repositories of learning, the galleries of art, the temple of religion, that it may sit down in their ashes to warm its shivering limbs.

CURE OF SUPERSTITION.

THE knowledge of Nature not only adds a myr

ind fold to human power, but it preserves its possessor from myriads of dangers. Read such works as Brewster's "Natural Magic," or "Dick on the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge," and see from what terrors and alarms the human mind has been freed by the progress of science. As wild beasts flee from a wilderness as civilization enters it, so the most loathsome and debasing superstitions, -a multitude that no man can number,which once held possession of the human mind, have fled before the advance of knowledge.

IS PROVIDENCE INSCRUTABLE?

HEN the youthful, the lovely, and the excel

W lent are brought to an untimely grave; when WH

the great benefactors of their race are cut down in the midst of their usefulness, an ignorant piety refers the calamity to the dispensations of an iuscrutable Providence. It sees not that some law was violated, in punishment for which they perished.

It understands not that Nature never accepts the plea of a general obedience as an excuse for a particular transgression, nor withholds her penalties for the breach of one physical law, on the ground of a life of piety. As it regards the outward and material world, is not a knowledge of its various substances, of their properties and interior laws; by which we can make a portion of Omnipotence the ally of our weakness, and by which our feeble wisdom and skill can contract a partnership with a portion of the divine wisdom and skill; by which the race can be saved from indescribable degradation and suffering, and the materials of superstition be converted into kindling excitements for adoration and gratitude to are not these the parts of knowledge most worthy to be known?

God,

EDUCATION AN ORGanic neceESSITY OF MAN.

EDUCATION is

DUCATION is an organic necessity of a human

being. It is so in a three-fold sense. It is necessary to save him from mistake, which is intellectual error; from sin, which is moral error; and from suffering, which is the inevitable consequence of both. Instinct, without training or acquired knowledge, may prompt man to a few automatic movements of the muscles, or to a few spontaneous intuitions of

the mind. But its directive forces have no amplitude of scope, no variety of application. Instinct can effect no combination of multitudes or opposites. into harmonizing systems. At most, instinct can only move outward from its ceutral point in radii or a single diameter; but reason and conscientiousness, enlightened by education, survey the whole area of circles, and not of circles only, but the whole solidity of globes. In its acuteness and in its certainty, instinct has an advantage over reason, as far as it goes; as a bee, without tools, will build as geometric a cell as a skilled mathematician with them; but reason has an immense advantage over instinct in the magnitude and boundless variety of its field of operations. A bee with its instinct can build a perfect home for bees; a man with his reason can build a home for all zoology. Without his reason, man would have been inferior to most of the brute creation; with reason, he is the lord of earthly powers; with conscience, he is God's vicegerent upon earth.

1

THE UNIVerse is fuLL OF THE OBJECTS OF

KNOWLEDGE.

NOWLEDGE is a mimic creation. God has

KNO

not merely stored, but stowed, the earth with

His divine knowledge, that is, with things to be known. In its solid rocks and in its pulverized soils; in its waters, its air, and its gases; in its light, heat, and electricity; in the dynamical and in the chemical properties of matter; in the laws of motion, vegetation, and reproduction, . . . where is there any thing among all things, or any place among all places, not compacted with the objects of knowledge, wonderful knowledge, sound knowledge, knowledge emanating from the Divine Mind, knowledge in its very nature adapted to bear all minds that shall receive it back to the Divine Mind for adoration and thanksgiving?

THE “COAL-BAGS" OF The astronOMERS.

AR off in the southern heavens, in that distant

FAR

Magellan Clouds diffuse their soft radiance, astronomers tell us there are certain spots intensely black, -not indeed adequately described by the adjective black, but demanding the solid noun substantive blackness; where, as they surmise, there are wide realms of space in which there is no constellation, no sun, even, to soften the unmitigated inkiness,so void, so deep, that no ray of galaxy or zodiac is reflected from it to our eyes. These regions are

known to astronomers by the somewhat descriptive but inelegant name of "coal-bags"- the appellation being intended to stimulate our imaginations to conceive of their solidified blackness of darkness.

Now, the brain of an infant, when first born, is as empty of knowledge as one of these astronomical coal-bags is of light. This brain has immense capacity for knowledge, -as much room for it as one of those coal-bags has for light: doubtless it has even an appetency for knowledge; but as yet, so far as acquired knowledge is concerned, it is a void, a pure nonentity, an exhausted receiver. All infantile brains are in this condition of darkness and vacuity, waiting to be illumined by the stars of thought! Alas, that they should so often be lighted by the ignis fatuus of mystic speculation, by the cometary light of wayward thoughts, or by the lurid fires of sin!

One of the grand functions of education is to fill these void spaces of the soul with ideas, thoughts, transcripts of the Divine Mind, as that mind is reflected in Nature and in Providence, and with high resolve and aspiration also, noble and ennobling. Where are these ideas, thoughts, transcripts, records, resolves, aspirations? I answer, All Nature, all the universe external to our own souls, and the laws of our souls themselves, are full of them.