fusive education for the poor, which the fervour of some modern philanthropists is urging upon us as an imperative duty, appear to our judgments to be preparative of a crisis that may one day, probably on the largest scale, illustrate the proverbial danger of a little learning. Now the little learning we would give the poor is that which has a natural and constant tendency to enlarge itself, taking in, by gradual and successive expansions, related portions of knowledge, and such as enter easily into union, by virtue of their respect for a common and commanding centre. From these hints, we think it may be easily collected at what we are aiming. We have, indeed, before given it as our firm opinion, the result of much quiet reflection, that the proper, compendious, effective, and beneficial education for the poor is that, and only that, which is wholly occupied with their improvement in religious knowledge, and the practical duties of which this knowledge is the only authentic source and interpreter. We hold to that opinion. We think it is the only knowledge which can be imparted to them entire; and that it is that which borrows least from other sciences or other studies. We know that it is a very prevalent idea with many writers and reasoners on this subject, that for the intelligent reception of religious instruction, the minds of the ignorant should be first prepared by a certain infusion of general elementary knowledge. This seems to us to be a mistake, founded on an incorrectness of feeling in respect to religion itself, which of all studies borrows least from the analogies and principles of other sciences, and depends least upon antecedent cultivation. It has a spontaneous light and heat, which burns in its sacred recesses like the mysterious fire which. was among the distinctions and glories of the first temple. It borrows little, it gives much; it is in itself a great source of general intellectual strength. No man has ever yet made a substantial pro-gress in sound Christian knowledge, without a visible elevation of the general tone and character of his mind. In the prosecution of this study the intellect goes on from strength to strength; and the more it brings other pursuits into subserviency to itself, the more it imparts of dignity and vigour, and plan and purpose, to every act and object. The whole moral man is invigorated by the connexion. As soon as religion takes its seat in the thoughts, life becomes a whole; existence, no longer a series of separate events, determined each by its own quantum of evil or good, becomes an economy of particulars, subjugated by their reference to a predominant purpose. A poor man's being, when he is thus brought under the influence of religious sentiment, has in his contemplation a proper beginning and end; a past and a future; a retrospect and a prospect, to which he refers, and by which he judges his own actions. He realizes in sober truth

་

what, in the language of rhetorical philosophy, he has been called—a being of large discourse, looking before and behind, into whatever influences his substantial happiness. He feels his vocation to a higher state lifting him out of the dregs of his depraved nature; from a consumer of time he becomes a purchaser of eternity; from looking upon the world as a place to forage in, and wherein to follow his instincts, he acknowledges an attraction that detaches him from a sublunary centre, and raises him into union with an infinite dispensation; his accountability fills his thoughts, and makes him recognize himself as the trustee of a treasure which has been consigned to his keeping by one who will require it at his hands under the penalty of an everlasting bond.

Entertaining these opinions, we cannot be expected to be in any great good humour with what we have before called mere pen ink and paper education for the poor; neither can we rely much on drill and discipline, or the simultaneous movements of an organical system, or the methods of a mechanical institution, or the impulse of a stimulating process, or on any scheme but that which requires but little apparatus-the plain, antiquated, parental procedure of simply and scripturally teaching Christian doctrine and discipline to the heart as well as to the understanding.

On this most interesting of all political subjects, the general education of the poor, we come therefore to two conclusions, well knowing to what a weight of censure we expose ourselves-first, that the project of general literary instruction for the poor is the childish enthusiasm of vain and illusory speculation; the vapoury suggestion of a dreaming philanthropy, or the cold ema nation of modern political metaphysics: and, in the second place, that any systematic education is good only in proportion as it tends decidedly to the single purpose of making the poor man more sensible of his accountableness to his Eternal Judge, and of his moral stand in the creation. All that affects more than this, or aims at less, or attempts to build even this on a neutral foundation, is commotion without progression, busy and profane trifling; it is industriously to do nothing; unless, indeed, we look to its solid mischiefs in setting men above their condition, and multiplying the sources of disappointment, discontent, and depravity, through the land.

What we maintain, therefore, is this-that to propose what is called a liberal education to the poor, is to propose a thing im possible to be effected; the direct purpose must fail, but of the collateral mischief the success is sure. It generates no steady light, but a wild and destructive fire, like that which, when the equilibrium of the natural element is disturbed, ushers in a day of storm and misrule.

Every thing, therefore, primarily depends upon the instruction given; secondly, upon the manner in which it is communicated; and, lastly, upon the consistency of those by whom it is afforded. Religion in its operative and practical character, but religion thoroughly Christian, as it stands revealed in the Bible, is at once the best, and the only cffectual education for the children of the labouring poor. To this sovereign object, reading, and if writing be taught, then writing also, must be made entirely tributary. But religion must not only be taught entirely, it must be taught as the subject demands, in a manner appropriate and peculiar; affectionately, personally, consistently, and feelingly: taught by its application to life, taught by the examples of its teachers, taught by a correspondent spirit, extending through society at large. To teach it technically is to teach it hypocritically; and to teach it as a matter of memory or science, or as a mere collection of truths and facts, is to adopt its letter for its spirit, its form for its substance, the confessions of the tongue for the convictions of the heart. Besides all this, there is in this whole concern one circumstance which cannot escape the shallowest politician-that the education now in process, whatever it may else effect or fail in, is calculated to raise up keen observers, among the lowest of the people, of the examples of those by whose purses or personal activity it is carried forward. If the rich combine and subscribe to give that to the poor which they seem not to value themselves, they will unite and subscribe to little purpose. There is not a more silly fancy than that we can render the poor religious against the tide of our own practice; we may give them, indeed, enough of the theory of religion to make our own violation of its rules and decencies the subject of their ridicule and deserved contempt; and it will be well if it ends there.

