126 ON THE EXPEDIENCY AND MEANS OF 



all that is fierce, vindictive, and destructive in the huraan heart."* 

 The depravity of the " huraan heart" is the inclination for evil in- 

 sensibly naturalized in the heart of the child, those impressions of 

 inert sin which grow up with their years into a state of active and 

 baneful maturity. As a good education begins in infancy, so it is 

 settled and perfected in childhood and youth ; but is it the rigid dis- 

 cipline of human selfishness (miscalled piety) that will " train up a 

 child in the way he should go ?" On the contrary, good will be 

 brought into a near and unfavourable comparison with evil, wear- 

 ing the disguise and aspect of love. 



What is taught with severity will be heard with pain, and thus 

 a religion of love assumes an air of severity, begetting in the heart 

 an habitual aversion to its presence ; leaving the dissatisfied soul to 

 be attracted by the novelties and delusions of sin. " Great severities 

 do often work an effect quite contrary to that which was intended. 

 And many times those who were bred up in a severe school hate 

 learning ever after, for the sake of the cruelty that was used to 

 force it upon them ; and so likewise an endeavour to bring up chil- 

 dren to piety and goodness by unreasonable strictness and rigour, 

 does often beget in them a lasting disgust and prejudice against reli- 

 gion, and teaches, as Erasmus says, ' Virtutem simul odisse et 

 nosse,' to hate virtue at the same time that they teach them to know 

 it. I insist upon this the more, because I do not remember to have 

 observed more notorious instances of great miscarriage than in the 

 children of very strict and severe parents."t 



In contemplating the many and serious evils springing from a 

 degraded and faulty education, hindering the hallowed operation 

 of true religion, and obscuring the light of the church. What shall 

 be said of the wisdom and justice of those of our legislators who 

 are hostile to the general intelligence of the people, who pro- 

 crastinate the moral amelioration of a nation ; not merely indiffer- 

 ent, but actively opposed, to the spiritual and temporal improvement 

 of a kingdom. Without a good and wise education, liberty is li- 

 cense and innovation destructive ; without education the stability of 

 law is insecure, and the nation is shook between the tyrannies of the 

 rulers and the people. A good and universal education is so abso- 

 lutely essential to the happiness and well-being of man, that with- 

 out it not even the best-ordered and liberal government could long 

 exist as such, but, from a natural expediency, must fall to a level 



* Mammon, p. 356. 



f Tillotson, Sermon 58, p. 500. 



