f course, to prevent
them from cheating others, but others from cheating them. All is
prostituted to money and business. Character and happiness are left out of
view. What have our schools now to do with the propensities, appetites,
temperaments, habits and character of the pupils? And how are the parents
who send their children to school to have them trained up with reference to
these! All that is now looked at, is that learning which will fit the child
for business. As a consequence most of our schools are a disgrace to the
very name of education. More evil actually results from them than good. The
mind and heart are injured,--the one but half trained; the other corrupted.
Mental and moral training are divorced; hence one-sided, and the very end
of education defeated. The child has no incentive to a virtuous and a noble
life, and sinks down to the groveling drudgery of money-making. It is
educated for nature, but not for God,--for this, but not for the next life.

If we would not abuse home-education we must not separate the moral from
the mental,--the secular from the religious; for in doing so, we expose the
child to rationalism and infidelity on the one hand, and to superstition
and spiritualism on the other. This course is generally taken by parents
when they educate their children for mere worldly utility and fashion, when
they have not the welfare of the soul in view, and look only to the
advantage of the body.

The duty then of Christian parents to give their children a true
home-education may be seen from the consequences of its neglect and abuse
on the one hand, and from its value and importance on the other. They
should furnish them with all the necessary means, opportunities, and
directions, of a Christian education. Give them proper books. "Without
books," says the quaint Bartholin, "God is silent, justice dormant, science
at a stand, philosophy lame, letters dumb, and all things involved in
Cimmerian darkness." Bring them up to the habit of properly reading and
studying these books. "A reading people will soon become a thinking people,
and a thinking people must soon become a great people." Every book you
furnish your child, and which it reads with reflection is "like a cast of
the weaver's shuttle, adding another thread to the indestructible web of
existence." It will be worth more to him than all your hoarded gold and
silver. Make diligent use of those great auxiliaries to home-education,
which the chur