EliEVATlNG THE PROFESSION OF THE EDUCATOR. 117 



mulus would be removed, and the whole soul of the school would be 

 laid fallow under the dull monotony of a senseless routine. 



CHAPTER IV. 



THE RESULT OF THE DEGRADATION OF THE OFFICE UPON THE 



SCHOLAR. 



The natural law that "every thing is produced after its kind," is 

 equally true as a moral law ; for the character and conduct of man 

 are but the life and practice of those first and generative impressions 

 of education, and which are divinely and naturally prophetical of the 

 good or evil tendencies of his mind. The divine prediction concurs 

 with a natural corollary " that the sins of the father should be visited 

 upon the child ;" but the law is further extended in its fulfilment, and 

 the sins of the child are reflective in their consequences upon the 

 parent. But what is here said of the parent is equally predicable of 

 the teacher, and the evils of a bad education are retaliated upon the 

 educator and his office. Were it not that the commercial vigilance of 

 the nation kept the public mind in so constant a state of restlessness, 

 the ill success of the present educative system could not fail to claim 

 their indignation. Can there be a more melancholy picture than a 

 great and powerful nation, gifted with the highest privileges of man, 

 religious, moral, intellectual, and worldly, yet degraded in intellect 

 and vitiated in morals ? The spirit of a pure and undefiled religion, 

 offended by our superstition and sceptical faith, may ere long forsake 

 our altars for another and more tractable people, who will not, with 

 a proud and stiff-necked sectarism, disinherit the power of the spirit 

 from the pre-electing influence of that law of intelligence given unto 

 man, *' that he should train up a child in the way he should go," en- 

 graving the image of God upon the infant mind, that it may hereafter 

 recognise the divine likeness impersonated in the " Great Exempler" 

 of truth and holiness. Generation succeeds generation, and ages 

 wither away ; but the day still dawns upon a world full of the 

 miseries of error and sin. The creator has formed in man a law of 

 love, which, by the curse of an evil education, is turned into a law 

 of hate. 



The first instinctive perception of life is love ; the maternal na- 

 ture is love; from their mutual sense love is born and nurtured; 



