tens of thousands in the periodicals of the day, forms the entire secret of their benevolent zeal; while a highpressure system of religious fervour is thus created in the minds of the people, leading their sympathies more in favour of schemes for diffusing among barbarous nations the mere theology of Christianity, than its practical and essential benefits among the neglected at home.

Equally unhealthy in its nature is such fitful enthusiasm to that morbid feeling of sentimentality induced upon the minds of many young persons by the representation of a tragedy or the perusal of a novel. Every one knows the spurious nature of such romance-engendered sympathy, and its influence even in hardening the mind against real sorrow. People like to have their sympathies awakened by ideal woes: they give a false and intoxicating excitement to the feelings, which, subsiding into their ordinary channel, cannot be so easily called forth by the real sufferings of daily life. They will expend money upon books of fiction, because it is a cheaper and more luxurious way of gratifying their feelings than by entering the abodes of misery, and feeding, warming, and clothing the poor: and a similar influence is apparent in many of those who subscribe to foreign missionary enterprises. They pay for the gratification of a romantic though a religious passion, as others pay for a box at the theatre or the last new novel. If the objects of their benevolence be not altogether ideal, they form at least a medium between the fictitious heroes of a romance, and the destitute poor immediately under their own eyes. But the idea is much more poetical, and withal more gratifying to the cravings of vanity, to be enrolled as a subscriber to a society whose every deed comes under the eye of the world, than to go forth, and

enter the dense masses of misery and moral desolation within a few hundred yards from Exeter Hall, and, without the aid of declamation or the eloquence of poetry, look into the faces of God's creatures starving under the very sound of words that sympathise with the natives of a distant land, and in the true spirit of Christian philanthropy alleviate their pressing wants, "not letting the right hand know what the left hand doeth."

Another fashionable mode by which many are deluded into the belief that they are acting upon a charitable motive, is the masquerading idea of a bazaar. То walk through one of these fancy fairs and examine the various articles of bijouterie exposed for sale, cannot fail to inspire something like a conviction of the misdirected ingenuity of the minds that have devised and the hands that have elaborated them. In such places there is often presented an array of toys for grown-up people, many of them of a most complicated nature, but of no earthly use, except to afford the indication of a latent energy and genius in the female mind that as yet have found no field for their legitimate development. And in a moral point of view the very excitement caused by such a public display has an effect the very reverse of that contemplated, in drawing away the mind and inclination from the pure feeling and unostentatious practice of charity. Even a spirit of envious commercial rivalry is often manifested on such occasions, leading the occupants of neighbouring stalls to regard each other with a feeling very unlike that" charity which thinketh no evil and is not easily provoked."

Last in the list of these self-deluding schemes of philanthropy, the very name of a charity ball needs only

to be mentioned to call up in the mind one of the most incongruous ideas that artificial life has yet presented to the world. An appeal is here made to feelings the very opposite to those of charity, for a charitable end. The charitable feeling is, therefore, not only not evoked, but deadened: and even if a temporary purpose be served by making people thus impose upon their own convictions, the true sources of an active and permanent sympathy are dried up. It is holding out a bribe to hypocrisy, and forcing people into the belief that they are giving money to the poor, when they are only sacrificing at the shrine of their own pleasure; or at the best it is adding an unnatural stimulant to produce the fruits of charity, while it permanently injures the soil on which they grow. What a mockery of his sorrows would the poor man feel it to be, were he to enter one of these gilded saloons and gaze upon the rich dresses and sparkling gems of the merry dancers, and be told that all this was done in mercy to him—that these gay revellers were the charitable men and women who felt for his wants, and had compassion on his woes! Were he to draw a moral under such circumstances he might naturally say, that if such a lever power were necessary to excite sympathy with sorrow, how vain would be the attempt to move such frivolous hearts to a charitable deed by a simple representation of misery itself!

God forbid, however, that I should here be thought involving in one general charge of selfishness all who are engaged in the benevolent enterprises enumerated. I know there is on earth the existence of a disinterested philanthropy, and often, under favourable circumstances, does it show itself above the dead level of a worldly morality. I know there are men and women who have learned the luxury of doing good, and go about the

world diffusing happiness from the purest of motives. But a very small knowledge of the human heart and intercourse with the world, is necessary to convince any one that such form the exception, not the rule, of daily life. Neither should I be thought cavilling at those conventional arrangements themselves, many of which have done great good to society. My object has simply been to analyse the motives originating such schemes; and though it is not the province of man to decide upon these individually, there is unfortunately too much evidence always at hand to inspire a doubt regarding the pureness and disinterestedness of the great majority of them, and to show the necessity of some new moral agency being applied to this part of man's nature, namely, a right education of the motives of his conduct.

In all these instances, too, however selfish may be the impelling motives, the actions themselves invariably educe some moral good; and while one looks in vain to man to aid in the development of a higher guiding impulse, the inevitable course of events seems tending to a speedy subjugation of the tyranny of reason, and the ultimate establishment of a moral government. It is, therefore, alike the duty and the interest of man to deduce a rule of conduct from this arrangement of nature, in which the ultimate design of every organised being, and of every moral event, is the diffusion of a universal happiness, and by acting upon this principle co-operate with Providence to the same end. Every new discovery in the works of nature proves that the Almighty Mind itself is obedient to the dictates of goodness, and, in the contrivance of its most complicated plans, that Omniscience has only a benevolent moral end in view.

CHAPTER II.

TAKING a hasty review of the history of education, with its rise and progress as an art, there is found abundant evidence of its inherent power for good when under the guidance of benevolent motives, but for evil when misdirected in its objects or partial in its operations. To pursue this inquiry to its source, is a parallel investigation to that of tracing the rise and progress of language, for by this alone can we, with any certainty, discover the gradual development of the universal mind. This subject, however, shrouded as it is in the mist of ages, and necessarily extending to a period when no contemporaneous record existed, is a question regarding which little more than vague conjectures can be formed. It is like one starting from the embouchure of some mighty river to explore its far distant source amid the wild and lonely desert, or the bosom of some inaccessible mountain range. As the traveller advances, he perceives the parent stream gradually diminishing above the junction of each successive tributary, until it shrinks into the tiny brooklet and the gurgling rill oozing in thread-like currents from the bosom of the earth; but while he thus gazes upon its visible source, a veil of obscurity hangs over the further progress of his search, and he still remains undecided, whether to ascribe the formation of