evil thoughts are there as well as good thoughts, and all are registered. If time was when Reason was morally clear, it is not so now. It is clouded; there is a thick fog before it; and however fancy may wreath the vapourfalsity in fascinating shape and colour, it still more or less shuts out the brightness of Truth; or, where that partially breaks through, converts it into an unreal distorted imagery. Were it not so, would not all men see alike? Should we have the diversities of opinions we have; disputing as we do even about the most common right and wrong; one by one ignoring all virtues; or, quite as bad, stripping them of their divine simplicity, and tricking them up in fantastic dressing, 'to please the eye of the mind, no longer single enough for truth? Who can deny that, were not the implanted moral sense depraved, and hence the Reason, we should be now here, on this earth, the "just men made perfect" which we are only capable of being made hereafter? We greatly boast of human reason, but where is it as a one recognised or recognisable entity? We are all flattered as rational beings, whereas we should be rather called capable of receiving reason, and that each of us perhaps in small portions. Reason as an absolute whole is with no one. It has its thousand problems, some of which we work out for ourselves with painful labour, and by experience, for our limited individual use. It is a bewildered fancy that conjectures beyond a narrow sphere, and dreams of a perfectibility in wisdom. Knowledge-knowledge! It is a cant and conceited cry. The Tree of Knowledge bears two kinds of fruit, good and evil; both are plucked and eaten, poison and strengthen. There is no stronger mark of our innate imperfection than that we are all claiming reason as our rightful infallibility, while at the same time we have its manifold misshapen and discoloured phantasmagoria playing trickeries before our very eyes. "Eyes have they, and see not." Is not that passage of truth exemplified everywhere? How came human reason to be a divided thing? Doubtless it was once one. When was its moral sense disnted from its intellectual? In

tellect must have been once truthseeing, and must therefore have been itself a moral knowing and feeling power. We know where the history of its declension is told. That same history tells the hopeful future, that the moral and intellectual are to be reunited; and it shows in some degree the mysterious how, before mankind can be perfected in reason. What inference, you may ask, Eusebius, would I draw from this argument? Simply this, that knowledge, mere knowledge, as it is not an unmixed thing, is a doubtful good-good only as we carefully, cautiously use it. It requires much sifting. If the sulphur get into the otherwise innocent ingredients, it becomes a dangerous compound, that, coming in contact with fiery natures, may blow all the laboured works of civilisation to atoms.

I have no patience, Eusebius, to hear this perpetual cant of educationists, that knowledge is everythingthis perpetual cramming fact upon fact, and nothing but fact, into the brain of man, woman, and childfact good and fact bad, without discrimination, so that it be fact, and too often surmises and fallacies mistaken for facts. There is an art of false reasoning easier taught than that of true reasoning. Knowledge, in the sense in which knowledge is usually taken, is no panacea for the ills that are in the world. There is but one cure for them-one, though two in name-moral and religious training

the training which tends to make, not knowing, but wise. What a pity it is that our beautiful Church Catechism, that pure moral training, is set aside so widely. There is a knowledge that keeps up bad pride-this keeps it down; elevating through humility; teaching to be just, kind, contented-in fact, good. I cannot repeat this lamentation on the neglect of this best teaching too often; mere secular knowledge, either for high or low, is, as a teaching, in nine cases out of ten, worthless. Even common useful knowledge is less taught than the showy and useless. I find even a government inspector complaining of the "high-flown school" system; and, as a result of a neglect of the useful and practical. Speaking of an

examination, he says: "Not one of the boys could tell, if wheat was 7s. 6d. a bushel, what seven quarters would cost? But they readily answered such questions as, What is the specific gravity of the planets Saturn and Jupiter?" Happily there are judicious inspectors who effectually and beneficially perform their duties, and are sensible of the ambitious mistakes made by some of their brethren.

