s of little
value to us unless we can remember them in their connections, and can so
remember them as to be able to lay our hands upon any particular thought
or fact just when and where it is wanted. Many persons read and study
voraciously, filling their minds most industriously with knowledge, but
such a confusion of ideas prevails throughout their intellectual
store-house, that their very wealth is only an embarrassment to them.
The very first rule to be observed, therefore, in cultivating the
memory, is to reduce our knowledge to some system. Those who are charged
with the training of the young should seek not only to store their minds
with ideas, but to present these ideas to them in well ordered shapes
and forms, and in due logical order and coherence. Hence the peculiar
value of requiring children at the proper age to commit to memory the
grand formulas of Christian doctrine, on which, in every church, its
wisest and ablest men have expended their strength in placing great
truths in connected and logical order and dependence. The creeds and
catechisms of the Christian church are among the best products of the
human intellect as mere specimens of verbal statement, and are valuable,
if for nothing else, as a means for exercising the memory. A child who
has thoroughly mastered a good catechism has his intellectual
store-house already reduced to some order and system. His mind is not
the chaos that we so often find in those children who are gathered into
our mission schools.

The objects that are put away for safe-keeping differ in one respect
from those things which are stored away in the memory. The material
object is the same, whether we visit and inspect it from day to day or
not. The banker's dollars are not increased in fineness or value by his
handling them over carefully every day. Not so with intellectual coin.
The more frequently we re-examine our knowledge and pass it under
review, the more does it become fixed in its character, the more full
and exact in its proportions. Handling it does not wear it out. Even
giving it away does not diminish it. In short, so far as the cultivation
of the memory is concerned, the next best thing we can do, after
reducing our knowledge to due order, is to give it a frequent and
thorough re-examination. Constant, almost endless repetition is the
inexorable price of sound mental accumulation.

A distinction is to be made between memory as a power of the mind and
the remembra