worth, what indemnification should be demanded from a careless or ignorant preceptor ?*

We may add, suppose that he had neglected to fasten the nails so that the first hard piece of road the horse had to travel, his shoes would be knocked off, and his feet made incurably lame for want of protection. The security of good principles is what we want in education, and it can be found only in the religion of the Bible; and that system which neglects or wilfully refuses to provide those fastenings, the nails of divine truth, is justly chargable with all the consequences.

* Practical Education, vol. 1. p. 202.

13*

Presentation of the Subject by John Foster.

IN arguing with characteristic energy and power for a scheme of popular education, John Foster argues with equal power that religious instruction should form a material part of it. He exposes the miserable absurdity of the plan of divorcing education from religion, and teaching the latter as a separate thing. He shows the importance, the duty, of combining religious with other information, and thus rendering it familiar and natural, a companion of every-day life, and not a formalistic god, or influence of Sundays only, or of Sunday schools. Religion must not be forced upon the mind, or presented by itself as a mere catechetical speculation or abstraction, but must be a daily companion of other more attractive knowledge, because it requires so

much care and address to present it in an attractive light; and it is desirable to combine it with other subjects naturally more engaging, and with associations that are most familiar and pleasing to the thoughts.

The question being how to bring the people by the ordinary means of education to a competent knowledge of religious truth, we have to consider the fittest way. "And if," says Foster, "in attentively studying this, there be any who come to ascertain that the right expedient is a bare illustration of religious instruction, disconnected, one system, from the illustrative aid of other knowledge, divested of the modification and attraction of associated ideas derived from subjects less uncongenial with the natural feelings, they really may take the satisfaction of having ascertained one thing more, namely, that human nature has become at last so mightily changed, that it may be left to work itself right very soon, as to the affair of religion, with little further trouble of theirs."

While, therefore, this great writer insists upon the mental cultivation of the masses by

all means, at all hazards, accounting all knowledge as being absolutely valuable, an apprehension of things as they are, and tending to prevent delusion, and to remove the obstacles, some of them at least, in the way of right volitions; yet he maintains that never, in any case, should knowledge be separated from religious truth.

"We are not heard," says he, "insisting on the advantages of increased knowledge and mental invigoration among the people, unconnected with the inculcation of religion. The zealous friends of popular education consider religion (besides being itself the primary and infinitely the most important part of knowledge) as a principle indispensable for securing the full benefit of all the rest. It is desired and endeavored, that the understanding of these opening minds may be taken possession of by just and solemn ideas of their relation to the Eternal, Almighty Being; that they may be taught to apprehend it as an awful reality, that they are perpetually under His inspection; and, as a certainty, that they must at length appear before Him in judgment, and join, in

another life, the consequences of what they are in spirit and conduct here. It is to be impressed on them that his will is the supreme law; that his declarations are the most momentous truth known on earth; and his favor and condemnation the greatest good and evil. And it is wished and endeavored to be by the light of this divine wisdom, that they are disciplined in other parts of knowledge; so that nothing they learn may be detached from all sensible relation to it, or have a tendency contrary to it. Thus it is sought to be secured, that as the pupil's mind grows stronger, and multiplies its resources, and he therefore has necessarily more power and means for what is wrong, there may be luminously presented to him, as if celestial eyes visibly beamed upon him, the most solemn ideas that can enforce what is right.”

Now, let us take the brief description of such an education presented by Foster, as an approximation towards the only true ideal of a just education, an education which the State that undertakes to educate, is pledged to provide for its children, and let us ask if there be