44 SEL'^.CTED ESSAYS FROM LAY SERMONS 



are trained to come to heel by a vigorous will, the servant 

 of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, 

 whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to 

 respect others as himself. 



Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal- 

 education; for he is, as completely as a man can be, in har- 

 mony with Nature. He will make the best of her, and she 

 of him. They will get on together rarely; she as his ever 

 beneficent mother; he as her mouthpiece, her conscious 

 self, her minister and interpreter. 



Where is such an education as this to be had? Where 

 is there any approximation to it? Has any one tried 

 to found such an education? Looking over the length 

 and breadth of these islands, I am afraid that all these 

 questions must receive a negative answer. Consider our 

 primary schools and what is taught in them. A child 

 learns — 



1. To read, write, and cipher, more or less well; but in a 

 very large proportion of cases not so well as to take pleasure 

 in readino;, or to be able to write the commonest letter 

 properly. 



2. A quantity of dogmatic theology, of which the child, 

 nine times out of ten, understands next to nothing. 



3. Mixed up with this, so as to seem to stand or fall 

 with it, a few of the broadest and simplest principles of 

 morality. This, to my mind, is much as if a man of 

 science should make the story of the fall of the apple in 

 Newton's garden an integral part of the doctrine of gravi- 

 tation, and teach it as of equal authority with the law of 

 the inverse squares. 



4. A good deal of Jewish history and Syrian geography, 

 and perhaps a little something about English history and 

 the geography of the child's own country. But I doubt if 



