The reason why this maxim is current with so many parents seems to be, the favorable view which they take of their own youth; and also, that system of morals, so agreeable to many, which makes the road to virtue a broad and easy one.

It would be far better to oppose this theory as strongly as possible; and to devote all our eloquence to show what excellent possessions for men are a delicate moral sense, pure and noble manners, a virginity of soul, even during the turbulent years of youth, a blameless conscience, early virtue, unconsciousness of evil, freedom from those thoughts which raise a blush; and what unspeakable pleasures these things procure; pleasures which the debauchee, grown wise too late, must needs renounce.

NIEMEYER.

Can it be true that the experience of vice makes him who passes undestroyed through it, a better and wiser man?

I believe that I have observed the fact that the unmixed horror which innocence feels at vice, departs with that innocence, never to return; and so does the perfect love of what is good and beautiful.

The witching charm of vice corrupts the imagination, by this means confuses the understanding, and brings incurable weakness upon the heart which yields to it.

It is the purest soul, where there is not too great a disproportion of the other faculties, which will always show itself the strongest.

Neither do I know of any case where a vicious person has been so taught by his experience as of his own accord to return to a better state of mind; he always has his variation from virtue to thank for an unpleasant experience, as often as he meets innocence in his path, whenever it looks upon him, or addresses him with its unspotted lips.

It is certain that he will most love goodness for itself, who has never departed from it.

No light shines so clearly as that of a soul all innocent, and whose peace from on high exceeds all the power of reason and experience.

FR. H. JACOBI.

The religious ideas impressed upon us in carly childhood are never erased from memory or heart; they shine clearly out when all else seems dark to our souls, and often become an anchor of rescue to the soul, when the ships of its happiness and life seem about to be wrecked for ever. Simple thoughts of God, Christian virtue, eternity, have rescued more than one youth from the whirlpool of corruption, when all other lessons of wisdom have been washed away by the waves of passion, and when the hour of temptation has been powerful upon him.

Religion wrests the knife of despair from the hand of the unfortunate in the wretched moment of sorrow, when all the precepts of the wise have been forgotten, and glory and shame have alike become indifferent to him. The religious ideas which are summoned back from the days of childhood encourage the mourner, and even in case of the loss of his property, his honor, or those he loves, will raise him from the depth even of an insensible grief, when the consolations of friends, no matter how well considered or judicious and well grounded, are administered in vain. Such are the effects of religious habits of thought in which we grow up from childhood.

As man enters into life without knowing whence he comes, so should he also carry elevating thoughts of God, virtue and eternity with him, out of the twilight of childhood, into the storms of the world, without knowing where he received them, or how it is that they have become so intimately bound up with his nature. ZSCHOKKE.

A most important reason for instructing children early in the principal and simplest truths of religion is this: that it will be a lasting protection to them in after years, against that most terrible of all mental diseases, a despair amounting even to frenzy.

If these truths, received with confiding belief from the lips of parents, shall once be fully appropriated by the mind, they will receive, when the child's reasoning powers have become fully matured, very much confirmation from the history of humanity, the wondrous book of nature, and the laws of his own being. He will thus become possessed of a healthy mind; like those of the wisest men who have lived before him. Neither the teachings of half-learned fools, the reading of silly books, nor the forward curiosity with which he himself is impelled to the verge of the inscrutable, can shake him in his peaceful convictions. He believes in one God; and to him, doubt of the existence of an infinite and perfect being, is only insanity. He believes in Christian virtue, and has no doubts on the subject of immortality; while without these beliefs, God and virtue are an empty phantom conjured up by the brain, life an aimless riddle, and the universe a contradiction to itself. ЧСНОККЕ.

Erring humanity wanders, afar off.

God is the nearest resource for humanity.

Even thy family, O man, and the wisest of thy pleasures, will not last thee forever.

To suffer pain and death and the grave, without God, is what thy nature, educated to mildness, goodness, and feeling, has no power to do.

Faith in God is a tendency of human feeling in its highest condition; it is the confiding childlike trust of humanity in the fatherhood of God. Faith in God is the source of peace in life; peace in life is the source of inward order; inward order is the source of the unerring application of our powers, and this again is the source of the growth of those powers, and of their training in wisdom; wisdom is the spring of all human blessings.

Thus, faith in God is the source of all wisdom and all blessings; and is nature's road to the pure education of man.

Faith in God, thou art not a sequel and result of educated wisdom; thou art a pure endowment of simplicity; the hearkening ear of innocence to the voice of nature, whose father is God.

