If now we should take at random the various expressions of opinion, from different towns and districts, we should find these sentiments sustained. The conviction is all but universal that a just training of the child in a common school education is impossible in the exclusion of religious instruction. A Report of the School Committee of the city of Salem, Mass., declares that "the sentiment of all parties is that moral instruction and moral consideration ought to have precedence of everything else." In the regulations of the public schools in the town of Swampscot, the following is the fourth section: "The morning exercises of the schools shall commence. with the reading of the Bible; and it is recommended that the reading be followed with some devotional service." And so in cases without number, the idea of banishing the Bible and religious instruction as sectarian, would be deemed heathenish, The Annual Report of the Superintendent of the Public Schools in the city of Boston, remarks, that "the moral feelings, in their early manifestations, appear first to the moth er's eye, whose light should, like that of the sun falling upon opening flowers, give them the hues of imperishable beauty. But unfortunately for the rising generation, this high parental duty is now so often neglected at home, that many a child must receive at school his first notions of his various duties as a social and an immortal being. True education, in the broad and liberal meaning of the term, includes such a moulding of the youthful affections and impulses, as will bring them into ready obedience to the voice of conscience, and above all, sUCH RELIGIOUS CULTURE as will aim at imbuing the mind with that Christian spirit which teaches us to love God with all the heart, and our neighbor as ourselves." This would be impossible, were the Bible and religious instruction excluded from the schools. If the proposed divorce of a common school education from religious truth should be accomplished, where is the "religious culture" that constitutes a primary part of “true education" to be provided or introduced? The affections cannot be rightly moulded, the conscience cannot be trained, without religious instruction. Mr. Mann applies the same principles to the formation of District Common School libraries, and contends that one grand object of them should be, by the substitution of useful books instead of idle and immoral trash, to protect the children from those temptations and exposures which come from the flood of pernicious reading. "Much can be done by the substitution of books and studies which expound human life and human duty as God has made them to be." "To rear the amaranth of virtue for a celestial soil; to pencil, as with living flame, a rainbow of holy promise and peace upon the blackness and despair of a guilty life; to fit the spirits of weak and erring mortals to shine forever as stars amid the host of heaven; for these diviner and more glorious works, God asks our aid; and He points to children who have been evoked into life as the objects of our labor and care." "For this purpose, I know of no plan as yet conceived by philanthropy, which promises to be so comprehensive and efficacious as the establishment of good libraries in all our But how is it possible to accomplish this ob- Opinion and Practice in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. AT the session of the National Convention of the friends of public education, held in Philadelphia in 1850, a Report was presented on the subject of moral and religious instruction in common schools, by the Committee appointed for this purpose. They remark that "in the common schools, which are, or ought to be, open for the instruction of the children of all denominations, there are many whose religious education is neglected by their parents, and who will grow up in vice and irreligion, unless they receive it from the common school teacher. It seems to us to be the duty of the State to provide for the education of all the children, morally as well as intellectually, and to require all |