MORAL EDUCATION.* FOURT BY REV. E. THOMSON, D. d. rision is a practical fallacy, as it leads us to reject without examination whatever has been its object. Peter Aretin perhaps subdued more princes with his lampoons than ever did Alexander with his sword. If the teacher be disinclined to wit, he may resort to sophistry; he need not mention any faith while he upsets in the youth's mind all faiths, or he may supply a false premiss, and let the mind go forward in correct reasoning to wrong conclusions; he need not state his false premiss, but merely allude to it as among curiosities or axioms. He may point NOURTHLY. The absurdity of the scheme appears from the connection between the different methods by which a teacher influences his pupils. What is the teacher? When he teaches arithmetic, he is not a mere slate; when he teaches penmanship, he is not a mere handwriting on the wall; when he teaches reading, he is not a mere alphabet moved by a learned pig; he is a man, a whole man, and nothing but a man; and though you may hire him for intel-out fallacies in the reasonings of others in such lectual service only, yet he will give you moral service or disservice. You can not have one side of him move while the other stands still. Many men seem to be under the delusion of a certain selfish southerner, who had a wife and child, and owned one-half of a negro named "Harry," and who prayed that God would bless him, and his wife, and his son, and his son's wife, and his half of Harry. Men generally are in no danger of this sort of delusion; they know that one side of a man can not well go without the other. When they employ a man to work with his hands they do not expect him to leave his eyes and ears at home; when you elect a senator you know that you do not merely send a pair of premises to Congress; and yet in regard to the schoolmaster they seem to adopt the views of certain philosophers, who look upon the brain as the mind, and suppose that while one side of it is asleep the other may be awake, thinking out its fractions of ideas and sentiments. The teacher has a moral nature, and so has the child; and you can no more bring them together without having a mutual action, than you can bring salt and water together without having a saline solution. The most oppressed man is still a man. You may hitch a slave to your cart with the ox, or chain him to your door for a watch-dog, but you can not reduce God's child to man's brute; he will still operate upon your moral nature and that of your family-it may be fearfully and forever. The teacher may give no didactic instruction in morals or religion, and yet be a powerful moral educator. Voltaire did not systematize or argue, yet he did more to demoralize Europe than all its philosophists. He wisely preferred epigram to argument; for though few can reason, all can laugh; while logic is soon forgotten, wit can be retained, and relished, and retailed; and though ridicule is not the test of truth, yet de Concluded from page 14. a way as to mislead. Every system may be supported by an invalid reasoning which is supposed to be correct merely because it leads to a true conclusion. Let a man select some of these fallacies used in support of truth, and construct similar ones whose inconclusiveness shall be apparent, and he need not point out the parallelism; he may leave the young mind to scent that out, and trust to it to proceed to a fallacy of its own; namely, that of denying the truth of a conclusion because certain premises used to prove it are false. Men may argue without syllogisms, may wrap up a couple of premises in a single word, and bring out a conclusion in an exhortation, as did Pilate's wife in a certain message to her husband. They may reason when they appear to be inquiring, as did the most profound of ancient reasoners-Socrates-habitually. Indirect instruction is all the more vivid and permanent for being indirect; the mind goes with its utmost speed when the guide, having put it upon the track, leaves it to itself. An explosion is none the less sure or less violent because the train is concealad. Men do wrong to sneer at little errors as though they were harmless. A little unarmed boy may slip a bolt at midnight and let armed enemies within the citadel. Hints from a man who dare not speak out may not be powerless. There is a doctrine which teaches that infinitesimal doses are most active. Whether homeopathy be true or not, the soul is apt to feel moral poison even in its decillionth dilution, especially if it be in the shape of forbidden sugar, for the prohibition produces a morbid sensibility. But let us suppose-what is impossible-that you could reduce the human tongue in the teacher's mouth to a tinkling cymbal. He would still have a face, and this would be something more than a picture. Truth and lies, arguments and sophisms, hints and inuendoes, might play around it like lightning on the face of the thunder-cloud. Suppose you cover his face with a cowl, he will still put eloquence in his attitudes and movements. Who has not heard of the pantomime? The pointing of a finger, under certain circumstances, might arouse an army, and make all the difference of defeat and victory. Lovers may court by signs and wonders. If the teacher's person were concealed, you could not conceal his spirit. Ah, how often does this silently breathe its image upon a fellow-spirit! In utter weakness it may win conquests, and call forth the exclamation, "Though your arguments are worthless, your spirit has subdued me;" and spirit may reach spirit even though both be deaf and dumb. tion