The British review and London critical journal

ART. I.-Hints for conducting Sunday Schools, useful also for Day Schools and Families. Compiled by the Committee of the Sunday School Society for Ireland. Second Edition. Hatchard. London, 1819.

THE present spirit of education, its means, and its execution, have often distinctly and incidentally attracted our notice. What heart, indeed, can meditate unmoved on the busy bustling scene of moral reform, which every where agitates society to its very bottom? The lever is already under its old foundations, and modern enterprize has pledged itself to elevate the entire struc

ture.

If knowledge is power, and power is happiness, the principle of this great and imposing effort is broad, and safe, and unperplexed with doubts. Scatter universally the unequivocal blessing, fill the land with schools, give the presses unrestricted range, and let it be considered among the birth-rights of Britons, however poor, to be placed upon an intellectual equality with the richest of their fellow subjects. When we look, however, with sober thoughts, and with minds undazzled by specious maxims, and magnificent generalities, to the practical condition of man, and the natural and moral constitution of society, certain simple verities will be apt to cool down these high and glowing expectations, and induce us to doubt whether, after all, an artificial system, not in harmony with those relations which inevitably spring out of the necessities of the social state, may not tend to dislocation and disorder, if not to subversion, revolt, and ruin, If, indeed, it were practicable to make a liberal education universal, and to make the fruits of it attainable by all alike, whether the state of things produced by this new posture of human affairs would issue ultimately in an increase of happiness and virtue, may be variously argued, and must ever be doubtful;

but it seems but too probable to the reasoner from observation and experience, that to set the understandings of men upon inquiries which neither station, nor opportunity, nor duty, will allow to be prosecuted with effect, will tend only to warp the members of society out of their natural places, to foment a spirit of repining, to inflate the mind with arrogance, and sour the temper by disappointment.

That the position of society should be such as to leave the avenues to knowledge, and the access to preferments, open to industry and talent, no reasonable man will dispute; it is scarcely a state of moral freedom where there is no arena for the pure display of merit, and where the fair opportunities of distinction are denied to humble circumstances; but it may be allowed to cautious men like ourselves, to question the advantage of an education for the poor, which proceeds upon the principle that all knowledge, under all circumstances, is a positive good; and that whatever partial mischiefs may arise from occasional abuses, to scatter instruction promiscuously and gratuitously among the mass, irrespectively of all specific and appropriate culture, is to increase the sum of social felicity, and to urge on the moral progression of mankind. This seems to us to be a vain and perilous doctrine. When instruction has a special designation towards what is obviously needful and applicable, its foundation is moral, its progress is steady, and its end is salutary; but when an education is tendered to the poor, the philosophical promise of which is to expand their minds, to constitute them reasoners, to put their understandings upon a level with complex subjects, and to bring them acquainted, as is sometimes speciously said, with their constitutional privileges, we believe in our consciences that the scheme is delusive and dangerous, full of treacherous flattery to those to whom the boon is offered, and disguising much substantial evil under one knows not what magnificent speculations of extended and eventual benefit. Instruction should have a definable and ostensible purpose; so that if the child should happen to ask his instructor "What am I to do with this education?" it may be readily pointed out to him in what way he may turn it to practical and beneficial account in the course of life naturally and probably marked out to him. It cannot be too liberal or intellectual for those to whom high station may be proposed as the prize of their industry, or whose birth or leisure afford them the opportunities of speculative and diffusive research; but it is the idlest and the vainest of all things to put the whole mass of the people under a stimulating process; and, for the sake of some possible discoveries of latent genius, of some accidental disclosures of shining substances lurking in the recesses of life's vast quarry, or of the vague expectation of some general results favourable to truth and science from the agitation of the whole in

