106 ON THE EXPEDIENCY AND MEANS OF 



the word tyranny, but the whole imperfect system of education pur- 

 sued in too many schools in Great Britain. Can there be a harsher 

 tyranny than the ill-directed teaching of an unskilful master ?* for 

 whether learning be obnoxious from the tediousness of the process, 

 or from the stripes of the rod, is of little consequence in the result. 

 Without ascending to the heights of prophecy, but by an historical 

 comparison of the social and intellectual character of all nations in 

 all ages, it is neither a superstitious nor a sceptical opinion that, as 

 long as the school discipline is characterized by its present empiricism 

 and dull formality — as long as schoolmasters are the despised and 

 needy huxters of a teaching trade — as long as the office is prostrated 

 with all that is abject in circumstances and debased in opinion — so 

 long will the nation present a godless, soulless, degraded character, 

 in continuous retrogression from the presence and communion and 

 image of God, into a lost and irrecoverable heathenism. 



" Amidst all the shocks and revolutions of empires, a good system 

 of public instruction would serve as a common insurance of this 

 realm. And if it occupied the attention of governments as much as 

 the incitements to avarice and the ambition of false glory, we might, 

 to use a metaphor, admire the future prospect of Astrea descending 

 from heaven, and reviving the reign of innocence and concord among 

 men. Hitherto the earth can only be examined as a vast theatre of 

 depopulation and waste ; it is surely time to contemplate the dawn- 

 ings of reason, happiness, and humanity, rising from among the ruins of 

 a world which still reeks with the blood of its people, civilized as well 

 as savage.''t But, however badly constituted the education system 

 be, what is further to be deplored is, that even its slender benefits 

 are partial and exclusive ; as if difference of circumstances dispos- 

 sessed man of his reason, expunged the divine image, and retroverted 

 him into his irrational and animal being. The only knowledge the 

 poor man is permitted to imbibe is to be sucked in through " the pipe 



• The writer of this essay does not impugn the intellectual and moral cha- 

 racter of schoolmasters indiscriminately, but rather questions their possess- 

 ing what to him appears of much higher importance, inasmuch as it precedes 

 knowledge itself— the temperament or genius of teaching, and the philoso- 

 phic understanding of the compound nature of man. The qualifications, in- 

 deed, of a teacher of youth, are so multiform and rare, as it were, the fruition 

 of all knowledge and excellence, that, as Milton expresses, ** I believe that 

 this is not a bow for every man to shoot in that counts himself a teacher, but 

 will require sinews almost eq\ial to those which Homer gave Ulysses." 



t York. 