against it; but there is no prophylactic against the virus of a bad example. Equally operative is a good example. What though the good man be blindfolded and speechless, still he is a good man. As well suppose that your children can gambol and sing upon the bosom of some flowery mountain without breathing its fragrance, and catching and bearing onward to eternity its forms of beauty, as that they may sit at the feet of a good man, day by day, without receiving the impress of his soul. He is a tree planted by the river's side; his branches shall spread, and his beauty be as the olive-tree, and his smell as Lebanon; and what though he dare not speak, they that dwell under his shadow shall return-they shall revive as the corn and grow as the vine. And who does not know that the impressions made upon young minds are lasting, like the image which Phidias wished to of his Minerva that it should be impossible to obliterate it without destroying the statue itself! "Take heed that ye offend not one of these little ones." Then there is a power-from which no man can divest himself-example-more effective than any other method of instruction, and which no caveat can cancel. Who has not heard of the fable of the frog that exhorted his offspring to walk upright? The influence of a master, how-perpetuate by stamping it so deeply in the buckle ever he may be trammeled, will always be great. "Ipse dixit," cries every qualified instructor's pupils with something of the same feeling as the pupils of Pythagoras. They are taught to take his statements in some things; they find them Fifthly. We may show the impracticability of reliable so far as they can verify them. What the scheme we are considering by the relation shall prevent them from transferring the credi- which the hearer sustains to what is uttered. I bility with which they receive one class of his know that as in the natural world—as a general dicta to other classes, and, a fortiori, what shall rule-like produces like, so in the moral the prevent them from feeling the influence of his harvest is according to the seed. But as in the life? You might as well put a child in the fire, former climate, and soil, and prior cultivation and pray that he may not be burnt, as put him have their influence upon the crop, so in the under the care of a vicious master and hope that latter constitution, and education, and habits of he will not be vicious. The contagion of exam- association affect the germination and growth of ple, like the malaria of cholera, works silently, that which is sown. In the road over the Andes insensibly, constantly, widely. Even men can there is a half-way house where the ascending scarce resist it—how then shall children? Think and descending travelers meet for refreshments. not a few cautions will save them. Behind their Here, under the same temperature, those who little eyes are active brains; and little as you have just come from the chilling breezes of the think of it, they are capable of going through summit are panting with the heat, while they the most complicated processes of reasoning who have just quitted the sultry valleys of the without knowing any thing of logic. They base are shivering with the cold. Could we read countenances, they trace thoughts, they make the school-house a half-way house on the scent inconsistencies as the war-horse snuffs the Andes of thought, so various are the moral elebattle from afar. What one Roman once said vations from which the children come, that what to another we may say to the teacher, "Thou might chill the hearts of some might inflame shalt live so beset, so surrounded, so scrutinized those of others. In any Christian city you may by vigilant guards, that thou canst not stir a foot find some families who breathe the air of heaven, without their knowledge. There shall be eyes and others who are as perfectly Pagan as are the to detect thy slightest movement, and ears to inhabitants of Shanghai, and to whom a just catch thy wariest whisper;" and we may add, conception of God would be a new revelation. if thou art evil, thy careless look, or movement, A word, an allusion, a definition, an incident that or whisper may telegraph lies in immortal souls might make one soul glow like a furnace, might or fire trains upon the track of distant maga- leave the other like ice. zines. No district would put the small-pox in the school-house, yet vaccination is some protec The associating principle has immense influence on minds; it, in a very great measure, determines the effect which a truth shall have. Mr. Hartley, Sir James Mackintosh, and others have applied it to explain the origin of our moral sentiments. It is that property of our minds by which any object or state of consciousnesswhether image, thought, or emotion-has a tendency to recall other states or objects of consciousness with which it has, in some way, been previously connected. Every thought received into the mind by its relations of time, place, cause and effect, resemblance or contrast, awakens a train of thought previously in the mind; its influence, therefore, depends upon the stores of knowledge which the mind possesses and its associating habits, as the result of the chemical test depends upon the affinities of the solution into which it is dropped. Tell me that I shall say nothing to influence the moral character of those under my care, and you tell me nonsense. As well say that I shall restrain the atmosphere from bearing my breath in any direction except toward the north pole. They who forbid moral instruction generally overlook the fact