in proportion to their weakness: but to whom much is given, from them let much be required. GUESSES AT TRUTH.

ON ENFORCING OBEDIENCE.

PUT out of the house that swarm of infantine science, and infantine criticism, and infantine story, and infantine catechisms, and infantine hymns, and spiritual songs, which keep children for ever children, which sacrifice faith at the shrine of understanding, and that the understanding of a child; which abolish reverence and obedience from the mind, where, above all it ought to be seated.

And oh, ye foolish fathers, and fond mothers, who delight to hear your children asking reasons of you for every command, before they will yield it faith or obedience, you are destroying their very capacity for divine teaching, unfitting them for hearing God, and preparing them for that scepticism which rageth among us like a pestilence, sparing neither sex nor age. Suffer all questions which are expressive of their ignorance, and with reverence asked at your superior knowledge; and answer all such, according to your best ability, directing them besides to the reverend sources of

knowledge in the holy word of God, and the writings of the wise and faithful of his church.

But questions which originate in disinclination to believe and unwillingness to obey, in conceit of mind and a desire of self-determination, suffer not in a child, and in a man discourage.

IRVING.

ON THE FALSE MOTIVES PRESENTED TO CHILDREN.

Be

Of all drams the most noxious is praise. sparing of it, ye parents, as ye would of the deadliest drug; withhold your children from it, as ye would withhold them from the gates of sin. Whatsoever you enjoin, enjoin it as a duty, enjoin it because it is right, enjoin it because it is the will of God-and always, without reference of any sort to what man may say or think of it. Reference to the opinion of the world, and deference to the opinion of the world, and conference with it, and inference from it, and preference of it above all things, above every principle, and rule, and law, human or divine; all this will come soon enough without your interference. More readily will you stop the east wind, or check the progress of the blight, which it bears along

with it. Ask your own conscience, reader, probe your heart, walk through its labyrinthine chambers, and trace the evil which you feel within you to its source: of the diseases which prey upon your moral being, do you not owe the first seeds of half, and more than half to your having drunk too deeply of this delicious poison? At first indeed it may seem harmless: the desire of praise seems little else than the desire of approbation, and by what loadstone is a child to be guided, unless by the approving judgment of its parent? But although their languages are so similar, that on the confines they are scarcely distinguishable, you have only to advance a step or two and you will find that you are in a foreign country, almost singular in your good fortune if you discover it to be an enemy's before it is too late to escape from it.

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Approbation speaks with reference to thing or action: That is right'-'What you have done is right.' Praise is always personal, it begins indeed gently, with the particular instance, ' You have done right;' but soon fixes on permanent attributes, and passes from You are right,' through You are a good child'-' You are a nice child' -You are a sweet child,' to what is the cruelest of all, You are a clever child.' For God in his mercy has hitherto preserved goodness from being much fly-blown, and desecrated by admiration: people who wish to be stared at, seldom try hard

to be esteemed good; vanity takes a shorter and far more congenial method; and the fruit of the tree of knowledge is still, in a secondary way, one of the baits which catch the greatest number of souls. When a poor child has once eaten of that fruit, and been told that it is worthy to eat thereof, it longs for a second bite, not however so much from any strong relish of the fruit itself, as from a hope to renew the pleasing titillations by which the first mouthful had been followed-the longing soon becomes a craving, the craving a gnawing ravenousness. Nothing is palatable save what pampers it; but there is nothing out of which it cannot extract some kind of nourishment-and woe is sure! It is on this appetite that we rely ; on this almost alone for success in our modern systems of education. We excite, stimulate, irritate, drug, dram the pupil, and then leave him to his best, heedless how soon he may break down, provided he does but start at a gallop. Nothing can induce a human being to exert itself except vanity or jealousy; such is our axiom, and our deductions are worthy of it. Emulation, emulation, is the order of the day; and only look at its marvellous effects: it has even turned the hue of the Ethiop's skin; it has set all the blackingmongers in England emulating each other in whitewashing every wall throughout the country.

Emulation, it is declared, is the only principle we can trust to; for principle it is called, al

though it implies the rejection and denial of all principle, of its efficacy at least, if not of its existence; and is a base compromise between principle and opinion, in which the things of eternity are made to bow down before the wayward notions and passions of the day. Nay, worse; this principle, or no principle, is adopted as the main-spring and motive, in a scheme of national, and even of religious, education, by the professing disciples of the Master, who pronounced, "If any man desire to be first, the same shall be last,"and whose apostle has remembered emulation amongst “the works of the flesh," together with adultery, idolatry, hatred, strife, and murder.

We may vociferate as we will about the unchristian practices of the Jesuits; the Jesuits knew far too much of Christianity ever to commit such an outrage against its spirit as to make children pass through the furnace of the new Moloch-emulation.

But let us turn from these boisterous and vulgar paradoxes, to look at Wisdom in all her quiet gentleness, as in Wordsworth's sweet language she describes the growth of her favorite,

'A maid, whom there were none to praise,
And very few to love.'

The air of these simple words, after the hot, close atmosphere I have been breathing, is as