It is preposterous to teach the poor any thing but religion; it is preposterous to hope to teach religion irreligiously; it is preposterous to hope to teach it in any manner or form, unless what is professed to be taught is reflected in our own examples. The neutral plan of instructing the poor in letters and general learn→ ing, to qualify them to think, and choose, and reason for themselves, is treacherous; the mechanical and dry form of communicating religious instruction is vain; the pretence of spreading among the poor the religious principle, while we appear to undervalue it ourselves, is both vain and hypocritical. Do we imagine that with all this clatter of slates and pencils, this parade of copy-books and stationery, these anniversaries of beef and pudding, these regimental arrays of hundreds and thousands marching to church in white and grey, and green and blue; these dinners of celebration with a jovial hierarchy, these priestly

libations to Bacchus, with songs and sentiments and three times three*, are the signs of amelioration through the land, the harbingers of a religious posterity, the pledges of a right feeling and disposition in the rich, the indications of an improving and contented poor? or can it be thought that any real and permanent blessings can arise from a system of teaching, to the professed spirit of which the teachers are strangers? Was ever army well trained in which those in command did not submit to the discipline they imposed? and can it be rationally expected that the children of the poor will be industrious to improve their opportunities, if the children of the rich continue to be initiated at schools, and finished at academies, where, though ecclesiastics rule and ecclesiastics are formed, Christian discipline lies prostrate at the shrine of a fabulous and impure theology, and the manners and fashions of fullgrown vice are imitated and anticipated with impunity?

Men that think and reason on the signs of the times, moralists that meditate on coming changes, place themselves on different stations, and see society under different aspects; ours may be a deceptious point to contemplate the scene from; but from the place of observation on which we stand, it seems to us that the quarter from which the stability of the empire, and personal security, and social order, are most imminently threatened, is not, as some writers would have us think, the ignorance of the people, and the neglected state of their learning; no; nor "the separation of the upper and middle classes of the community from the lower," nor "an unhappy estrangement between the two grand divisions whereof the population consists," which, in one of our periodical journals, is flippantly and falsely said to be daily and visibly increasing, but altogether from the barrenness of our public teaching; from the fatal omission to make that which is the only source of duty, and morality, and political quiet, the great aim and end, the alpha and omega of all our national and gratuitous instruction to the people. No man of right thinking can desire a state of things, in which the poor are not the objects of national instruction: Christianity forbids it as inconsistent with the calls of charity, and with the claims of Christian freedom. Without provisions for this object, a state is like a fair vessel perfect in its rigging, with a leak in its bottom. Bad, however, as such a negative condition would be, it will be better for the upper ranks to stand with their arms folded, than to stir in the great work of mental excitement without the security of a

See the account in the journals of the day, of the anniversary dinuer in honour of the National School Establishment.

Christian guarantee. It is impossible that weak good men can serve the cause of rogues more efficaciously than by adopting the philosophy which professes to equalize to all mankind the boon of general learning; it is a net of sophistry spread over the land to catch the simple and unwary.

Now what is the sum of religion taught in our general establishments? Does it so occupy the intellectual ground as to make it entirely subservient to a sanative and improving produce? or does it, in truth and effect, leave it in a neutral state for any. culture to luxuriate upon its surface? Has it, in short, a strenuous hold upon the soil? or is it too loosely and superficially planted to withstand the blasts of a pestilential press now in full and furious operation against it? It has no hold at all unless its hold is on the heart. No part of the little learning of the poor. can be safely suffered to be unengaged on the side of religion. Every inch that is not God's is the Devil's; and where there is more fidelity to their trust in the Devil's agents they will soon be permitted to engross the whole. We have before us a widelyextended arena of contest, in which man's immortal part is the prize of the champions; and it will be seen in the issue whether the poor are to have their Sabbaths and their Bibles, or to exchange them for the privileges of an emancipating philosophy.. Unluckily, that which best agrees with the passions and prejudices of the multitude is a superficial and precipitate temerity of thinking; and this is just that state of diseased activity which a little general instruction prepares and fosters for the triumphant appeals of a vitiating press. Will the cure and prevention of all this be found in the improvement of the general learning of the poor by stronger excitements until their attainments enable them to cope with the mischiefs, and their sagacity to repel them? The answer is, that this is not possible. It could not be done consistently with their callings, or consistently with the exigency of their daily bread. To urge a secular education of the lower orders beyond its present extent, would be sure to manifest its efficacy in an increase of want, dogmatism, and discontent, without pushing forward a solitary inch the land-marks of the human understanding.

Nothing appears to us more explicitly and decidedly to dictate the sort of education of which the common people of this land are in want, than the description and character of the means, which, since the commencement of the French revolution, perhaps more conspicuously during the last ten years, have been in constant activity, more particularly by the influence of the press, to alienate them from their government and their God. The extent of this danger has nowhere been more accurately stated and set forth than in the critically important speech