that it is constantly going on. Though the school might not teach morals, the playground, and the street, and the market, and the tavern, and the promenade, and the auctionblock will. Though the teacher do not teach the written decalogue, there are plenty of masters to proclaim an unwritten one: lust, and stealing, and blood, and Atheism preach without any license. Let the youth grow up and choose religion and morals for himself, and he may choose himself into the penitentiary long before he is fully grown. Men often complain of the ease with which the young mind receives a religious bias; but they ought to think of the greater ease with which it receives an irreligious one. The early age at which vicious tendencies appear, the prevalence of wickedness all through the world, the proneness of nations to degenerate, the acknowledged difficulties of virtue, and the shocking details of human history are familiar to all, and show that without resistance the soul must be borne downward. But if any still object to the education of a child's moral nature, let him reflect upon that nature. It is the moral nature that gives us ideas of right, of duty, of obligation-next to that of God, the noblest conceivable ones; it is this which harmonizes the jarring elements of the breast; that alone can gird well for its conflict with passion, arm the soul with strength in every difficulty, patience under every pain, and a might that braves all the powers of hell. The idea of right may be misdirected, the impulse to right may be misleading, the approbation of conscience may be misapplied, but still that idea is the greatest of all, that impulse of more value than the universe, and that approbation the richest reward that heaven can bestow. The moral nature is necessary in order that we may understand the character of God or receive a revelation of his will. It alone enables us to ascend the scale of being. However undeveloped a human mind may be, it has in it the elements of all intellectual combinations. So if a man have a moral nature he has the elements of virtue, and may erelong ascend the skies. The child at the breast that has but just caught a glimpse of the idea of right is a nobler being than the ancient archangel that has lost it. What though that archangel penetrate all mysteries and obtain all knowledge; what though he take up the isles in his intellectual scales and the hills in his mental balances; what though he measure the heavens with his astronomical rod, and weigh the planets with his mathematical steelyards; what though he combine all beauteous forms, and utter all the languages of earth and the harmonies of heaven; yet without a sense of right to guide him he would be no angel, no man-only an awful reasoning brute. He would need a chain to bind him; and the more glorious his faculties, the stronger must be that chain. True, he might be governed, as a tiger, by fear; but how else than by chain or fear, if the idea of right were absent from his soul? We could admire such a being as we admire the whirlwind or the earthquake, but we could not love him any more than we could the steam-engine. To him blasphemy, perjury, murder, would be as worship, and song, and beneficence. Though he might remove mountains, he could not be "just;" though he might sacrifice himself, he could not be benevolent; though he might wallow in lust, he could not feel shame; and though he might spread ruin around him, he could feel no remorse; he could have no aspiration for purity, no drawing toward God. So would a man be without a moral nature. Unhappily the world has given some illustrations of this remark. Dr. Rush has given one case, Dr. Crawford another, and Dr. Haslem a third. These are familiar to the readers of philosophy. I have received from a colleague-Dr. Merrick-the following, which fell under his own observation: "S. G. in early life gave singular indications of a total want of the moral nature. Almost as soon as he could speak his mouth was filled with cursing and deceit. He would steal whatever he wished, and from his best friends as soon as Parent, would you have your son, for a score God has given you a son with all the elements of a man; day by day you watch and pray over his unfolding powers, and rejoice especially to mark the ideas of right, and duty, and grati¦tude the feeling after God-the aspiration after a better state. How painful would it be to see the light of his fine eye go out, or the power to guide his feet or stretch his arms fail, and then to see the light of reason, and imagination, and memory, slowly extinguished, leaving him an idiot in your arms! But still you could carry him with tenderness if only there were left the idea of right, the power to love the good, to be grateful for your kindness, and to breathe after a higher life. But, O, to see the light of conscience go out, and though the form of man be left, though the intellect blaze forth with celestial brilliancy, yet the power of self-government, and the power of being loved, and the connection with good men and angels, and the sympathy with God, is gone. Let us have “blue laws,” puritanical strictness, any thing, rather than uneducated, neglected, put-out consciences. But the objectors generally say, "Teach morals, if only you do not teach dogmas." But what morals? Of course, you would not allow us to treat of the ground of moral obligation-perhaps you will tell us of the rule of life. Shall I go to the Spartan, who bids the youth to steal, and praises him if he cover the theft; who allows a large margin of licentious indulgence to