals. Speakers properly so called cannot now be heard for the hubbub of the talkers; and as literature is becoming more and more periodical our writers seem mostly employed like children on card pagodas or like the recumbent artists of the London streets who produce on the stones of the pavement gaudy chalk drawings which the next shower washes

out.

But if I would have fewer books what business have I to add to the number? I may be told that—

"He who in quest of quiet, Silence!' hoots,
"Is apt to make the hubbub he imputes.”

My answer is that I do not write to expound my own thought, but to draw attention to the thoughts of the men who are best worth hearing. It is not given to us small people to think strongly and clearly like the great people; we, however, gain in strength and clearness by contact with them; and this contact I seek to promote. So long as this book is used, it will I hope be used only as an introduction to the great thinkers whose names are found in it.

§ 3. There is another way in which the book may be of use. By considering the great thinkers in chronological order we see that each adds to the treasure which he finds already accumulated, and thus by degrees we are arriving in education, as in most departments of human endeavour, at a science. In this science lies our hope for the future. Teachers must endeavour to obtain more and more knowledge of the laws to which their art has to conform itself.

§ 4. It may be of advantage to some readers if I point out briefly what seems to me the course of the main stream of thought as it has flowed down to us from the Renascence.

Jesuits the first Reformers.

§ 5. As I endeavoured to show at the beginning of this book, the Scholars of the Renascence fell into a great mistake, a mistake which perhaps could not have been avoided at a time when literature was rediscovered and the printing press had just been invented. This mistake was the idolatry of books, and, still worse, of books in Latin and Greek. So the schoolmaster fell into a bad theory or conception of his task, for he supposed that his function was to teach Latin and Greek; and his practice or way of going to work was not much better, for his chief implements were grammar and the cane.

§ 6. The first who made a great advance were the Jesuits. They were indeed far too much bent on being popular to be "Innovators." They endeavoured to do well what most schoolmasters did badly. They taught Latin and Greek, and they made great use of grammar, but they gave up the cane. Boys were to be made happy. School-hours were to be reduced from 10 hours a day to 5 hours, and in those 5 hours learning was to be made not only endurable but even pleasurable."

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But the pupils were to find this pleasure not in the exercise of their mental powers but in other ways. As Mr. Eve has said, young teachers are inclined to think mainly of stimulating their pupils' minds and so neglect the repetition needed for accuracy. Old teachers on the other hand care so much for accuracy that they require the same thing over and over till the pupils lose zest and mental activity The Jesuits frankly adopted the maxim "Repetition is the mother of studies," and worked over the same ground again and again. The two forces on which they relied for making the work pleasant were one good-the personal influence of the master ("boys will soon love learning when

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