nciple!--'magnopere curandum est ut id teneamus
quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est' (it must be
especially seen to, that we hold to that which everywhere, which
always, which by all, has been believed).

There is no exclusiveness in the eternal word; it speaks to every one
whose ears are open to it; it enters wherever it is not shut out. It
speaks through Nature, through every form of Art (which to be art must
be a manifestation of it), through Poetry, 'the breath and finer spirit
of all knowledge,' through Music, Sculpture, Painting, Architecture,
through all sacred books, and, above all, through sanctified men and
women, of the Present and the Past, 'the noble Living and the noble
Dead.' In the words of Emerson:

Not from a vain or shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought;
Never from lips of cunning fell
The thrilling Delphic oracle;
Out from the heart of nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old;
The litanies of nations came,
Like the volcano's tongue of flame,
Up from the burning core below,--
The canticles of love and woe.

* * * * *

The word unto the prophet spoken
Was writ on tables yet unbroken;
The word by seers or sibyls told
In groves of oak or fanes of gold
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.

The kind of books which the young should read, is, of course, an
important consideration. If 'a general insight into useful facts' be
regarded as the main thing in a child's education, such as 'the royal
genealogies of Oviedo, the internal laws of the Burmese empire, by how
many feet Mount Chimborazo outsoars Teneriffe, what navigable river
joins itself to Lara, and what census of the year five was taken at
Klagenfurt,' and other matters not having much to do with the
advancement of the millennium, why the question is easily settled as to
the kind of books a child should be provided with, and be required to
learn, and recite; but if some vitality of soul, the indispensable
condition of intellectual vitality, in after life, be the aim, then a
different kind of books will be needed--such books as will serve to
vitalize and guide the instincts, to bring the feelings into a healthful
play, and awaken enthusiasm, and thus to prepare the way for the later
exercise of the reasoning faculties, and for the comprehension of moral
and religious principles.