the husband, and a limited compensation to the wife; who permits the master to kill his slave, and commends him if he commit suicide himself? or shall I go to the Roman, who says, "I will avenge all injuries according as I am provoked by any," and who thinks no lie should be used in contracts? Shall I go to the Mohammedan, who tells me to give alms to the widow and orphan, pray five times a day looking toward Mecca, make the pilgrimage to the Caaba, and eat no meat during the fast of the Ramadan? or shall I go to the modern moralists, who, having burst the shackles of the priesthood, have poured such floods of light upon the subject? "No, no," I fancy the objector says, "we can agree that the decalogue and our Savior's summary of it in the law of love to God and man shall be taught in common schools till we can find a better rule of life." But then how shall we make the pupils receive it? It will not do to say that it is the law of God; this were a religious dogma. Shall we get the civil law to enforce it? But the civil law can not control the heart, and it is the motive which characterizes the moral action. Indeed, the difficulty always has been more in the absence of the right impulse than the right rule. "Proba meliora The intellect may apprehend the rule as the eyes may see the road, but it can no more obey than the eyes can walk. Well, what motives shall we present? Shall we say, with one philosopher, there is a God, or, with another, there is no God? Shall we say, with Socrates, that God overrules the world, or, with Aristotle, that he is not concerned with any thing beneath the moon? Shall we suppose, with Cicero, that there is a future state, or, with Pliny, that there is none? Or shall we find our motives in modern philosophers, whose creeds, to say the least, are no less contradictory? Suppose we teach that there is one God, that he governs the world, that man is responsible to him, and that there is a future state of rewards and punishments: these are all dogmas, and the skeptic insists on their exclusion. He plants himself upon the Constitution. The amendment to which he refers was, however, set up as a monument against religious persecution, not as a caveat against religious principle. Had it been proposed in the convention which framed the Constitution to repudiate the Christian religion, or to express indifference to all religions, or to forbid the inculcation of Christian doctrine in the common schools of the republic, who that knows any thing of our fathers does not feel certain that such a proposition would have been promptly rejected? The infidel may, however, go below the Constitution, and insist that society has no right to require him to pay for any thing which is not essential to its existence. But are not religious principles essential to society? Without it, where can you find a sufficient sanction for law, especially in a republic? If we are to have a religion, we are shut up to the Christian religion. We have too much intelligence to adopt any other. And, surely, there is no reason to complain when the public teachers inculcate only those leading truths of the recognized religion of the nation, which breathe in the national spirit, mold the national mind, direct the march of national events, are recognized the world over as the leading principles of the Christian faith, and which all experience shows are the stability of the times. I grant there is a difficulty in thus limiting our religious instruction. But it may be met by a judicious selection of teachers. Let them be men of true goodness and of enlarged views. The difficulties spoken of are not peculiar to common schools. The state interferes with morals and religion. It passes laws against profanity, murder, adultery, polygamy, in disregard of the Atheist, the Pagan, the perfectionist, and the Mormon, who respectively may feel conscientiously bound to blasphemy, infanticide, the violation of the marriage vow, and a plurality of consorts. The state also recognizes great religious principles. In her judicial oaths, in her public fasts and thanksgivings, in her designation of time, in her observance of the Sabbath, in all the branches of the government, she recognizes the being and attributes of God, his providence over the earth, and the redemption of the world by Jesus Christ. Should she cease to do so she would practically ordain Atheism. You may say give us neither Atheism nor Deism, Christianity nor Rationalism, in the government, as though you could separate the legislation of a people from its religious and moral ideas. You might as well attempt to separate the Mississippi from its tributaries. Well, as much religion as we have in the government we may surely have in the school. There is one question to which I would like to devote attention if I had space. May we not safely intrust religion to priests and parents? If so, although we may admit that it is necessary to government, it may not be allowable in schools. Preaching comes too late-after moral character is in a great measure formed; and if any one would trust parental instruction, let him consider the characteristics of this restless, speculative, money-getting, moving, heterogeneous people. The school-house is the great fountain of national character, and sends forth sweet or bitter waters through all the streams of the nation's thought. It must be in the hands of either religious or irreligious men. Let it fall into the latter, and Cataline is at the gate of our Rome. "TIS A COLD WINTER NIGHT." BY ELLA ENFIELD. Ir is a dreary night; the storm sweeps past, |