and of fire, is really feeding them with more wholesome food, and exercising their wonder more, than she who uses the greatest pains to make them understand the different parts of a machine, or the great things which it can accomplish. It may be said, "Certainly! these things are more beautiful; and if you could enable a child to understand the structure of plants, how much design and arrangement there is in them, and in all the works of God, such observations would be very helpful. But this teaching is far above its years; it is much easier to point out the design of a piece of human mechanism; hereafter the child may carry the analogy to the more intricate and divine mechanism of the universe." Most cheerfully do I acknowledge that any remarks about design would be very unfit to be addressed by a mother to a child, when she was drawing its thoughts to the wonders of growth and life and decay, in vegetable or animal natures. Coldly and drearily would such words sound to us at any time, if they were not happily associated with feelings of childlike faith, with the silent homage to One who is the Creator, and not the mechanist of the world. But they would fall utterly dead upon the simple ear of childhood; there would be no response to them whatever. And this is the very blessing which I discover in the simple course for which I am pleading. For it is a mistake altogether to suppose that infant wonder is excited by the sense of adaptation, by seeing how means lead to an end, how parts make up a whole. All such feelings belong to maturer life; they pre-suppose much observation and reflection. In a child there is a direct sympathy of life with life; a delight in seeing things move and act, as it moves and acts itself. And it is through this sympathy and delight that the sense of order is to grow up in its mind, if it is ever to grow up at all. Observe the fear and almost shame, mixed with intense joy, with which a child discovers a flower coming out upon a bank, just where he saw the very brother of it on a like bright sunny day in the same month of May the year before, and ask yourself, whether there is not more feeling of succession and order in that boy's heart, a succession in natural things, and one in his own life answering to it, than you could have worked into him by the most laborious indoctrination, and with the wisest books.

I shall be reminded, that however encouraging such words as these may be to country parents, they must sound disheartening to those who live in London. I do not undervalue the difficulties and disadvantages of a town for the rearing of children; but surely it is a blunder to say, that we are without natural objects, and wonderful natural objects, to look at and reflect upon. Is the river Thames nothing? Is there nothing even in our maligned smoke? nothing in the fire which produces it? And if we only use the husbandry, which is proper to those who have small means, we shall find that we have opportunities of making our children acquainted with nearly all the commonest, that is to say, with nearly all the most wonderful, operations of nature. real evil is, that a London life deadens wonder in our own minds. oppressive weight of crowds, the monotony of custom, the habit of abstaining from astonishment lest we should prove our ignorance, and of using the phrase "of course" upon all occasions, is very hurtful to

The

The

the simplicity of our characters, and makes it impossible that we should enkindle in children what we have laboured to check in ourselves. But if we are aware of this tendency, and struggle against it as we would against any other which we knew to be evil or debasing, we may perhaps find that London has its own way of appealing to the wonder of children, without crushing or distracting them as it does us. For let us ever remember, that if nature addresses itself very powerfully to the heart of a child, creatures of its own kind address it still more powerfully. There were giants on the earth in the infancy of the world; there are giants on the earth to every young child now. Those who can at all recall the impressions of their childhood, speak not only of the magnificent proportions in which ordinary things appeared to them, but still more of the sublime, heroic, half-divine aspect of the human beings, or some of the human beings, with whom they conversed. The latter feeling fades away sooner than the former, because the follies and sins of their elders so soon appear in their conduct, and in their countenances. One may hope, then, that the sight of the multitudes of men and women whom a child meets without knowing in a walk through a city, may not be altogether unhelpful in its education. At all events, one must feel what a new obligation children lay upon us to resist all such tempers and habits as may degrade their race in their eyes, and to keep up such converse in our own hearts with what things are pure and gentle and of good report, as may shew them that their early wonder was not really extravagant; that, if men have a nature which sinks them to the level of beasts, they were created in the image of God, and have been redeemed, that they might exhibit it again.