Childlikeness and obedience are not the result and invariable consequence of a complete education; they must be the primitive and spontaneous first principles of human culture.

The wonder of wise men at the depth of creation, and their searches into the abysses of the Creator, are not an education to this faith. In the abysses of creation, the searcher can lose himself, and in its waters he can wander ignorantly, far from the fountains of the bottomless ocean.

Simplicity and innocence, pure human feelings of thankfulness and love, are the source of faith.

On the pure childlike nature of men is based the hope of everlasting life; and a pure human faith in God is not possible for it without this hope.

life.

God is not the father of men, or else death is not the completion of our

Man, thy inward sense is a sure guide to truth and to thy duty; and dost thou doubt, when this sense summons thee to immortality?

Believe in thyself, O man; believe in the inward intelligence of thine

own soul; thus shalt thou believe in God and immortality.

God is the father of humanity; God's children are immortal.

Within thine inmost being, O man, lies that which with faith and reverence recognizes truth, innocence and simplicity.

O humanity in thy loftiness!

I am touching strings unused, and not accordant with fashionable tones. Despise the sound, dance-music, trilling calumnies, and drown my voice; leave pure humanity and truth, unnoticed.

All the powers of humanity only accomplish blessings through faith in God;

Thy power, consecrated one, is enlightenment from God.

A proneness to degrading shadows, an impulse to make sport with the faculties and powers, and to hide its own weakness, are marks of the lowest and weakest humanity, turned aside from the natural order of development.

Forgetfulness of God, neglect of the filial relation of humanity to God, is the source of the destruction of all the power of morality, enlightenment and wisdom, to enlighten humanity. Therefore is this loss of filial feeling towards God the greatest of human misfortunes, since it renders all paternal instruction from God impossible; while the restoration of this lost filial feeling is the salvation of the lost children of God on earth.

The man of God who through the sorrows and death of a human being re-establishes this universally lost filial feeling towards God, is the Savior of the world, the Mediator between God and man. His teachings are pure justice, an instructive philosophy for all, and the revelation of God the Father to the lost race of his children. PESTALOZZI.

Without religion, humanity is impossible.

That very infinity which surrounds us both before and behind, which we can as little comprehend with our thoughts as with our hands, in which nevertheless we everywhere recognize laws and an organization, which puts us into the sweetest astonishment-this very infinite wisdom and beneficence, exacts from us religion; that is, reverence, fear, gratitude, and confidence in that great and nameless being, who erected this organization, and established these laws. To Him, the rule of right will join us still more closely; for it is His law, the law of the moral universe.

The thought that, as we are, we belong wholly and eternally to Him, and that what we are now, is only a pledge of what we shall be able to do and to know by advancing under His guidance this strengthening thought renders us inseparable from worshipping Him.

Thus, it is better to believe than to know. When we see that we can not comprehend the infinity which lies before us, and why we can not, we shall, if we proceed rightly, go on with confidence, loving and believing. HERDER.

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." (Ps. cxi; 10.) O that all might be penetrated with the thought that those desires which we possess in common with beasts are not so wise as that reason which constitutes us men; and that man sinks into the grade of an animal, when he despises that truth and that justice which should be his guiding stars. Let us therefore be obedient unto this divine guiding star; and not only make reverence for God and for his truth and justice powerful within our souls, but also be careful, in training up the next generation, both to render them prudent, and to make them strictly conscientious.

Only in knowing and reverencing the will of God, shall we find what will make us, and humanity, happy. BRETSCHNEIDER.

Where knowing is sufficient, we do not need faith; but where knowing does not use its power, or loses it, we should not contest the rights of faith. The two should not neutralize but strengthen each other.

GOETHE.

Even though your children, my excellent friends the teachers, knew the

whole of geography and history by heart, could name every city, every remarkable occurrence, every date, knew the whole of the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms without a mistake, without knowing the most important truths respecting God and duty, providence and immortality; without knowing the difference between virtue and vice, the words of Scripture would be applicable to them; "Ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth." (2 Tim., iii; 7.)

The principal thing must ever continue to be Christianity and religion. For however important may be the relation of man to the external world, still his relation to himself is much more important; and his relation to God, the Highest, is the most important of all.

Of what value is all knowledge of nature, if we do not know its Creator? Of what value are all kinds of practical skill,-if we have not the first of all-skill in doing right?

Give your children a God; or they will seek out one for themselves, having strange caprices, but not a friendly face.

Under God's authority, the world has a fixed zenith and nadir; a determinate right and left. At present, everything is in continual movement, going, as the earth itself does, round and round, so that right seems to be left, and the contrary.

