n't, you know more than I.
You may answer such questions if you know how,
But I'll not wait a moment to hear you now!

THE BURNING QUESTION IN EDUCATION.

If our left hand had been mangled, and continued to be an inflamed,
ulcerating mass, though carried in a sling and treated by all the
surgeons of repute around us,--never through a long life giving any
promise of restoration or even relief,--would not its restoration be
the most prominent question in our minds?

Society has a crushed, ulcerous, and painful hand upon which the
doctors of the college and church have expended such skill as they
have in their occasional perfunctory visits, and the hand grows no
better, but rather worse, during the whole existence of the American
Republic.

The existence of an increasing mass of crime, pauperism, and insanity
is the crushed and diseased hand of civilized society, to which and to
its obvious, natural method of healing I have vainly endeavored, in
the "New Education," to call the attention of our clergy and our
teachers. It is true that three editions of that book have been
disposed of to the delight of progressive thinkers, but it has made
little impression on those who control public institutions and public
opinion. Why is this?

There are sounds in nature too finely delicate to be heard by the
average ear, and rays beyond the violet too fine for the average human
eye, though visible to those of superior nervous endowments. So in the
world of thought there are ethical conceptions too high and pure for
the multitude,--conceptions so far away from their habitual life that
they cannot appreciate or sympathize with them. Such conceptions
constitute the ethical system of education, which is competent to
banish crime, and to introduce a higher social condition, as has been
amply proved by its imperfect introduction in the Lancaster, Ohio, and
other reformatory schools.

Why is not this made the prominent theme in every religious society,
as prominent as temperance? True, intemperance supplies us the
majority of criminals, but when the criminal is prepared in the
hot-bed of alcohol, society transplants him into a richer soil,
impregnated with a greater amount of filth than the saloon, and
cultivates him into the full-blown, hardened villain, for whom there
is nothing but a career of crime, very costly indeed to society.

Why is this insane course pursued? Because society has not the
Christianity which it pro