A child thus encouraged to wonder at nature, and wonder at man, when it is brought into the holiest place of all, when it hears the awful name of God, and is taught in what relation it stands to Him, will need no grovelling explanations, no 'Books of the Soul' to assist it in receiving the amazing communication. If wonder and awe be in its heart, it will not want to have such mysteries brought down to the level of its conceptions. They will meet its wants-they will be entertained with fear and delight-just because they are above its conceptions. The one word, Father, makes the idea definite and personal. If you take away its obscurity and awfulness, you do not increase the child's sympathy with it. You only lead it to feel that the reverence which you inculcate is unreal; you destroy the hold of your words upon the imagination, and in doing so you make them seem merely imaginary.

The effect of the kind of culture I have described, upon a child when it learns to read, or is taught the first elements of arithmetic or grammar (I say nothing of drawing or music, which all will allow have a direct connexion with the imagination), I believe some parents can very well appreciate. Various plans have been suggested for removing the difficulties which check a child's progress in the alphabet, and in the first putting together of syllables and words. I doubt not that all such plans are well worthy of consideration; all probably contain some useful hint; all may point out some unnecessary contrivance which previous writers of manuals, ignorant of children, have devised for the purpose

of assisting them. But parents and teachers are deceiving themselves, if they fancy that, after all possible mechanical facilities have been devised, less will be required than before in them or in their children. There will still be the same (if not greater) temptations to listlessness in both; and listlessness will make all helps and appliances ineffectual. On the other hand, be it remembered, that all existing obstructions, and some perhaps that exist no longer, have been surmounted; that children have mounted the scaling ladder of the alphabet with amazing intrepidity, and have charged, sword in hand, through close set columns of heavy armed quadri-syllables. Where there is no eagerness to force letters upon the child, and again, no idle notion of treating them as mere playthings, the feeling of wonder at the strange fact that sounds and words, and living things and thoughts, can be actually represented by written characters, will gradually be awakened in the child's mind; it will desire to enter into the secret; and its teacher becomes to it a new Caduceus. Trouble then is easily endured, because the reward seems so great; and the knowledge acquired is sound and real. With Numbers the case is not different. You may crush the child's memory and intellect under the multiplication table; you may turn it prematurely into a little merchant or huckster, by what are called familiar explanations. These six are six apples; these seven are seven pennies. The applewoman wants to get the seven pennies for her six apples; papa will only give her five. Take five from seven, and two will remain; two pennies, which will buy two loaves at the baker's, or two tracts at the depository.' But (unless there be no other opportunity of delivering lectures on the exchange and distribution of wealth) these plans are not necessary. The imagination of the child, if you have given it scope in other parts of your discipline, will interest it in numbers, though you do not identify them with apples; its interest in the apples themselves is derived from another faculty, and may be cultivated by more direct means.

I hope the studies to which I have alluded are sufficiently matter of fact to please the greatest enemy of castle-building; and it has been one great object of these remarks, to convince mothers that just so far as they regard their children merely as creatures of imitation, and act as if they had no other faculty but this, just so far are they likely to become little actors

"Filling from time to time their humourous stage,
With all the persons down to palsied age,

That life brings with her in her equipage."

Thus contracting all the impatience of realities which we dread, while at the same time

"They provoke

The years to bring the inevitable yoke,

Thus blindly with their blessedness at strife;
Full soon the soul shall bear her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon it with a weight,

Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!"

On the other hand, those who cultivate in the child that holy feeling of wonder which God has planted in it, as a spring of present delight, and a foretaste of brighter good in reserve for it, which

the world cannot give or take away, will arouse it to the consciousness of

I am following your example, in quoting from a poet who, I think with you, has yet to be understood and appreciated for the services which he has rendered to education, for the light which he has thrown upon the duties of the teacher and the feelings of the child. The passages in his works which have been most perplexing to critics, will oftentimes be interpreted to parents and schoolmasters by their most ordinary experience,

Hitherto I may seem to have made no direct reference to our Infant Schools; but the remark in your last number respecting your own feeling towards Sunday School Teachers, well expresses mine in this case. I have had the infant school continually in my mind, though I have thought that I could say what I wished to say better without alluding to that which distinguishes it from the nursery. The school for boys is no mere substitute for the family-it is something of its own kind. The infant school, I conceive, is merely intended to make as good amends as can be made for the absence of domestic teaching and discipline. Whatever ends then the best mother should propose to herself in the care of her children, these the infant school master should propose to himself; whatever means she finds the best for accomplishing her ends, will be as nearly as may be those of which he should avail himself.

