this intercourse, is irrefragable and ** decisive. It often happens, however, that there is an inconsistency in education more to be deplored than any which has yet been mentioned :-this is the inconsistency of the paCarent with himself. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, contrasting the correction employed by paarents with that used by the Almighty in his government of his true serivants, says, "They" (the parents) verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure, but he for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness." What a picture is this! God, the sovereign proprietor of all his creatures, invariably pursues the good of those whom he deigns to call his sons, in all the discipline to which he subjects them; while man, who can call nothing his own, who is a mere trustee under the Almighty, who, in his conduct towards his children, should always bear in mind that both they and he are bought with a price, and that not his own gratification, but the will of God, should be his rule in all he does as a father, man presumes to forget his imperious duties in education, and to make it his object to please himself rather than his sovereign Lord! If one did not continually see the fact, one should not believe it possible that the work of education would be so often carried on under the supreme influence of selfishness. His own ease and convenience, and the indulgence of his own feeling and humour, frequently seem to engage a father's first attention in his proceedings with his children; and, except in striking cases, which oblige him, as it were, to depart from so lax a system, the good of the child is clearly made in practice, though not in theory, a secondary object. So true is the description of the apostle he proceeds according to his own pleasure, rather than for the profit of his children. When education is not conducted so very ill, and the good of the child is geCHRIST. OBSERV. No. 119. nerally the main object of the pa rent, and his own inclinations are generally made to bend to it; yet, in many families, this is by no means so entirely the case as it ought to be. When the stimulus to self-gratification is strong, the parent yields to it, the rules of good education are violated, and the child is injured. The injury will be (unless God avert it) in proportion to the extent of this fault. Some portion of it is found in all parents: but I am speaking not of a few thinly scattered instances rarely occurring, such as must be expected from so weak a creature as man even in his best estate, but of its more frequent recurrence, to the serious interruption of a good system of education. Now it is clear that this fault, in whatever degree it may exist, is an enemy to consistency of conduct. As it proceeds from the parent yielding to a different motive from that which ought to actuate him, and sometimes at least does actuate him, when with his children; this new motive must lead to different results from those which would flow from the other, and produce inconsistency. But this is by no means all. A man under the influence of self-indulgence is inconsistent with himself. He will conduct himself towards his child according to his present humour. One hour he will be indulgent, and the next severe : at one time he will allow his child to do things, which at another he will forbid. The child also will find out that he can carry points by management;-by making his request when the parent is in a yielding humour, or by bringing him into such a humour by coaxing and wheedling, or by overcoming his objections by im portunity. Inconsistency must be the consequence: and an inconsistency the more to be deplored, because it will be connected with a diminution of respect for the parent who is the author of it, and with the practice of cunning and art in the child,-habits of mind most adverse to all that is good. 4 X parents must not trust to being informed of every thing important to be known. They must delicately but effectually make the requisite inquiries; and also take care by personal inspection (conducted, how. ever, with kindness and delicacy to the nurse or the governess) to ascertain the real state of things. But, with all that can be done, it will the seldom be found possible to put management of children in the nursery on a truly good footing. The class of persons to be employed is so ill educated and unenlightened; and such of them as are pious are ge nerally so injudicious, that not only the plan of the parent with the child will scarcely ever be even tolerably maintained when the child is out of his sight, but positive and serious evils will be produced and cherished. It is highly important, therefore, that the child should be as much with the parent as circumstances will permit. Every hour in the society of a parent who understands educa tion, and pays proper attention to it, is an hour gained to moral improvement, and (as far at least as regard children yet in the nursery) is too often an hour redeemed from what is far from deserving that ap pellation. In whatever way the child is employed, whether in talk often lamentably counteracted in the nursery or the school-room. If the children are indulged there in bad tempers and habits; and still more, if they there meet with bad examples; with passion, or pride, or deceit, or a love of ease and luxury; all may be undone which is done in the parlour, and perhaps more than undone notwithstanding all the efforts of the parents, the progress of the child may be not in good, but in evil. Even on the most favourable supposition, the fruits produced by the exertions of the parents, will be scanty and crude. The bias of nature will be so in favour of what is wrong, and so against what is right, that, if Divine grace did not wonderfully favour the exertions of true piety in education, the task of the parents would be hopeless. How carefully, then, should nurses and others, who are put about children, be selected? And how attentively should the course of things in the nursery and the school-room be watched and regulated! To this end, the nurse or the governess should be impressed with a sense of the very high importance which the parent attaches to good tempers and good habits; to which must be added, good principles, if the child is old enough to understand them. But it will by no means be sufficient ing or playing, a moral lesson may to do this in a general