Appropriateness and Beauty of the Cord of God in our Common Schools.

THE potent energy of God's word as an element of regeneration and transfiguration, both for the intellectual and moral nature, as well as the certainty of the Divine blessing attending its presence, and its constant power, must have been forgotten, if not denied, by those who would exclude it from a place in our system of Common School Education. As an element of quiet, but effectual government and order in the schools, it would be invaluable; where its influence is judiciously employed, by a teacher whose heart loves it, punishment is but seldom needed. It is a forcible preventing, as well as reforming element, yet ever gentle, instructive, and persuasive. What an agency of power, kindness, and love, is

foregone, neglected, rejected, when the Bible is excluded from the system of instruction and discipline in school. And what a delightful and attractive variety, in both the form and material of thought, feeling, and imagination, in history, parable, poetry, argument and precept, in the lessons prepared by the Great Teacher of mankind, and given to our race under the gracious perpetual sanction of our birth-right from heaven, with the assurance that the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever!

That from a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures, is the most marked and explicit record of an educational process, as sanctioned of God. Doubtless, it ought to be the process with every immortal being in a Christian State; and it might be, with nearly every one, if the State performed its full responsibility. And when we think of that responsibility as extending, in the course of a few years, to the children of more than a hundred millions, who will at once, within the limits of another generation, be the inhabitants of our country, and think of all those children, during the whole

period of their education undertaken by the State, as deprived of the Word of God with all its hallowing and sanctifying influences, its wondrous winning and perpetual power of sacred training and restraint, we regard with amazement the heedlessness, not to say recklessness of consequences, with which any man can deliberately and earnestly propose and labor for the exclusion of that Divine agency from the whole circle of an education so vast and important.

To think how great and beneficial an influence is exerted during the period of one year, in a single district school, by the falling of the Word of God, as the gentle dew from Heaven, in the hushed stillness of the school, morning and evening, on so many opening and susceptible minds and hearts; and then to think of the possibility of making that the reverent habit of the schools of twenty millions; and then to think of that influence carried forward from year to year, as uninterrupted as the rising and setting of the sun, through a period of thirty years, when the children of a population of more than two hundred millions may be

thus gathered beneath the same Divine Hand, the same beneficent impression! How imposing, how majestic, how delightful the sight of the children of a whole nation, every day silently listening, at the same hour, to the words of their Father in Heaven, and uniting at the same hour in the petition, Our Father! To think that this might be, was in likelihood of being, and then to conceive the plan of thwarting this possibility, and to labor by argument and management for preventing it! Does it seem possible that such an effort can co-exist with Christian principle? Are the two compatible?

In this connection, how strikingly and solemnly beautiful are the words of John Foster, in reference to the inestimable value of the union of religious truth with secular instruction, and the security and happiness of the mind advancing forward to the responsibilities of life, and the command of thought and action, under such a discipline. He imagines a visitor gazing on the busy operations of such a school, and watching the multitude of youthful spirits. "They are thus treading in the

precincts of an intellectual economy; the economy of thought and truth, in which they are to live forever; and never, to eternity, will they have to regret this period and part of their employments. The visitor will be delighted to think how many disciplined actions of the mind, how many just ideas, distinctly admitted, that were strangers at the beginning of the day's exercise,—and among these ideas, some to remind them of God and their highest interest, there will have been, by the time the busy and well-ordered company breaks up in the evening, and leaves silence within these walls. He will not, indeed, grow romantic in hope; he knows too much of the nature to which these beings belong; knows, therefore, that the desired results of this discipline will but partially follow; but still rejoices to think that partial result, which will most certainly follow, will be worth incomparably more than all it will have cost."

"The friends of these designs for a general and highly-improved education, may proceed further in this course of verifying to themselves the grounds of their assurance of happy