32 LAY SERMONS, ESSAYS, AND REVIEWS. [in. 



5. A certain amount of regularity, attentive obedience, 

 respect for others : obtained by fear, if the master be incom 

 petent or foolish ; by love and reverence, if he be wise. 



So far as this school course embraces a training in the theory 

 and practice of obedience to the moral laws of Nature, I gladly 

 admit, not only that it contains a valuable educational element, 

 but that, so far, it deals with the most valuable and important 

 part of all education. Yet, contrast what is done in this 

 direction with what might be done ; with the time given to 

 matters of comparatively no importance ; with the absence of 

 any attention to things of the highest moment; and one is 

 tempted to think of Falstaff s bill and &quot; the halfpenny worth of 

 bread to all that quantity of sack.&quot; 



Let us consider what a child thus &quot; educated &quot; knows, and 

 what it does not know. Begin with the most important topic 

 of all morality, as the guide of conduct. The child knows well 

 enough that some acts meet with approbation and some with 

 disapprobation. But it has never heard that there lies in the 

 nature of things a reason for every moral law, as cogent and as 

 well denned as that which underlies every physical law ; that 

 stealing and lying are just as certain to be followed by evil 

 consequences, as putting your hand in the fire, or jumping out 

 of a garret window. Again, though the scholar may have been 

 made acquainted, in dogmatic fashion, with the broad laws of 

 morality, he has had no training in the application of those laws 

 to the difficult problems which result from the complex 

 conditions of modern civilization. Would it not be very hard to 

 expect any one to solve a problem in conic sections who had 

 merely been taught the axioms and definitions of mathematical 

 science ? 



A workman has to bear hard labour, and perhaps privation, 

 while he sees others rolling in wealth, and feeding their dogs 

 with what would keep his children from starvation. Would it 

 not be well to have helped that man to calm the natural 

 promptings of discontent by showing him, in his youth, the 

 necessary connexion of the moral law which prohibits stealing 