way. It be instilled, moral habits may be enmust be done in detail and by exam-couraged, and bad ones repressed: ple, and with a persevering, but not the parent will continually be ob a harassing, recurrence to those taining a greater insight into the points which seem to be the ciently understood, or not properly greater affection for its parent. Thus carried into practice. The vigilant good will be doing, and a foundaeye of the parent will always be tion laying for still greater good. wanted to keep things in the right Indeed, God seems to me to afford at course, as well as to put them in it slight ground for presuming that at first. It must be laid down as a children should be much with their principle, that nothing must be con- parents, by making the society of cealed by the child. That vile max- each so pleasant to the other, where im against telling tales out of school the parent performs his part as he in ignorance) must be utterly pro- spoiled by excessive indulgence in (vile, when applied to keep parents ought, and the child has not been scribed; and openness and confi- some other quarter. But the evidence must be zealously cultivated, dence of his will, which arises from both in the child and in those who the benefit resulting to the child, and have the charge of him. But the also, I believe, to the parent, I from this intercourse, is irrefragable and decisive. It often happens, however, that there is an inconsistency in education more to be deplored than any which has yet been mentioned :this is the inconsistency of the parent with himself. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, contrasting the correction employed by parents with that used by the Almighty in his government of his true servants, says, "They" (the parents) 'verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure, but he for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness." What a picture is this! God, the sovereign proprietor of all his creatures, invariably pursues the good of those whom he deigns to call his sons, in all the discipline to which he subjects them; while man, who can call nothing his own, who is a mere trustee under the Almighty, who, in his conduct towards his children, should always bear in mind that both they and he are bought with a price, and that not his own gratification, but the will of God, should be his rule in all he does as a father, man presumes to forget his imperious duties in education, and to make it his object to please himself rather than his sovereign Lord! If one did not continually see the fact, one should not believe it possible that the work of education would be so often carried on under the supreme influence of selfishness. His own ease and convenience, and the indulgence of his own feeling and humour, frequently seem to engage a father's first attention in his proceedings with his children; and, except in striking cases, which oblige him, as it were, to depart from so lax a system, the good of the child is clearly made in practice, though not in theory, a secondary object. So true is the description of the apostle he proceeds according to pleasure, rather than for the profit of his children. When education is not conducted so very ill, and the good of the child is ge CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 119. his own nerally the main object of the parent, and his own inclinations are generally made to bend to it; yet, in many families, this is by no means so entirely the case as it ought to be. When the stimulus to self-gratification is strong, the parent yields to it, the rules of good education are violated, and the child is injured. The injury will be (unless God avert it) in proportion to the extent of this fault. Some portion of it is found in all parents: but I am speaking not of a few thinly scattered instances rarely occurring, such as must be expected from so weak a creature as man even in his best estate, but of its more frequent recurrence, to the serious interruption of a good system of education. Now it is clear that this fault, in whatever degree it may exist, is an enemy to consistency of conduct. As it proceeds from the parent yielding to a different motive from that which ought to actuate him, and sometimes at least does actuate him, when with his children; this new motive must lead to different results from those which would flow from the other, and produce inconsistency. But this is by no means all. A man under the influence of self-indulgence is inconsistent with himself. He will conduct himself towards his child according to his present humour. One hour he will be indulgent, and the next severe : at one time he will allow his child to do things, which at another he will forbid. The child also will find out that he can carry points by management;-by making his request when the parent is in a yielding humour, or by bringing him into such a humour by coaxing and wheedling, or by overcoming his objections by im portunity. Inconsistency must be the consequence and an inconsistency the more to be deplored, because it will be connected with a diminution of respect for the parent who is the author of it, and with the practice of cunning and art in the child,-habits of mind most adverse to all that is good. 4 X : The very high importance of consistency must be clear to your readers. Will children be likely to value good principles as they ought, when their parents do not steadily act upon them, and enforce them? Will good habits be rooted and fixed in the child, when he is allowed at times to indulge in the opposite bad ones? Will he be led to see the beauty of holiness of heart, and of holy conduct, when he is allowed at times to taste the sweets of sin (for every fault is a sin) from which he ought to be weaned, and when he finds his own self-indulgence sanctioned by the self-indulgence of his parent? "The ways of religion are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace;" but to those only who steadily walk in them. They have no charms for those whose conduct is marked by frequent or gross inconsistencies." 