It was no bad expression of the poet Afranius, that "knowledge is the daughter of use (experience) and memory.' The commentary on which passage, in Aubus Gellius, is quite to the point, as to the need of exercise in "common things," in preference to the "inanitates verborum." Our educational systems are propagating the pedantry of knowledge; and this pedantry, in all variety of prescriptions, is trumpeted about, like other deleterious medicines, as the cure for every moral malady under the sun. It is a common observation that mere book-men and fact-men have the narrowest minds. They want the daily intercourse with their fellow-creatures, and the common sympathies of life. Yes, Eusebius, the cultivation of human sympathies, how little is that regarded! There is no provision for the amusement of the people in common, from which both knowledge is to be acquired and sympathies begot. Popular amusement, by the very congregating people together in enjoyment, wears away that crust of selfishness, which, in a stagnating state of universal dulness, settles round every individual heart. Bigotry of a new kind-puritanism-struck out too many holidays from the calendar; games and sports, and days of general cheerfulness, were not looked upon, as they should have been, as educational. Would, Euse

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bius, we had more of them now. The public mind wants to be stirred, not by its interests only, but away from those engrossing interests, by enjoyments that are in common. I look upon it, that war is at this moment giving not unimportant education. It is stirring the general heart-making it sensitive to every touch of generosity-awakening what has been too long dormant; and, through the best feelings, quickening the understanding. Events that reach everybody make a present portion of everybody's education. When the heart, as the saying is, comes up into the throat and chokes utterance, which every man has recently witnessed when he participated with his neighbours in the admiration of the heroic deeds of his countrymen in the Crimea, there is an ennobling spirit that will neither soon nor easily be suppressed; and more is done for the national character than knowledge schools can ever effect. The many become one in honest pride, the whole moral of a man is raised, and that lifting up pervades the land; it reaches the remotest corners, and brings all, however distant, together, in one absorbing interest and general sense of fellowship. There is one common participation in glory, one common sympathy for the suffering. The better life is thriving, the general heart and understanding are quickened together. War and danger sharpen the wits; both move and direct the passions, and leave no stagnant pools for the understanding to be smothered in. Thus, war civilises. It is in its own nature generous; for the true soldier is ever gentle

pities and succours his wounded foe; and when, after warfare done, such soldiers return to their native land, and town, or country homes,

they are schoolmasters in their way, and no bad ones: they have acquired two great human virtues-fortitude to endure, and a gentle pity; and these they impart to a population about them. I call this education; for there has been experience; and so large, that some judgment can scarcely be wanting.Learning is folly," says the proverb, "unless judgment have the use of it." And how is judgment acquired? It is mother-wit sharpened, and able to decide by intercourse with the bigger world. This is training; it is showing a man what he is, by enabling him to compare himself with many others; and it teaches him the general human nature, by seeing infinite varieties of characters; and not only by seeing, but by mingling with them, and finding their agreements and disagreements; and thus the world's scholar learns to think, which is far better than to know, at least such things as are very often taught, and which never can be turned to any use. It was a happy thought to set up schools to teach "common things." Let us hope they will flourish, for they are sadly wanted. Therein is the foundation of a good social education. And what is social education? will be asked by some crotchety educationists. It begins with home, and widens in the circle of life. It is the teaching the well-doing the duties that properly belong to home and to society. Very many are there who think that modern teaching has taken quite another and a worse direction, and that the mass of the people have deteriorated in the knowing and the doing these duties. The emulation encouraged in national schools has too much of the anti-national in it. And this has had a very mischievous influence among young women of the lower classes. They marry, and know not how to keep their homes-how to cater in home-comforts. The husband comes to an unclean house, a bad fire, an ill-dressed dinner-the

