who are fathers, and which he exemplified in his own infant years, when as yet he sat at the feet of Loïs and Eunice, and came to know the Scriptures from his childhood.

To train up a child in the paths of piety and virtue is the first and great commandment in the law of education; but there is a second commandment, which, though it be inferior and subordinate, is still like unto it; it is this; train up children in the way they should go, so as to become fit, and qualified, by the suitableness as well as sufficiency of their knowledge to undertake and execute what may be required of their various abilities in afterlife; and Scripture will be found to be as profitable for instruction in this branch of education, as in that which is of a sacred and spiritual nature; for how will children be able, in years of maturity, to provide things honest in the sight of all men, who have been brought up in ignorance of the methods whereby such provision is to be made? How can they avoid being slothful in business, whose active powers have never been called forth, and cultivated, and applied to the elements of any sort of useful knowledge, or to any course of suitable preparation for honest and useful pursuits? In like manner it may be asked, how it will be possible for those to fulfil the requisitions of the Gospel respecting the callings of civil life, who have never been trained in any of those details, and particulars of instruction, which are to qualify them for their respective situa

tions? Will they be able to walk honestly, so as to have lack of nothing; or lay out their talents, so as not to be unprofitable servants; or provide for their own, who have never been fitted for the effectual performance of these offices of charity and prudence, by appropriate means, and methods of education? St. Paul is very express in his charges to the Corinthians, and especially to the Thessalonians®, upon the duty of performing all those offices of skill, carefulness, and labour, which belong to the social relations of man, and the business of civil life. Every man is charged to walk in his calling; he is told, that if he would not work, neither should he eat: that he who works not, is a disorderly walker that he should work with quietness, and eat his own bread, to the intent that he may do as St. Paul himself did, that is, keep himself from being chargeable to any. But without suitable courses of early training in things of a secular nature, it will be impossible to perform the duties, or accomplish the purposes, which the apostle has so emphatically pressed upon our Christian prudence. To these evidences of the divine will, and to the doctrinal derivations from them, might be added, all those examples of trades, and professions, which were carried on by the servants of God', by the Son of God himself, from which it would farther appear,

d 1 Cor. vii. 17, 20. 2 Cor. xi. 9.

e 1 Thess. iv. 11, 12. 2 Thess. iii. 10, 11, 12.

Paul and Agrippa, Acts xviii. 3. Simon of Joppa, Acts x. 5.

that children should be suitably instructed, and prepared in such sorts of knowledge as are subsidiary to the proper discharge of their duties in those sections or subsections of useful employment, into which the business of life has been divided.

Upon these principles of Scripture, (which are all in meet accordance with every other evidence of the Divine will discoverable in the constitution of nature, and the course of Providence,) the Church, of which we are members and ministers, has framed her ordinances respecting religious education; and they require neither the light of modern philosophy, nor the sanctions of modern jurisprudence, to make them more obligatory upon conscience, more conducive to edification, nor better adapted to the intellectual powers and spiritual wants of childhood. In all these particulars, the Church has provided for her young with parental care and affection; from their birth to their years of youth, from those years onwards to maturer age, she administers the milk, or the stronger food, as may best suit the spiritual strength and condition of those who are to be fed. The teaching of her children the elements of Christian knowledge, forms the subject of a solemn interrogatory, put to the Deacon at his ordination, of an earnest exhortation to the sponsors at baptism. A course of elementary instruction has been drawn up in a form of sound words, most suitable to the apprehensions of the infant mind, and the venerable page still bears upon it the beauty of parental ten

derness, the impress of divine truth, and the sanctions of an authority, which is almost divine; I mean, the testimony of the martrys and confessors who have borne witness to its verities. These evidences are sufficient to prove, (though many more might be added from the Canons of the Church, Articles of Visitation, Episcopal Injunctions and Enquiries,) that, with respect to religious training, the Church has authoritatively required, that all her lambs should be taken early to the wells of salvation, and that they should, with their first nutriment, imbibe the principles of the doctrines of Christ.

But though much has been done and decreed, and in many ways, both by the ecclesiastical and civil power, for the universal training of children in the truths of the Gospel, nothing whatever has been enacted and enforced, nor attempted to be so, by any authority, regal, parliamentary, or ecclesiastical, for the purpose of establishing any one uniform and universal system of secular instruction for all children, or for the children of the poor; for it cannot be too often repeated, that such instruction is no more than a qualification for worldly callings, and, as such, requires a conformity between the things taught, and the object of the teaching; a suitableness between the instruments to be provided, and the work to be performed; a subserviency of the means to be employed, to the ends to be accomplished. The charitable training of poor

children in matters appertaining to civil or secular knowledge, ought not to be subjected to any universal rule, nor forced into any unnatural constraint and coincidence with the provisions of a statute. Instruction of this sort ought not to be imposed by the undistinguishing injunctions of authority; it should be left to particular appointment, to special adaptation; it should not be fixed and determined upon abstract principles, it should arise out of personal and local considerations; it should be adjusted, as to its kinds and quantities, not by those who reason from what they assume to be necessary, and theorize upon what they fancy to be true, but by those who, by actual experience and intercourse, have come to know the local and personal, the existing and probable, relations of the children to be instructed; and it may be said to be a thing impossible, by any process of à priori reasoning, to devise any one scheme of elementary secular instruction, which shall be commensurate with the wants and applicable to the circumstances of all the poor children of the kingdom.

The sorts, measures, and degrees of such knowledge must be left to those, whose Christian benevolence is under the guidance of practical and real knowledge. Those who are best acquainted with the nature, number, and variety of services and situations open to the poor of any particular parish or district, are best able to frame for them a suitable course of training in things of a secular nature,