7. Spend much time with your children; encourage them to be free before you; and carefully study their characters. For what is education? it is cooperating with the Divine Spirit in forming the mind and changing the heart of an immortal being, weak and corrupt, averse to the change to be wrought in him, and whose nature is made up of various parts, and differs greatly in different individuals. Is it possible to doubt, that what is above recommended must be necessary in this work? Can too great pains be taken where so much is at stake? Can success be rationally expected, unless great pains are taken, and your labours are enlightened and judicious? And can you flatter yourself that you take due pains, or that your labours will have a proper direction, if you give little time to your arduous task and do not employ proper means for becoming well acquainted with the characters of your children? It is wonderful that a parent can from the power of Satan unto God, by proceeding in the way in which religious education is often coducted. Is it not generally true, that, even in religious families, more thought, and care, and up: are employed in teaching children to read, than in teaching and per suading them, by God's help, to be real Christians? The father sen but little of those who are young, and much less than is desirable of sucha are older. The first he considers g scarcely at all under his care; and though he probably gives some is structions to the latter, they are commonly such as are more calc lated to enlarge their knowledge, and improve their understandings han to regulate their disposition, and make them new creatures His avocations often are such a to make it impossible for him be a great deal with his children; but he generally might be much more with them than he is; and,when with them, might employ the time much more usefully, for the prome tion of their best interests, than be does. It often happens that they are under a degree of restraint in his presence, which, added to the little time he spends with them, prevents his obtaining a deep insight into their characters: and, therefore, many evils either escape his notice, or he adopts some wrong mode of cr recting them; and many a tenuer germ of good passes unobserved, and withers for want of his fostering care. The mother is much more with her children, but gene rally, I think, not so much as she ought to be. This is the more to be lamented, because women are admirably fitted for training their offspring in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. They have a remarkably quick insight into cha racter; and a warmth of affection, a tenderness and a delicacy, which win the affection of others, and enable them to correct faults without hope to be an effectual instrument giving offence, and to present Chris under Divine grace, in leading his children from darkness to light, and tian principles and virtues to their children in their most amiable form. I believe that there has seldom been a man who had a good and amiable mother, that has not in after life looked back on her instructions and example with reverence and delight. Cowper's admirable little poem, on viewing his mother's picture, touches the hearts of all of us, because it describes scenes and feelings dear to every virtuous mind; scenes and feelings of which many of us have partaken, and all wish to partake. Every hour which a Christian mother spends with her children has balm on its wings. She contrives to make even their pastimes a moral lesson; and though she cannot (and it is not desirable that she should) make their regular lessons a pastime, yet she adapts them well to the abilities of her scholars, accommodates them well to times and circumstances, and divests them of whatever is oppressive and revolting. To mix the pleasant with the useful, is at least as important in education as in poetry; but good mothers far exceed good poets in that art. Surely, then, a mother should be jealous of every thing which keeps her from the bosom of her family;-a sphere in which she is so gifted to shine, and to be a blessing to those most dear to her. How sad it is, when she throws away this pure gold for mere dross, by giving up those hours to an excess of visiting and company, or even of reading, which ought to be spent among her children! And how sad, too, when such high powers to train her young charge for Christ and glory, are not under the guidance of an enlightened judgment, or receive a wrong direction! I have been grieved to see maternal sensibility much more alive to the bodily than to the spiritual health of the objects of its solicitude: electrified when there was an idea that a child had received some slight hurt, but little moved while it was contesting a point with a nurse, or teasing a brother: and I have been much more grieved, when I have seen it fall into partiality and favouritism; or exhaust itself in anxieties about the persons of the girls, to the comparative neglect of their understandings, and to the great injury of their feelings and dispositions; or employ itself in heaping on them accomplishments, instead of leading them on in useful attainments and Christian habits; or yielding to the influence of humour and caprice; or (worse than all) giving itself over to a blindness to the faults of the objects of its love, and ruining them by indulgence and commendation. The only plausible excuse which parents, possessing health and sufficient time, can make for not employing themselves actively in the education of their children is, that they put them into hands more fit for that task. This may be a good reason for sending boys, after a certain age, to school, or to a tutor; though still, even in their case, much remains to be done by parents. Waving, however, the consideration of this part of the subject for the present, the excuse which has been mentioned does not appear to me admissible, under any common circumstances, in the case of girls and of younger boys. Of these, the parents are certainly the natural guides and instructors. They are fitted for this task, by long knowledge of their offspring, by the respect due to them as parents, and by affections and sympathies on both sides, far better than strangers can be. And if they suffer these great instruments of good to be lost, or perverted to evil; or if they fail to qualify themselves for their task by obtaining other requisites, and by alloting to it sufficient time, and thought, and care, and pains; they must be answerable to God. They may, with much propriety, call in assistance, especially in the mechanical parts of education; but should always consider themselves keeping the higher branches, which respect the principles, dispositions, and habits, chiefly in their own as |