to an easy efficiency and fill the body with new life. He learns in time that if he take his walks each day to the leeward of the town, he continues to breathe the gases and used up air blown therefrom, while if he walk to the windward, he breathes that germless air which has blown perhaps over mountain and forest for a hundred miles and has gained in purity and vigor all the way. He learns the elevated points in the neighboring country, and walking to one or more of them daily lets his mind wander for a few moments over the landscape and gather a broad exhilaration. He learns all those diversities and uniformities which fill him as an individual with the most fruitful vigor of nerve and brain.

THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL.

If we turn again to the moral and religious element in education, we find that it has a most important relation to physicial culture. The prog ress of the past and the hope of the future alike are found essentially in Christianity. The new physical ideal is in the main but the expression and outcome of Christian ideas. Jesus gave the world higher conceptions of man, his duty, usefulness and privileges. He opened vistas of higher and nobler life. As man has attempted to realize these, his views of himself and his physical nature have been refined and ennobled. The instant result of Christ's doctrine is seen in Paul's solemn, almost awful question "Know ye not that your

body is the temple of the Holy Ghost?" The human race since Paul has been trying to grasp the full meaning of this solemn new ideal, and has taken but a few steps in realization of it.

Christian training also has power to help men to go on further in this progressive attainment of the physical ideal, which is presented to us and required of us. A large part of physical culture is simply getting morality, punctuality, temperance, courage, obedience organized into the various parts of the body.

The

The penances of religious devotees show the power over the body which religious feeling gives the possessor. If religion can give such power to punish and to scourge, it ought to bestow still greater power to control and to develop. three ideas of sin, of duty, and of blessedness are the three strongest in the whole gamut of human motives; given that they have possession of a man, they have power completely to control him. Let the individual thoroughly feel that to neglect any law of health is a sin; let him feel that to develop himself to the highest efficiency of physical life, in order that he may thus live a longer and more intensely useful life, is a duty; let him feel that to be full of radiant vigor, to be a part of the active, thrilling essence of all things, is one of his most blessed privileges; let him feel that this blessedness brings a thousand other blessednesses and he has motives which will control him from all excesses, make him patient and persevering in effort,

and fill him with an expansive ambition to attain every possible fulness and effectiveness of physical life. Physical culture is being carried on in the most rapid and efficient way, only when in conjunction with moral and religious development.

ONE

CHAPTER VII.

ADULT EDUCATION.

THE PEOPLE'S PURPOSE.

NE of the most striking phenomena of the closing years of the nineteenth century is the development, in the leading nations of the world, of what may be termed systems of adult education. These movements take different forms in different lands, but every where the common purpose is manifesting itself among men in all stages of life and labor, to learn and enjoy the best that is to be known. Machinery is making leisure, popular government is distributing it, the people are more and more expending it in gaining knowledge and thus getting a broader and firmer grasp of the stream of existence in which they find themselves placed.

I. IN THE LAND OF PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE.

One form in which this movement appears in Germany is in what are known as "continuation schools." By means of these, those who have graduated from what correspond to our public schools, and are engaged in occupations by which they gain a livelihood, can, in special afternoon or evening schools during from five to twelve hours.

"So1

per week further carry on their education. complete is this system that even the waiters at the hotels, up to the age of seventeen, attend afternoon classes, and are taught one or two foreign languages." In some parts of Germany continuation education is compulsory. In other parts of Germany and in Switzerland opinion is ripening into a conviction that this form of education should be compulsory for even the poorest classes, and it is "in contemplation to extend it to all the States of the Empire, and Austria will probably follow suit."

Besides this more general system of continuation education, there are special institutions scattered through Germany whose function is the education. of adults. Thus in Berlin, there is the very interesting Urania Gesellschaft, an institution whose object is the general scientific instruction of the people free of charge. It is a joint stock company, but is supported in part by the government. In less than a year, over nine hundred lectures were given to audiences averaging over a thousand. Six telescopes are provided for the use of visitors. "The physical department is even better supplied with apparatus than the astronomical, and it is so arranged that visitors, by pressing different buttons may view the spectra of various substances, the phenomena of polarization, and many electrical effects. The recent presentation of two complete phonographs by Mr. Edison gives the science collection a still higher value." A journal is published free to all members. The large gen