‘Nil prætermitto: consuefacio: denique, Inspicere, tanquam in speculum, in vitas omnium Jubeo, atque exallis sumere exemplum sibi.’
An education not provided in this manner, an apparatus set up independently of a popular choice and control, can never be valued as it must be to be availing.”
We gladly turn from the institutes of man to the ordinances of God. In the laws of that religion by which Jehovah reigned before His ancient people gloriously, there is no enactment which dissolves parental responsibility in the education of children; and none which transfers it. He spake of the great ancestor of that people the encomium which contained the germ of their government: “For I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the law, to do justice and judgment.” This was to be the rule of transmission. “Teach them thy sons and thy sons’ sons.” “Thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thy house.” “He established a testimony in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers, that they should make them known to their children: that the generation to come might know them, even the children which should be born, who should arise and declare them to their children.” Not less tender, distinct, and authoritative is the Christian law: “Ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” “Children, obey your parents in all things: for this is well pleasing unto the Lord.” No one can doubt that the Bible enjoins on parents the duty of carefully training up their children, and of making it the grand purpose of this life to prepare them for heaven.
By a beautiful provision for keeping up the healthy interaction of the social forces, when the period of adolescence is reached, the sympathies burst the boundary of the domestic circle, and, through delicate and often inscrutable affinities, seek objects of attachment in the outer world. The upper, the middle, and the lower classes, for various reasons must go out into society. That principles of character can be imparted is one of the plainest doctrines of the Bible, as well as one of the commonest facts of human experience. For this express purpose, all the educative agencies of home, the school, the platform, the press, and the pulpit, have been instituted, are kept in operation. The Christian Church was formed by its Divine Head that all those to whom His words are spirit and life, should impart them to others. Christianity is a propagandist system, and is designed to revolutionize not the opinions so much as the ideas and motives of humanity. When we look at hundreds of girls, in pairs and triads, engaged in incessant and animated conversation; when we think of the influences under which their characters are forming, and remember that these characters, in all probability, will last through life,—we almost shrink back from the reflection, that here are the mothers of the next generation! If there is contamination here, the consequences are more disastrous than we are able to compute. Mutual influence is a law that embraces all worlds, pervades all the kingdoms of nature, and reaches its climax in humanity. All the elements and laws of the lower kingdom are summed up here; and magnetism, affinity, and gravitation find their spiritual archetypes in the influence of mind on mind. The character is like a piece of potter’s clay, which when fresh and new, is easily fashioned according to the will of those into whose hands it falls; but its form once given, and hardened, either by the slow drying of time, or by its passage through the ardent furnace of the world, any one may break it to atoms, but never bend it again to another mould.