tellectual world, to risk the too probable consequence of troubling the order of life and the natural dispositions of society. If a tradesman were to begin with educating his family for the learned professions, and to end in placing them in his own business, he would in all likelihood be laying the foundation of discontent, disorder, and domestic misfortune. It will be the same on the larger scale of the public economy. The aptitude of the man to his station, whatever the station be, gives to society an useful and efficient member; while every ill assortment in these dispositions of life is sure to disturb, in a greater or less degree, its equilibrium and its symmetry. It produces a similar confusion to that which would be the consequence to an army of teaching the common soldiers the duties of a commander. Trace back the lives of those restless men, the libellers of their government, and the fomenters of discontents and disorders among the people; and it will be found that they are chiefly those who, though not well instructed in any thing, have been converted into excrescences upon the body politic, by being taught just enough to make them start out of their natural places, to overshoot their own proper business, and to carry disorder into the departments of others. Life is short, and learning is tedious: it is, therefore, important that those who are to live by their labour should receive that instruction, and only that, which is accommodated to its demands, and which sweetens and refreshes its intermissions.

We are conscious that in this reasoning, which on various occasions has appeared in our journal, especially in an article* on the means of national improvement, we do not go with the great stream of popular opinion. Much as we have read since the article alluded to on the importance of removing popular ignorance, we continue to think that the only proper, the only practicable education for the poor, is that which has a direct specific and single tendency to bring them within the more decided influence of Christian principles, to make them better proficients in the science of what belongs to their peace, and to raise them in the moral scale, not by the teaching which proffers illumination, but by that which inculcates prudence; not by that which disposes them to meddle with the duties of others, but by that which binds their own upon their consciences.

We have been much amused with an apology contained in the preface to an essay on the importance of making haste to remove the ignorance of the people, for the frequent use of the phrases "lower orders," "subordinate classes," "inferior portions of society." If there is a necessity for the use of these terms, which the writer acknowledges, is not that reason enough to justify their

* Vol. xii. 286.

adoption? Why lament the necessity of using right, and such they must be if necessary, terms? In spite of all we can do, there must and will be higher and "lower orders." In spite of all we can teach, there must be, until the bonds of civil union are dissolved, "subordinate classes," and "an inferior portion of society." We look upon the great error of the present educating mania to consist in this, that it is fancifully and furiously bent upon levelling these stubborn distinctions, by asserting the rights of scholarship in behalf of those who want quite another sort of care, and the recognition of much superior rights. To teach the portion of the people alluded to that they are really, and in a moral, political, and religious sense, the "subordinate classes," to make them feel this relation as such in all its latitude, to make them alive to the obligations it imposes upon them, to impress upon them the connexion by which they are integrally incorporated with the whole system to which they belong, this it is which will improve in them the grounds of a just self-estimate, without the danger of unsettling principles, or engendering discontent.

But it would be to mistake us egregiously to suppose us at issue with the advocates for the promiscuous diffusion of knowledge, on the bare proposition that knowledge is a blessing to all orders and degrees: what we maintain is this, that instruction, to be beneficial, must have reference to the condition, the means, the opportunities, and the place in society of those on whom it is bestowed. This we say is especially true of it when it is taken up nationally, and as a great public measure; for then, in analogy to all other such political expedients, it must be calculated upon the collective interests of the whole community, and not upon a concession of individual or original rights, however liberal or philosophical such a theory may sound. It may be very liberal and philosophical to wish that knowledge might be poured out without measure among the people; but he that reflects upon the natural state of human beings, and the stubborn allotments of civil life, will controul that wish by a due regard to the capacities and opportunities of the recipients. A little knowledge may be dangerous; but can the danger be averted from the poor by any effective plan of extensive cultivation? The truth is, that the maxim applies principally to the case of those who are taught superficially many things. Fragments of various shapes and surfaces, collected here and there, reflect deceptious and perplexing lights; it is only from a substance uniform and entire that the rays combine to produce correct vision. To know but little, if that little is entire, is safe and wholesome: the little that a man thus knows usually operates as a nucleus, around which other materials are attracted, arranged, and consolidated; but the plans of dif

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