444 Education — Centralization. [October, 



EDUCATION— CENTRALIZATION. 



Mr. Editor. — I beg permission to offer a few suggestions on the 

 subject of polite education, and its relative influences upon the 

 rural and civic population of this growing Commonwealth. No 

 subject, when fully comprehended, can be of intenser interest to the 

 Christian, the guardian of youth, and to all who devoutly cherish, 

 the principles of our free government and Holy Religion. I do not 

 call that Education or Civilization which leaves out Christ, or 

 ignores any one of the fundamental principles of revealed religion. 

 Works on science have been written, and onoj/ be again, from which 

 it could never be ascertained whether we were living in a Christian 

 or Pagan land. And this is in our own times and country. I 

 would not deny but instruction may be given, with no lessons of 

 religion imparted but what may be gleaned from the mute utterances 

 of nature or deductions of reason. But under no such system can 

 man, the tchole man, be educated; and for this simple reason, that 

 there is no certainty or fixedness about any religion, save that 

 revealed from heaven — that given to us in the Scriptures of the 

 Old and New Testaments — and none other is adapted to the wants 

 of his religious nature. To demand of the educator the complete 

 development and culture of that young, immortal mind, without the 

 appliances of revealed truth, would argue as great folly as for that 

 same parent to send to the teacher his son, having but 07ie eye, or 

 one arm, and demand he should be sent back with tico sound eyesi 

 or two sound arms. The age of miracles has gone by. Enough 

 upon this point. 



Though the subject of American Education is an old and a hack- 

 neyed one, yet in none of its themes, phases, or applications, is it 

 exhausted. In a free government, where we recognize no order of 

 patrician, or plebeian, and unde-r a constitution knowing not one of 

 the three great elements of aristocracy — its very life depending 

 upon the virtue and intelligence of the people — this subject never 

 can become old, in the sense of being ready to vanish away, till 

 the predicted times of the New Heaven and the New Earth 

 shall have come. From the position to which in the providence of 

 God I have been called, I have endeavored to gain some definite 

 knowledge as to the practical workings of the system of our higher 

 Seminaries of learning, if, indeed, we have any system. We have 