I know that a different opinion has prevailed upon this subject. It has been thought that the circumstances of the infant school permitted or demanded the use of much complicated machinery, which the mother either may or must dispense with; and some mothers, I fear, have been so impressed with the superiority which this machinery confers, that they have been eager to turn what they could of it to their own service; or even to give up their children, that they might not lose the advantages of it. I believe, however, that the most unsystematic, untheoretic mothers, whose hearts tell them to recognise the feeling of wonder in their children, and to sympathise with it, really accomplish more, and with greater facility, than those who have had the most diligent training, but who have overlooked the living power upon which they are to act. Such mothers then, I think, should be the models of the infant school master. It is needful, above all things, that he should keep his own heart simple and open; that he should strive himself to become a little child, and especially that he should be so, by cultivating childlike wondering. Let him train himself to recollect what mysteries there are in the world, which he sees daily with his eyes; what deeper mysteries in the little creatures he is daily instructing; how these and yet a deeper one are implied in the prayers which he teaches them to offer up, and the songs he teaches them to sing daily to Him who made them. But let the thought of these

mysteries awaken him to reverence and fear; not crush or overwhelm him. It is the whirl of outward things which is really confounding, not the awful truths which lie beneath them. And though it may be hard oftentimes to perceive these when we are conversing with men, yet converse with children brings them very near to us. The harmonies of earth are intricate, for sin has introduced many discords in them the harmonies of heaven are intricate, because our ears are not purged enough to take them in. But there is a simple melody beneath them both, which the child's ear is meant to receive; which its teacher should strive to understand and delight in. He who has most of fear and of

love will be the best master of infants; if he seek that these gifts should be renewed in him day by day, he will not have occasion to learn many professional tricks, or to trouble the committee of his school for a very large apparatus. He will rejoice to have a few good pictures, but he will not suffer his walls to be darkened with daubs which will degrade sacred subjects in the minds of his children. He will intreat that they may not be taught or forced to shriek and make noises, in order that visitors may remark how cheerful and happy they are. He will use music to still and solemnise their minds, rather than to assist them in wringing their hands and remembering their multiplication table. He will find that there is a better way of escaping from rote teaching than the common one of turning study into a jest—a better way of escaping from dryness and formality than the practice of encouraging familiarity and rudeness. He will discover by experience, that he has not to chuse between the two evils of merely tasking the memory, or compelling the child to reason before it has any grounds or materials of reasoning that in the wonder or imagination of the child there lies a power which makes the processes of the memory living and not dead, pleasurable and not painful; a power which prepares the way for the future exercise of the reasoning powers, when it is according to the order of Providence that they should be exercised. There is nothing, I think, in such a course, which is more appropriate to the rich child than to the poor one; on both alike the gift of wondering has been bestowed; in both alike it may be called forth or may be stunted by our methods of dealing with it. Yours very truly,

Feb. 13th, 1843.

F. D. MAURICE.

ON THE PARAMOUNT IMPORTANCE OF HUMAN STUDIES

IN EDUCATION.

IT appears that the phrase "human studies," in the prospectus of this Journal, has been objected to by some, and misunderstood by others; and one or two correspondents have written to inquire what the term is meant to imply. We are glad to be able to answer the query, and at the same time to quote high authority for the sentiment, in so interesting a form as that of a short extract from Dr. Johnson's critique upon Milton as a schoolmaster :