where they will not have confirmed habits to contend with, and where the energies are fresh and vigorous to receive and act upon them.1

Unfortunately this is very far from being the idea that many parents entertain on the subject of education. They regard their children rather as toys to be

1 "I know not" says Plato " anything about which a man of sense ought to feel more anxious than how his son may become the very best of men." "The most abandoned desires his son to be good. . . . and if not dead to the moral sense and out of his own senses, pities his child who runs the risk of being like himself." (MICHELET.) "Surely no duty is more necessary and important than that which requires each succeeding generation to well train and lead forth its young successor."-(Anon.) 66 If we neglect the good education of our children they will, in all probability, prove bad men, and these will neglect their children, and so the foundation of an endless mischief is laid."-(Archbishop TILLOTSON.) "The greatest benefit a man can confer upon society is to bequeath them an educated family."-(T. SCOTT.) "Let parents consider what a sad inheritance they have conveyed to their children. Methinks parents that have a due sense of this should be very solicitous by the best means they can use to free them from that curse by endeavouring to correct those perverse dispositions, and cursed inclinations which they have transmitted to them."—(Archbishop TILLOT SON.)

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2"In these days it is the fashion to relax rules. Homes try to dispense with restraint. Each child from the first beginning of speech is to express his own opinion; each child from the first power of motion is to do his own will. Entreaty replaces command and persuasion supersedes authority. . . This is an inversion of God's order; and God's order can never be changed without mischief and without suffering."- (Dr. C. J. VAUGHAN.) Authority under some condition or other authority as distinct from dominion-is implied in the existence of fathers; its correlative obedience, as distinct from mere subjection, is implied in the existence of sons. . . . The obedience of a son is shown in receiving those influences and impressions from a father's authority, which must tend to quicken his own activity."—(Prof. MAURICE.) "Not by decreased but by an increased sense of parental responsibility is self-control to be made greater and recklessness to be checked. And yet the policy now so earnestly and undoubtedly pursued is one which will inevitably diminish the sense of parental responsibility."(H. SPENCER.)

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played with, or as pets on which to lavish their affections, than as human beings who are to succeed and represent them in the world, and to the right training of whom they should bend all their energies, exert all their skill. They subject them to no restraints, their minds are bent to no instruction, the evil principles of their nature are permitted to develop unchecked. They are allowed to have their own will in everything, and their every desire is, where possible, gratified. The evil is much more serious than it may seem.2

Obedience or submission to authority is one of the first and most important things in education;3 and un

1 "Parents, being wisely ordained by nature to love their children, are very apt, if reason watch not that natural affection very warily, to let it run into fondness. They being in their infancies not capable of great vices, their parents think that they may safely enough indulge their irregularities, and make themselves sport with that pretty perverseness which they think well enough becomes their innocent age; " but "when they are too big to be dandled and they can no longer make use of them as playthings, then they complain that the brats are untoward and perverse, then they are offended to see them wilful, and are troubled with those ill-humours which they themselves infused and fomented in them."-(JOHN LOCKE.)

2 "The most infallible way to make your child miserable is to accustom him to obtain everything he desires.”—(Rousseau.) "The petulance, self-sufficiency, and egotism of half-educated youth, the impatience of rebuke and insolent defiance of all constituted authority, domestic, political, spiritual, are very striking. The main cause of all this lies in the abdication of parental duties, the lack of proper discipline and control."—(Anon.)

8 "The first point to be attended to in the moral training, a point of all others of the highest importance, and which, if successfully attained, renders everything else comparatively easy, is obedience." (Dr. HALTON.) "Willing obedience to a categorical imperative is the first great lesson in our whole moral life, and unmurmuring deference to the will of a parent or teacher is the natural preparation for our subsequent unwavering deference to the moral law of God."-(J. D. MORELL.) "An education in submission is as essential a preparation for going out into the world, as an education in a sound bodily regimen.' (Prof. BAIN.) It must be inculcated as a fundamental principle that children are to obey without reserve the commands of their

less the child is taught, when young, to curb its desires, and to yield its will to that of another, it will be much more difficult, if not impossible, for it to submit to lawful authority, to reason and conscience, when it is older.1 He who has never been taught to submit to authority—

parents. On no other basis can the structure of human virtue and human happiness be built and rise up to perfection."Dr. A. KIPPIS.)"I rejoice in the decline of the old brutal and tyrannical system of teaching. . . . but the new, as it seems to me, is training up a race of men who will be incapable of doing anything which is disagreeable to them." "We do not doubt that children and young persons will one day be again systematically disciplined in self-mortification; that they will be taught, as in antiquity, to control their appetites and to brave danger, and to submit voluntarily to pain as simple exercises in education."(J. S. MILL.) "Habits of discipline once acquired qualify human beings to accomplish all other things for which discipline is needed." (Ditto.) "A foundation having been laid in the habit of obedience and the government of the temper, the other parts of education will be carried on with much greater facility and success." (Dr. A. KIPPIS.)

