EARLY MORAL CULTURE. 339 the inconsistent kindness or severity, may lay the foundation of good or evil in the future life, may influence the temper, and confirm or modify the disposition. And soon thereafter, in the order of time, the strict adherence to truth, the regulated temper, the unselfish disposition, the steady and mild controul, the consistent method, the scrupulous order, and even an occasional just severity, of the mother or her substitute, may subserve the great ends of moral education to a degree that can never be estimated adequately. And soon thereafter; still, in this, as in all other ways, following the natural indications and development of the physique; the first impressions of religion may be made, without parade and without obtrusion; and the mother's deep sense of piety, her reverential love of the great Giver of all good, her zealous endeavour to obey God's commandments, to fulfil His ordinances, to keep herself unspotted from the world, be imparted to her immortal child,—how mighty a responsibility the idea and the words imply !-more by the influence of her living example, than her direct precepts. All this is antecedent to the education of the intellect; although thereafter they may advance together to the common advantage of sentiments and faculties. There is no lesson so valuable, so needful to the physical strength, to the bodily health, or even to the chances of intellectual power in the after life, as this that intellectual education should be left, during the earlier years, to the natural efforts and investigations of the child himself, and should not be aided by parents or teachers, or promoted by books and lessons, until long after the time when it is commonly thought to be necessary or advisable to commence the business of instruction. In very delicate children, I should be glad to see the age of twelve or even fourteen years passed, before this great means of expending the vital forces, and abstracting from the chances of ultimate health and strength, should be called into operation; in other children, the ages of six, eight, or ten years, may be the earliest periods at which children of corresponding strength of constitution, should begin to be, so called, educated. The amount of information, the degree of intellectual exercise, the value of the knowledge obtainable, and the fact that the child has everything to learn, are all undervalued; or more importance would be assigned to the effect of the acquisitions, which may or must be made by a child, in every department of useful information, by the single aid of his own observation and intelligence; and less paramount rank and value would be assigned to the acquisition of the arts of reading and writing, of languages, &c. These are only auxiliary means to the primary exercise of observation and reflection, on the objects, circumstances, and events of the life,-to the intellectual result of receiving, digesting, and assimilating the ideas which may be derived from without, whether men, or events, or books, be the source from which they are directly imparted. The child who is passing his early years in the midst of an educated family, MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL DISCIPLINE. 341 living in a civilised community, observing facts and events, listening to opinions and their data, and comparing for himself, and directed, guided, and modified as to his own views, by the comparing faculties of those about him, is undergoing the best possible ordeal for future intellectual effort, even if no book be set before him until he arrive at ten or twelve years of age, and the meaning of the words "lesson" and "school" be practically unknown to him. Even if placed in a much less auspicious position for intellectual exercise and progress,-surrounded with the imperfectly educated, the great pages of Nature being set before him with no able and ready interpreter at hand, to illustrate and explain their teachings,the habit of self-culture and self-reliance is, nevertheless, more likely to be attained, if other circumstances are not unfavourable to these great acquisitions, than if the mind is prematurely taken from the field of its own efforts, and made to become, at too early a period, the creature of scholastic discipline: a sort of living machine, by which pages are committed to memory, facts and opinons learned by rote, and words virtually allowed to take the place of the things and the ideas they only represent, and may represent inadequately. The discipline of the intellect in the acquisition of languages, in the great science of numbers, even in acquiring the mechanical art of writing, and the mechanical elements of drawing and music, is by no means to be undervalued; nor is the information that may at the same time be stored up in the mind, to be omitted from the account; but, after all, the self-culture, the self-reliance, the personal observation, inquiry, and deduction, tell more, or at least as much, on the ultimate powers and capabilities of the mind,—and affect, at least as much, its eventual relative position, and the character and degree of its powers over the minds of its fellow men. If, however, the mechanical routinism of the scholastic discipline is to be deferred, in all cases, until at least six years of age, the moral education and controul should be pursued so much the more anxiously, and maintained so much the more steadily. And no better use could be made of these earlier years; even if such higher moral cultivation were not thus rendered more needful. And, cultivating the higher sentiments,-educating and developing the conscientiousness, the benevolence, the integrity, the love of truth, the domestic affections, the self-denial, the decision, and, above all, the faith,-no parent need fear, that these years, during which his child may not know one letter from another, will be thrown away; the soil is being weeded and watered; it is being warmed by the sunshine, and fertilised by the dews; and the well-fallowed land shall yield no less a crop, and the crop shall be of no poorer a quality, than that reaped from his neighbour's land, which may have been so differently dealt with. In truth, what is it, after all, that constitutes the great difference between men's minds? Is it the scholastic discipline to which they have been subjected, or the mental culture they have expended on themselves? Is it the routine tasks, the garbled exercises, the packed and crammed for themes, the elaborated and lexiconed translations, the be-ruled arithmetic, that make a man useful in his generation, and set him in the front-ranks of the battle of life, armed and panoplied for a victorious conflict? It is no such routinism, no such filtering of other men's ideas, no such garbled uses of other men's labours, no such formulary prescriptions for the operations of the intellect; it is from a man's own observations, from the digested operations of his own intelligence, from his self-culture, and self-discipline, the man must conquer a position, and work out his usefulness. Granting that physiology teaches a great lesson, well worthy of being universally known, and widely profited by, when she tells us that the nervous organism suffers from a premature use of any of its endowments; and that the views that have been taken, as to the successive developments of its several parts, of the order of such developments, of the gradual use to be made of them successively, are essentially correct,-the effect of neglect of these great organic requirements, or of a sedulous fulfilment of them, is readily illustrated. The nervous exhaustion, early death, or eventual mediocrity of intellect and character, of those who are marked by intellectual precocity, and many a case of cachectic degeneration, may be partly referred to premature efforts to educate the faculties, or to the disproportionate intellectual exertions required. It would be safe, and indicate a true wisdom, to class all cases of precocious intellect |