once to a child's understanding, and yet we do not hesitate to put at once before him the complex sum of moral and religious doctrine and precepts, in the hope of producing thereby a living result. The ideas of religion and the principles and precepts of morality must follow experience, accompany intellectual growth, and wait even on the activity of the imagination. The educator will approach this portion of his task with much earnestness and some fear. He has to shape and to inspire a human soul, full of sensibility, alive to the lightest touch, quickly responsive to every appeal of love and every word of hate. "A mother's scream," says Jean Paul, "will resound through the whole future life of a child ;" and do we not know that the memory of a mother's tenderness lives for ever? Let not the instructor of youth imagine that he has no concern with what may be called the refinements and subtleties of moral training. If he does so, his psychology is fundamentally unsound. Even in little things the teacher must seek and find his opportunity. Les petites morales of good personal habits and of good manners are to him by no means trivial. They constitute frequently the only way in which he can apply to the ordinary acts of the school-room and the playground the deeper truths which inspire his teaching; and they are in the case of many childish natures the only way in which those deeper truths can be brought into consciousness as living and governing forces. They are the outer expression of an inner state, and by the cultivation of the outer expression we always

sustain the inner life; nay, we sometimes evoke it when otherwise it would not emerge. Manners seem to be of slight importance, but they are often of large import, and are not seldom convertible with morals, as the word itself was among the Romans. The Laureate speaks truly when he says:

"Manners are not idle, but the fruit

Of loyal nature and of noble mind.”

I have been speaking of intellectual and moral instruction and of intellectual and moral discipline; but I would repeat that beyond and above both these, constituting the unity in which the two meet, is the Ethical life. This proposition-that the intellectual and moral substance of education, and intellectual and moral discipline, the formal and the real, are fused in the unity of the ethical life—it will be my business to explain and make good in the more philosophical portion of my course. You will then see, I trust, that the ethical function of the teacher cannot be pressed too far. It will appear also that it is the ethical element which is at the root of the manly and generous growth of boyhood, and the sole force which can permanently sustain even purely intellectual effort. All labour of the schoolmaster is of doubtful issue as regards the merely intellectual resultant in his pupils, but every act which is inspired by the ethical spirit has its sure intellectual as well as moral reward. It cannot possibly be wholly lost. Here the spiritual forces are on our side and continually make for us.

Indeed, if we have not this faith, we had better give the whole business up.

Be it observed that the term "Ethical" is here used in the broad sense in which it comprehends Religion. It is the ethics of a religion which justify a creed before the world, and it is the religion of ethics which gives moral teaching a hold on the heart of man and a sure foundation in human reason. The morality of

secularism has for its foundation self-interest, and for its sanction coercion; it may preserve society; but it is only when ethics are in union with religious conceptions, either passing into these or rising out of them, that they promote the true life of humanity. It is religion which affords to ethical science a basis in the infinite, and presents to the ethical life issues in the infinite.

The question which next most presses for consideration is-What instruments or materials are most promotive of the end we propose to ourselves, viewed in the light of their ultimate unity in the ethical life? We have to select those instruments which by their nature contribute most, and most surely, to the supreme end of all our endeavours. By this measure we must mete the instruments which the present state of knowledge offers us. It is impossible, and were it possible it would be undesirable, and destructive of all sound discipline, to teach even the beginnings of every subject. But it ought not to be difficult to adjust the rival claims of Literature (including under this head

Languages, Ancient and Modern), Science, and Æsthetics. The philosophy of education is a poor affair if it cannot, out of the materials which are clamant for attention in the school-room because of their immediate use in the work of life, and as essential prerequisites of ethical activity, find apt instruments for its purpose. ́Such questions are of great importance to the well-being of society. If primary instruction, for example, must exclude from its curriculum science, in any strict sense of the term, can there be any doubt that our daily instruction should be so contrived as to place a child in intelligent relations with the world in which he lives, and to enable him to look with the eye of reason, and not of the brute, on the phenomena of the physical universe? Still less is there room for doubt, it seems to me, that the elements and applications of the laws of health and of social economy should enter into every scheme of instruction. It is through these subjects indeed that we shall at once rectify the conceptions of the pupil as to the sphere of duty in which God has placed him, and give direction, significance, and practical force to our moral teaching.

In the secondary stage of education, again-that which immediately precedes University discipline,— the place to be assigned to Latin and Greek must be largely determined by what we mean when we name these studies. If such instruction resolves itself into mere memory-work and gerund-grinding, it is even then not without educative uses, but it must make way and that quickly, for other and better disciplines.

If, however, it is so employed as to be an exercise of the inductive and deductive processes; if the study of words and sentences be an unconscious study of thought, and if they become, as boys advance, a study of form and an introduction to the pregnant and elevating idea of Art; if the embalmed thoughts be truly made to breathe and the dead words to burn, then indeed we have here an instrument of unsurpassed and unsurpassable excellence. It is true that the rich records of modern life and literature now yield us much of the culture we seek in antiquity, but we cannot afford to dispel the halo which gathers round the remote past, and the deeds of the men who have gone before us. Imagination here, by idealizing, sustains morality, and is also the spur of the intellect. Still less can we afford to part with the impersonal and objective character of the teachings of Judæa, Greece, and Rome, and to substitute for them the subjective and partisan lessons of modern life. On the whole, I feel with Jean Paul, who says, "The present ranks of humanity would sink irrecoverably if youth did not take its way through the silent temple of the mighty past, into the busy market-place of life." But even after all this is said, and more than this, it is an anachronism to give such studies exclusive possession of the field. In the present state of knowledge, not more than half the school-time should, it seems to me, be given to ancient studies, even in the upper classes of professedly classical schools; and not all boys should be even thus far restricted. It is a dis