1 "The longer our passions and appetites have their head and govern the stronger they will grow; and he that was never used in his childhood to submit them to the will of his parents, will much less be able when he comes to be a man to make them submit to his own reason or the will of God."-(Dean WILLIS.) "A habit of dutiful submission to natural parents prepares a child to fulfil the duties which as a man he is required to pay to all superiors. . . . He who has listened submissively to the instructions of a natural father has become prepared to profit by those of a spiritual Fatherhood and of all preceptors." (Dr. GIBSON.) "If children by timely discipline are made tractable and obedient to the advice and authority of their parents and teachers they are then fitted to the hands of other lawful rulers; and the Church and State will be as quiet as were the family and the school."-(Dr. KENNET.) "The external discipline applied by schoolmasters is a substitute for that inward discipline which we all so greatly need and which is absolutely indispensible to culture."-(P. G. HAMERTON.) "The principle of all virtue and excellency lies in a power of denying ourselves the satisfaction of our own desires, where reason does not authorise them."-(J. Locke.) The principle of duty or obligation " grows up as the internal correlative to the external coercion."-(Dr. W. B. CARPENTER.) Morality or ethics is the art of living, or rather the art of submitting

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who has never been trained to obey another-can be but little able to obey himself, to yield the lower to the higher principles of his nature, to exercise self-command and self-control.1 It is not by self-will or selfassertion, or any form of self-development-development from within-that anyone has ever become great, but only by being an humble and submissive learner at the feet of others, and in the great school of the world.2

one's life to the authority of conscience."-(VINET.) Mora education "resolves itself into training the will to act firmly in accordance with the dictates of conscience." (J. D. MORELL.) "Legality precedes morality in every individual, even as the Jewish dispensation preceded the Christian."—(Coleridge.)

1 "The habit of self-control is, generally speaking, so far from being taught or encouraged that the greater part of parents seem to make it a maxim never to contradict their children in any desire. . . . What a hoard of guilt and misery they are laying up for their child when they give him not the early power of self-control, but suffer him from his first infancy to gratify every unreasonable humour and desire! ... Thus when his passions gain strength and the more violent inclinations of sense present themselves, he is robbed of all power of resistance, and, having never been accustomed to check the demands of appetite, falls an easy prey to the first solicitations of debauchery, ambition, or avarice."-(Dr. JOHN BROWN.) "He that is not used to submit his will to the reason of others when he is young, will scarce hearken to submit to his own reason when he is of an age to make use of it."-(JOHN LOCKE.) "Each of us

has had sufficient indications of what he would have become if he had had his own way in any considerable degree; absolutely to have his own way is not given the child or boy or man.”— (Prof. MAURICE.) "It is the duty of parents or those that have the government of us to make our wills submit to their reason while we have none of our own; if this were well done we might be delivered tame and pliable into our own hands when we come of age, and might without any difficulty keep up that dominion which was so wisely procured for us."-(Dean WILLIS.) "What a happy state must they be in, who when they come to take upon them the government of themselves have the pleasure to find their understandings replenished with proper knowledge, their passions tractible and obedient to reason, and the whole state of their souls regular and orderly."-(Dr. GASTREL.)

"All that men and people have ever done of great, has borne the character of obedience. It is obedience-it is the

Further, it is a leading principle of our nature that our powers are called forth by opposition, our faculties developed by antagonism;1 and hence, when the motive

faithful submission to a rule from without which makes the dignity of human life."-(VINET.) "The man of genius, as artist, painter, or poet, does not merely work with his own internal feelings, but goes out and studies nature and becomes her humble follower and copyist. It is so also with those who depict human passion and human feeling. They do not draw their subjects out of their inner consciousness, but look out and present what they find around them. Thus Shakespeare's characters are not creations of his own fancy. They represent the people around him whom he had known and conversed with, whose characters he had fathomed, whose feelings he had entered into, and whom therefore he could represent to the life.”—(Anon.) "A relish for the higher excellences of art is an acquired taste which no man ever possessed without long culture and great labour and attention." (Sir J. REYNOLDS.) "Men rise to originality through imitation first translating, then imitating, then creating through imitation."—(Anon.) "It is by imitation that the infant in arms acquires all its powers till perhaps it may thrill the senate with its eloquence or captivate the world with its genius."—(Ditto.) 1 "Das Mittel dessen sich die Natur bedient die Entwickelung aller ihrer Anlagen zu Stande zu bringen, ist der Antagonism derselben in der Gesellschaft."-(KANT.) "Know ye not," says Prof. Ferrier, "that ye are what ye are only on account of the antagonism between you and external nature; that ye perceive things only by resisting their impression, by denying them not in word only, but also in vital deed; that your refusal to be acted upon by them constitutes your own personality, and your very perception of them." "In the mental as in the material world, action and reaction are ever in proportion, and Plutarch well observes that as motion would cease were contention taken out of the physical universe, so all human progress would cease were contention taken out of the moral."—(Sir W. HAMILTON.) Progression produced by antagonism is a general law of the moral government of God."-(Lord LINDSAY.) "Had there been no Hume there would have been no Reid and no Kant.”— (Anon.)-"Everything that we learn is the mastery of a difficulty; and the mastery of one helps us to the mastery of others. . . The mastery of these studies evokes effort, and cultivates powers of application which otherwise might have lain dormant.”—(Dr. SMILES.) "He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This amicable conflict with difficulty obliges us to an intimate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations.

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