TISCHER.

Religious character is the completion of moral development. Where a truly pious mental condition has penetrated all the feelings, an inclination to everything right and good is certain.

The religious character should be early developed in the young, by means of family life; although, in the family circle, many hindrances arise, from diversion of attention, pressure of poverty, unskillfulness of parents, defective religious instruction, tendencies to doubt and to reason about things, &c. But as much should be done in this direction as possible, and the rest must be left to Providence.

The most important duty of parents and teachers, is in this particular, to set an example of reverence to God, efficiency and self-control, patience in case of ill success, and calmness under misfortune.

Remarkable days or changes in life, enjoyment of the pleasures of nature together with religious conversation, listening to affecting sermons, and religious music, are of especial value in this department of education.

Where the character shows a tendency to visionariness, the cultivation of the reason is the proper antidote, not derision.

Hypocrisy can not be too strongly opposed; for it is destructive not only of all true piety, but of all rectitude of character. NIEMEYER.

What is religion?

Let the answer be prayerfully given-it is faith in God. For it is not only a sense of the supernatural, and a faith in the invisible, but an aspiration after that without which no realm of the incomprehensible and supernatural-in short, no second universe-would be conceivable.

Expel God from the heart, and all that is above or under the earth, is only a repetition or enlargement of the same thing: everything supernatural only a higher stage of a mechanism.

Where religion abides in the heart, the Highest and Holiest converses with it, and is like a sun close at hand, behind which the eternal world lies in darkness.

When my Great Friend, God, requires something of me, heaven and earth become bright to me; and I become happy like him. When He conceals himself from me, storms conceal the ocean, but the rainbow is above them, and I recognize above them the cheerful sun, which has no stormy phase.

A loving view of the Great Friend of the soul banishes not only such

evil thoughts as conquer, but such as tempt. All earthly things clarify and sun themselves in the thoughts of Him.

But when we have arrived at the power of thinking without incorrectness of the infinite universe, how wilt thou, O God, appear, in the monotonous and dull hour of death, to him who is victorious over many-voiced life! He who brings God into his darkest hour can not experience what it is to die, while he gazes upon the eternal stars in the abyss of heaven. But how shall the child be introduced into the new world of religion? Not by precept. As the rainbow, which hangs on high, a glowing circle in the heavens, is by the same sun formed in the dewdrop as the smallest flower, so does divine providence rule, in the history of the world, and also in that of every family.

In man, the ideal is older than the actual. The lofty lies nearer the child than the debased. We measure time by the stars, and reckon by the clock of the sun, before we do by the city clock.

God, as at first in Paradise, has given man, in the desert of life, his image, until it fades away; and man can neither do without it or lose it. Holiness is always earlier than unholiness. Sin presupposes innocence. It was not fallen angels that were created.

If there were not already existing in children a whole dormant system of metaphysics, how could they receive those inward ideas of infinity, God, eternity, holiness, &c., which we have no means of explaining by any outward appearance but only by mere empty words; which can not create, but only explain.

The dying or fainting hear music with their inner being, when there is none without them. Ideas are analogous inward sounds.

Even children of four years old search after what is within the hidden world, after the nature of the existence of God, &c.

Rousseau, who represents God, and consequently religion, as the late inheritance of mature age, can no more expect religion to produce enthusiasm or love, than could a Parisian father expect filial love from a son to whom he only appears when he no longer needs a father.

For when could the knowledge of the Holiest be better implanted than during that sacred time of innocence that never forgets?

JEAN PAUL RICHTER.

Religious instruction which is too late, or neglected in early childhood, loses its holy power over the soul.

Without the strength of truths become habitual and united with the being, man easily falls under the first attack of a resolutely urged doubt, and wanders into the thorny by-paths of delusions. Such are the grievous consequences of neglect of religious instruction in early youth..

What is the destitution of religious susceptibilities, except actual barbarism? A child without religion is only a shrewder and more cunning animal than others; unacquainted with the holiness of the spiritual world, with God and virtue and eternity.

But religion renders even a child a nobler and more elevated being, and gives him a clearer view of his sphere of action. Religion beautifies the morning dream of life; the child loves it without knowing whence his pleasure comes, just as it loses its parents, without knowing whence it has them. And shall we endeavor to rob the child of such a blessing, to rob its future life of courage, happiness and fortitude? ZSCHOKKE.

But as he who would give must first have, so no one can teach religion without possessing it.

The younger a child is, the less should he hear of things inexpressible, and the more should he be familiarized with their symbols.

Elevated thoughts are the steps to the temple of religion as are the stars