his creature, the corruption of human nature, and
the means of salvation, in a garret or a cellar, where want and ignorance,
or low debauchery, are to be their preceptors. It is a mistaken
benevolence, and good men of all communions should deprecate the evil, and
resolve to avert it by the establishment of schools where the principal
objects of education should be the principal things attended to, that the
secondary ones may be made subservent to them; where, while the duties of
man to God, to himself, and to society, are inculcated, the scholar may
exercise his powers with books and pens to advantage, and without danger to
the state. Nor, without previous oral instruction, should the Bible itself
be put into the hands of readers, whether children or ignorant adults.
Bible societies, consisting, beyond all doubt, of pious {252} men, will
diffuse good or evil over the world according to the prudence with which
the sacred volumes are distributed. In theology, as in natural philosophy,
the uninformed mind cannot, of itself, embrace even the most
incontrovertible truths: the raising of the dead and the rotation of the
earth are alike incomprehensible; what is not immediately intelligible is
not impressive, but when once we have been taught to observe the motion of
the heavenly bodies, and are made sensible, that the power, which could
assign certainty of operation to nature, must be equal to the suspension of
it, astronomy and religion open upon us, and we fly to Newton and the
Testament; and, seeing truths unfold themselves, we willingly take much on
trust in both; certain that books, where we find so many demonstrations,
are not intended to deceive us in any one point, and the resurrection of
our Saviour becomes sooner solved than the precession of the equinox.

It is impossible to contemplate the {253} advantages arising to our fellow
creatures and to society from Dr. Bell's system of education for the poor,
without delight and without grateful feelings to the author, and, I may
add, the still active director of it. Thousands upon thousands will bless
him, while he yet lives, and a perpetual series of millions will revere his
memory after he shall have joined the myriads of spirits from whom he shall
himself learn the celestial allelujahs, and those things which it has not
entered the mind of man to conceive.

It would be unjust not to pay a tribute of praise, also, to the founders of
an institution, who, though dissentin