is fear of itself, fear of self-condemnation. The most terrible of fears is this, at the same time that it is the only elevating one. The fear of anything or any person out of itself, is always to some degree a lowering feeling. The child that directly fears its teacher or parent, - and not indirectly, as one whose displeasure is proof of its own moral delinquency, but directly fears him, that is, fears him as one who can inflict deprivation or punishment, is by such fear demoralized. Broadly I state this position, and unconditionally. That with defective organization of schools, from whatever cause, fear is had recourse to, from the want of full means to apply the pure moral law, proves defect in the organization, not in the principle I advocate, principle derived from the logical symmetry, the hierarchal structure of the human mind.

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Observe that in the art and practice of education we have reached a point where unconsciously, but most significantly, has been dropt the term master. We have now only teachers, a better and a higher name. And the less you have to enact the master, the better will you be able to attain the ends of the teacher. If you can bring a school into such healthy condition as to be self-governed, instruction will be for yourselves easier, and for the pupils more thorough. Through the serenity of the moral atmosphere more surely and more quickly will your intellectual messages reach their aim.

Of

The highest and strongest power on earth is the moral power. Where life is best it is regent. what it can do in the school-room we have all

witnessed, no doubt, brilliant illustrations, cases where the same school or class, on passing from the control of one teacher to that of another, has passed suddenly from disorder to order, from sullen disobedience to smiling obedience, from constraint to freedom; and the seemingly untameable, perverse and rebellious of the pupils have been stilled into cheerful docility. I have myself witnessed or experienced several such examples, and among them, one of remarkable force and beauty, given by a lady, who from the noblest motives, ascended out of the ranks of fashion to fulfil the duties of the high calling which was peculiarly hers; and, devoting the twenty best years of her life to keeping a boarding-school, so kept it, that all who entered its doors, found a home of such endearing geniality, that the hour of quitting her roof was their only hour of pain; and whose influence was so warming and purifying, that even cold and barren natures felt it in after years, and the many scores of others, who passed under her benign discipline, came out as if sanctifying hands had been laid on them, and into their inmost hearts had entered a heavenly blessing.

Cases like this have hitherto been the exceptions in academic practice. They nevertherless prove the possibilities of moral discipline, a discipline whereby men and women are lifted into freedom, and whereby therefore alone are men made manly and truthful, and women dutiful and pure.

But that these or any other principles of education become the soul of a living practice depends not

primarily on teachers. They are agents and ministers of a power behind them, higher, stronger than they, namely, our whole republican community of adults. Briefly, then, what are our duties to-day toward education?

The noble-minded, deep-souled German, Jean Paul Richter, opens his great work on education, the Levana, as follows:

"When Antipater required of the Spartans fifty children as hostages, they offered him in their stead a hundred distinguished men. The Spartans thought justly and sublimely. In children all futurity is present to us, into which, like Moses into the promised land, we can see, but cannot come; and at the same time they renew before us the primeval age; for the children last arrived on the earth bring with them into the world the Paradise of our first parents. Thus (according to Bruyn) the children of the Samoyiden are beautiful, and only grown persons ugly. Did there exist a complete and all-powerful Art of education, and were those who educate in unity with themselves and with each other, the immediate, and through it, the more remote futurity, of which we can now see so little, would be much more beautifully in our power. For, the other means with which we can act on the world, deeds and books, we apply to our equals, already formed and hardened: it is only with education that we sow on a pure soft soil, and what we sow is either poison or honey; and as the Gods are said to have descended to the first men, so we (physically and intellectually giants in comparison

with children) descend to the little creatures and form them great or little. It is touching and sublime, that before the teacher are crawling, as sucking babes of his milk-glass,—the great spirits and instructors of futurity, that the satellites now moving round him are to be future suns. Thence is apparent the importance of his part, as he can neither know, whether the being he has before him to unfold or distort, is to be a future demon or an angel of love or light; nor foresee on what perilous points of futurity the magician, who is playing before him in the guise of a child, will with a giant's power take his stand in the world."

In these high-ranging sentences the wise German thinker shadows forth the inexpressible preciousness of the young, the incommensurable power of education. Education is a great human privilege. The animals below man have no capacity to be educated: they are trained. With the noble faculties proper to man, the faculties that constitute him man, superinduced as it were on the animal, - begins the vast function of education. Remark, that the lower animals are disciplined through their appetites and fears. The learned dog performs his feats through dread of the whip and hope of a meal. Man, too, is an animal, with appetites, powerful, healthful, indispensable constituents in his prosperous existence. But if, as with the dog, you make these appetites his incentives to action, you make those the fulcrum wherefrom to set in motion his whole passionate being, whether in the school-room or out of it, you do not unfold the man, you train

the animal; you subordinate the man to the animal, and thereby you defile, you subvert, you' paralyze the man.

Our necessities, our labors, our interests, our outward relations call into play, exercise, stimulate the lower nature all-sufficiently. To develop, to brace the higher, ought to be the part of education. Schools, which only school boys to be accountants, or fit them for college, do but the lower part of their duty; the higher part is, to fit them to be men, men in the pure sense, that is, moral agents. And this part left undone, when boys arrive at man's estate, they are not men in this true sense,they are intellectual animals; whereof there are so many at large, that even from the picked places of social, political, ecclesiastical eminence, they grin and growl at us.

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What is it that, with her deep, tremulous, infallible instinct, the mother most dreads for her boy? Sensualizing influences. Can these be resisted, be escaped? Can the street, the wharf, the stable, the play-ground be purified? In the end even that can be; and by the very means, the only means, valid to season the young against the virus of their miasma. This means is, the antidote of inward purity, — a moral safety-lamp burning in the inmost self, carrying which, the youth walks harmless through paths where, without it, he had been saturated with poison. By multiplying these selffeeding lamps, so purged, might finally become the general moral atmosphere, that the infected localities, now perilous to youth, would be enveloped in,