wife has never learnt that first, most necessary business, how to cook. What is the consequence? The unsatisfied husband is put out of humour; he quits the house which has ceased to look like a home-and where does he go? Not far off is a public-house. A clean room, a sanded floor, and a bright fire, are irresistible temptations. He meets others there, like himself driven out and tempted in, and the very first day makes him an incipient sot. Consider his case. Where else can he go? Is there any very cheap amusement wisely provided for him out of a public-house? None, in country or in town. If he loves a freer range, and the fields, he is suspected as a poacher; and perhaps from the exuberance of animal spirits, and the love of danger natural to all (and long may it be so), and from the excitement of the publichouse talk and drink, a poacher he becomes. If means of innocent amusement are not found for him, he will find amusement of another kind for himself. Who can reasonably wonder if moral evils spring up and grow to magnitude among us? And it is thought that this moral evil is to be cured by books and lectures; and cramming unwilling and disobedient heads, "crassâ invitâque Minerva," with the fopperies, puerilities, and crudities of learning, called knowledge. They who think so, know not human nature. Taste for book-learning never can be a general taste. How hard is it to give it any animation even in the higher classes-how difficult to set a youth of any class to book-work. I suppose nature intends it should be irksome work, and that only a few should be gifted with studious desires; for it is surprising how few, of all who go through a public school, or even a university, become readers in after-life, or have acquired anything like a stock of knowledge, according to the educationist's interpretation of knowledge. But it does not follow that they have not acquired other know

protesting, are upraised against this simple word-a theatre. But be so good as to sit down, ladies and gentlemen, and have a little patience while I explain myself. You are not really so averse to the thing as you imagine; you have it, but you have not the name. Needs it not to say where, but you really have theatres, not so designated, with stages and platforms, and very practised actors too. Verbum sat. There is more acting in the world than takes its name professional. Volumes have been written, more than enough, against plays and theatres, whereas the subject should have been the abuse of them. If suppression of the thing is to follow an argument upon its abuse, what will be safe? Religion itself would have to be suppressed by acclamation. Such extravagance as this is like the folly of the teetotallers, who have ruined their own good intentions and a better cause by their total-suppression views. Common sense has kicked their theory out of doors, when they chalked the back of him who took a pint of small beer or a glass of wine as a drunkard. So, in persecuting plays, instead of rectifying them, the puritans did their best to put down what was essentially good. Its evil was its accident. The very origin of the drama was religious; and when it first wandered from distinct religious teaching, it still attached itself to the virtues. They were then the old "moralities." The drama, progressing and accommodating itself to wants or desires of the people, assumed a more varied form, and took upon itself to exhibit manners-to pourtray life as it is, in all its circumstances and accidents; and by so doing, it brought the world at large, as it were, home to every man's door, and provided thus a substitute for the means of acquiring knowledge by ubiquity-by that travel into the wider sphere denied to the masses of the people. The drama became a remedy against the narrowness and ignorance of circumscribed localities; and they to whom occasionally good plays were brought home, knew something more of mankind and of themselves, and had both their hearts and understandings enlarged. In this way the drama was, as it ever might be if

properly cared for and directed, in the best sense educational. People were brought together for general amusement. There is much in that; their delights were in common. They felt in common-they distinguished in common-the good from the bad. They learned at what to laugh and at what to weep. They conceived the greater antipathy to vice and crime, by seeing how universally odious these were to all around them; and, by welltimed ridicule and gentle satire, corrected the minor vices of their own manners. Now, Eusebius, if this ever was true, or if it be in the nature of things possible, tell me if here are not means of education-even of acquiring knowledge too much neglected, worse than neglected-cast aside, with an ill name, as an "unholy thing." I would go further and say, that a natural want is suppressed, and that never can be done with impunity. A natural want-yes, Eusebius,-in its strictest sense. The curiosity to know all about mankind, of which we form a part, is an instinct. The veriest infant loves the little story, and to have dramatised to him the ways, the habits, of all creatures around him, and always with a certain application to himself; hence the child's delight in fables. As the child grows, he gathers his little experiences into stories of his own making. Groups of young ones meet in byways of lanes and hedges, and, for lack of larger dramas put before them, act their own. Every village and town has multitudes of these unrecognised, unobserved "minor theatres." Is not, then, the theatre an instinctive want? We are imitative for its purpose. Nature impels us to the drama as a means of acquiring knowledge, and something better than knowledge, as knowledge is understood. It is an ally and adjunct to religion. Has there ever been known a people among whom, in some form or other, the drama was not? The more civilised nations become, the stronger is its necessity. The Germans have a saying-"Bread and the theatre." They make it the second necessity of life. The French carry it still higher-they make it the first, for they say "The theatre and bread." The wisest statesmen have encouraged it. The