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THE

BRITISH REVIEW,

AND

LONDON CRITICAL JOURNAL.

SEPTEMBER, 1821.

ART. I. Hints for conducting Sunday Schools, useful ulso for Day Schools and Families. Compiled by the Committee of the Sunday School Society for Ireland. Second Edition. Hatchard. London, 1819.

THE present spirit of education, its means, and its execution, have often distinctly and incidentally attracted our notice. What heart, indeed, can meditate unmoved on the busy bustling scene of moral reform, which every where agitates society to its very bottom? The lever is already under its old foundations, and modern enterprize has pledged itself to elevate the entire structure. If knowledge is power, and power is happiness, the principle of this great and imposing effort is broad, and safe, and unperplexed with doubts. Scatter universally the unequivocal blessing, fill the land with schools, give the presses unrestricted range, and let it be considered among the birth-rights of Britons, however poor, to be placed upon an intellectual equality with the richest of their fellow subjects. When we look, however, with sober thoughts, and with minds undazzled by specious maxims, and magnificent generalities, to the practical condition of man, and the natural and moral constitution of society, certain simple verities will be apt to cool down these high and glowing expectations, and induce us to doubt whether, after all, an artificial system, not in harmony with those relations which inevitably spring out of the necessities of the social state, may not tend to dislocation and disorder, if not to subversion, revolt, and ruin.

If, indeed, it were practicable to make a liberal education universal, and to make the fruits of it attainable by all alike, whether the state of things produced by this new posture of human affairs would issue ultimately in an increase of happiness and virtue, may be variously argued, and must ever be doubtful;

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but it seems but too probable to the reasoner from observation and experience, that to set the understandings of men upon inquiries which neither station, nor opportunity, nor duty, will allow to be prosecuted with effect, will tend only to warp the members of society out of their natural places, to foment a spirit of repining, to inflate the mind with arrogance, and sour the temper by disappointment.

That the position of society should be such as to leave the avenues to knowledge, and the access to preferments, open to industry and talent, no reasonable man will dispute; it is scarcely a state of moral freedom where there is no arena for the pure display of merit, and where the fair opportunities of distinction are denied to humble circumstances; but it may be allowed to cautious men like ourselves, to question the advantage of an education for the poor, which proceeds upon the principle that all knowledge, under all circumstances, is a positive good; and that whatever partial mischiefs may arise from occasional abuses, to scatter instruction promiscuously and gratuitously among the mass, irrespectively of all specific and appropriate culture, is to increase the sum of social felicity, and to urge on the moral progression of mankind. This seems to us to be a vain and perilous doctrine. When instruction has a special designation towards what is obviously needful and applicable, its foundation is moral, its progress is steady, and its end is salutary; but when an education is tendered to the poor, the philosophical promise of which is to expand their minds, to constitute them reasoners, to put their understandings upon a level with complex subjects, and to bring them acquainted, as is sometimes speciously said, with their constitutional privileges, we believe in our consciences that the scheme is delusive and dangerous, full of treacherous flattery to those to whom the boon is offered, and disguising much substantial evil under one knows not what magnificent speculations of extended and eventual benefit. Instruction should have a definable and ostensible purpose; so that if the child should happen to ask his instructor "What am I to do with this education?” it may be readily pointed out to him in what way he may turn it to practical and beneficial account in the course of life naturally and probably marked out to him. It cannot be too liberal or intellectual for those to whom high station may be proposed as the prize of their industry, or whose birth or leisure afford them the opportunities of speculative and diffusive research; but it is the idlest and the vainest of all things to put the whole mass of the people under a stimulating process; and, for the sake of some possible discoveries of latent genius, of some accidental disclosures of shining substances lurking in the recesses of life's vast quarry, or of the vague expectation of some general results favourable to truth and science from the agitation of the whole in

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