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NATIONAL POPULAR EDUCATION.

CHAPTER I.

IN WHAT DOES A CORRECT EDUCATION CONSIST?

I call that education which embraces the culture of the whole man, with all his faculties-subjecting his senses, his understanding, and his passions to reason, to conscience, and to the evangelical laws of the Christian revelation.-DE FELLENBERG.

FROM the beginning of human records to the present time, the inferior animals have changed as little as the herbage upon which they feed, or the trees beneath which they find shelter. In one generation, they attain all the perfection of which their nature is susceptible. That Being without whose notice not even a sparrow falls to the ground, has provided for the supply of their wants, and has adapted each to the element in which it moves. To birds he has given a clothing of feathers; and to quadrupeds, of furs, adapted to their latitudes. Where art is requisite in providing food for future want, or in constructing a needful habitation, as in the case of the bee and the beaver, a peculiar aptitude has been bestowed, which, in all the inferior races of animals, has been found adequate to their necessities. The crocodile that issues from its egg in the warm sand, and never sees its parent, becomes, it has been well said, as perfect and as knowing as any crocodile. Not with man! SO He comes into the world," says an eloquent writer, "the most helpless and dependent of living beings, long to continue so. If deserted by parents at an early age, so that he can learn only what

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the experience of one life may teach him-as to a few individuals has happened, who yet have attained maturity in woods and deserts-he grows up in some respect inferior to the nobler brutes. Now, as regards many regions of the earth, history exhibits the early human inhabitants in states of ignorance and barbarism, not far removed from this lowest possible grade, which civilized men may shudder to contemplate. But these countries, occupied formerly by straggling hordes of miserable savages, who could scarcely defend themselves against the wild beasts that shared the woods with them, and the inclemencies of the weather, and the consequences of want and fatigue; and who to each other were often more dangerous than any wild beasts, unceasingly warring among themselves, and destroying each other with every species of savage, and even cannibal cruelty-countries so occupied formerly, are now become the abodes of myriads of peaceful, civilized, and friendly men, where the desert and impenetrable forest are changed into cultivated fields, rich gardens, and magnificent cities,

"It is the strong intellect of man, operating with the faculty of language as a means, which has gradually worked this wonderful change. By language, fathers communicated their gathered experience and reflections to their children, and these to succeeding children, with new accumulation; and when, after many generations, the precious store had grown until memory could contain no more, the arts of writing, and then of printing, arose, making language visible and permanent, and enlarging illimitably the repositories of knowledge. Language thus, at the present moment of the world's existence, may be said to bind the whole human race of uncounted millions into one gigantic rational being, whose memory reaches to the beginnings of written

records, and retains imperishably the important events that have occurred; whose judgment, analyzing the treasures of memory, has discovered many of the sublime and unchanging laws of nature, and has built on them all the arts of life, and through them, piercing far into futurity, sees clearly many of the events that are to come; and whose eyes, and ears, and observing mind at this moment, in every corner of the earth, are watching and recording new phenomena, for the purpose of still better comprehending the magnificence and beautiful order of creation, and of more worthily adoring its beneficent Author.

"It might be very interesting to show here, in minute detail, how the arts of civilization have progressed in accordance with the gradual increase of man's knowledge of the universe; but it would lead too far from the main subject." The preceding sketch may remind us of the low condition of man in a state of ignorance and barbarism, and of the high condition to which he may be brought by cultivation. We possess a material and an immaterial part, mutually dependent on each other. On one hand, we may well say to corruption, Thou art my father; and to the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister. On the other hand, the Psalmist says of man, Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels.

In the Scriptures we learn the origin and history of man-the subject of education. He was created in the image of his Maker. It was his delightful employment, in innocency, to dress the beautiful garden in which he dwelt. Presently we learn he transgressed. His subsequent career becomes infelicitous. In the earlier history of the human race, the days of his pilgrimage were protracted several hundred years. In process of time, because of the prevalence of sin, a