explanation.

How rich in strange and touching utterances have been the last fifty
years of English literature. Do you think that God has been teaching
us nothing in them? Will He not _make_ our children listen to that
teaching, whether we like or not? And suppose our most modern
writers _had_ added nothing to the stock of national knowledge, which
I most fervently deny, yet are they not actually influencing the
minds of the young? and can we prevent their doing so either directly
or indirectly? If we do not find them right teaching about their own
day, will they not be sure to find self-chosen teachers about it
themselves, who will be almost certainly the first who may come to
hand, and therefore as likely as not to be _bad_ teachers? And do we
not see every day that it is just the most tender, the most
enthusiastic, the most precious spirits, who are most likely to be
misled, because their honest disgust at the follies of the day has
most utterly outgrown their critical training? And that lazy
wholesale disapprobation of living writers, so common and convenient,
what does it do but injure all reverence for parents and teachers,
when the young find out that the poet, who, as they were told, was a
bungler and a charlatan, somehow continues to touch the purest and
noblest nerves of their souls, and that the author who was said to be
dangerous and unchristian, somehow makes them more dutiful, more
earnest, more industrious, more loving to the poor? I speak of
actual cases. Would to God they were not daily ones!

Is it not then the wiser, because the more simple and trustful
method, both to God and our children, to say: "You shall read living
authors, and we will teach you how to read them; you, like every
child that is born into the world, must eat the fruit of the tree of
knowledge of good and evil; we will see that you have your senses
exercised to discern between that good and that evil. You shall have
the writers for whom you long, as far as consists with common
prudence and morality, and more, you shall be taught them: all we
ask of you is to be patient and humble; believe us, you will never
really appreciate these writers, you will not even rationally enjoy
their beauties, unless you submit to a course of intellectual
training like that through which most of them have passed, and
through which certainly this nation which produced them has passed,
in the successive stages of its growth."

The best met