a court-house or a jail, a dwelling or a prison, or revolutionize his country to effect his fell purpose and reek revenge; revenge for the robbery of an education without religion, a heart virtually plundered, because deprived of those salutary restraints his faller nature imperatively needed and God has so bounteously provided. Nothing, save the fear of God, can be a safeguard against the terrific powers of educated mind, quickened genius, sharpened wit, and enlightened talent, to which it is the aim of our school system to give birth and manhood. How shall this mighty responsibility be safely met, unless parents and teachers be made to feel it, and steadily and earnestly aim at educating the heart and conscience of our children, at home and in the district school? How, unless the Bible be more honored, both as a classic and a class book, and its pages and its truths made familiar to our children? How, unless a higher and holier standard be diligently sought for, in those who have these young hearts, six days out of seven, under their powerful example and tuition ?"

Conclusion.

To us, as well as to our fathers, God has spoken: "Therefore shall ye lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes. And ye shall teach them to your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thine house, and upon thy gates." Educated as the Puritans were in the Scriptures, and in the most jealous reverence and love for them, as the foundation both of their civil and ecclesiastical privileges and blessings, they have bequeathed the habit of a religious education, and of the same enshrinement of

the Bible in the heart, to all their descendants; a habit, which no attempt was made to undermine, in any part of the country, till the Roman Catholics began the outcry against the Bible and the element of religion in our public schools, as a sectarian thing. But the good ancestral primitive habit is too strong for this infusion of Papal jealousy against the Bible. The decision and firmness of character, which marked our Puritan ancestry, are features of New England still; and New England schools and institutions have got their roots so entwined around the Scriptures, and imbedded in them, that under God's blessing all the miners and sappers of Romanism can do nothing to loosen them.

The same love of the Bible, and sense of our dependence upon it, are increasing elsewhere; and the very attack and insidious effort of Romanism against a common school education with the Bible, as sectarian, tends to awaken the sensitiveness and alarm of the Christian public on a point in regard to which the people had sunk into too sluggish a security. If we would keep our civil freedom,

we must educate our children in the Scriptures. That freedom came to us from the Bible; by the Bible only we can keep it. Like the pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, Divine Truth led our heroic ancestors through all the sufferings, discipline, and struggles, by which they established our liberties, and nothing else can preserve those liberties, or the spirit of them in their descendants. We must have a religious education; and if an evil influence should prevail with the State so to change the system to which we have been accustomed as to banish the Bible and religion from it, then the church will be compelled to take it up, as she does the voluntary support of religious worship. In reliance on Christ alone, she has advanced religion more than all State endowments in the world have ever done. In reliance on Christ alone, if compelled into it, she is able to do the same with education. She rejoices in the appropriations of the government for a common school education; but if the condition of such help is to be an oppressive exclusion of the Bible and religious teachings, she abhors the treachery. It

would be the death warrant of freedom and religion to put her hand to such a covenant.

There must be an education in religion and morality, or our life as a free people is ended. It is claims from other worlds, according to that noble sonnet of Wordsworth, that have inspirited our star of liberty to rise, and other worlds alone can keep it above the horizon. No earthly expediency, or political management, truckling to the cry of Sectarianism, can save us. Our freedom is the product of celestial wisdom, and not a covenant with the powers of darkness, nor the child of a cuning policy; and celestial wisdom alone can keep it.

"What came from heaven to heaven by nature clings, And if dissevered thence, its course is short."

THE END.