ivine will, there
is but one difference--that of Education. The natural part of any one of
us is, in any significant sense, simply the uneducated part. If a
certain course of action is once recognized as rational, it is
unnecessary to state that it is "not natural," and the formation of
rational _habits_ of body, as of mind, these habits which constitute our
second and better nature, is the very work with which education is
concerned.

There is room, however, for misunderstanding here, and this I must pause
to guard against; I must not be interpreted as saying that all natural
feelings or actions are to be crushed out by a cold, reasoning logic.
But it must be remembered that every virtue has its negative
representative, and that this negative phase is simply and only the same
virtue, but in an uneducated state, and not at all another and different
thing; as, for instance, license is not different in its essence from
self-control--it is only uneducated self-control. Obstinacy is merely
uneducated firmness, and the worst forms of barbarous superstition are
but the outcome of uneducated reverence. The lawlessness and bravado of
our American children and youth, so severely commented upon by
foreigners, are simply an index of the uneducated state of the greatest
amount of directive force that the world has ever seen. A fatal error is
committed in education when this central truth is overlooked, as when
one treats these manifestations as in themselves wrong, instead of
recognizing their value, and bending the energies in their proper
direction. If a missionary should begin his work by destroying in the
mind of the savage all reverence for his own and only gods, he would
have sawed off the branch on which he himself hoped to stand, and it
were wise for him to make his escape from the country as soon as
possible.

SEXUAL EDUCATION.

Up to the period of life at which the sexes diverge, that is, up to the
time when the boy becomes a man and the girl a woman, the physical
system pursues the even tenor of development, broken only by the two
marked advances of the cutting of the first and second teeth. But now,
the strength of the general system is supposed, in the counsels of the
Creator, to have attained sufficient strength and firmness to be fully
capable of assuming a new duty. In both sexes, organs up to this time
quiescent, that is, as to any functional action, take on rapidly an
independent life, assert their own chara