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that the method of studying both the language and the literature is such as to bring the moral qualities of both into direct contact with the pupil's mind. I do not say that the moral education thus secured is of necessity intended by the teacher, or consciously received by the pupil, but that it must be a powerful, and may be made a wholesome influence upon character. In studying these languages and literatures, the pupil is putting himself under the teaching of the races that gave to the world its civilization, its laws, and its manners; the races through whom all the great moral ideas which make human life what it is have been given to the world, save what has come to us from the Hebrews. If we ask what Greece has stood for, and what Rome, in the moral development of mankind, we shall get our answer in certain great moral ideas, wrought out by their history, articulated into their language, crystallized into their institutions, and so bequeathed to the world for its guidance in the path of progress. To bring the plastic mind of youth into close contact with these formative and representative ideas, is to put him under the same process of moral training through which Divine Providence has led the world itself. If it should be suggested that those who have the perfect revelation. of God's will in the Christian Scriptures, do not need to go through these preparatory stages, I reply that the individual character still needs to be subjected to very much the same discipline as that which was applied to the race. I appeal to all who have had experience in watching and assisting the moral development of youths, whether the same questions do not arise, the same dangers do not emerge, the same succession of moral phases and the same progress of moral ideas do not appear in each school or college class, that we see on a

grander scale in the moral history of the world. I might state my point differently, thus: Most persons have a period of moral infancy, a time when they begin to learn the alphabet and elements of morality. It does not always come in youth. It often comes quite out of date, sometimes after the individual seemed to have made considerable attainments in spirituality. In such cases, the elementary work in morality having been omitted, there has to be a fearful breach and a temporary chaos in the moral life, until the foundation can he properly laid and the structure of character begun anew. It is of the utmost importance that this adolescent stage in moral training should come in youth; that these juvenile questions should get started and laid; these crude notions be avowed, exposed, and abandoned. in good season. Now I venture to say,—and the experiences of many Christian scholars sustain me in the assertion,--that a boy often finds his own moral state more nearly paralleled, his own queries echoed, and his mind more naturally led along, by what he reads in Cicero and Æschylus, crude and false though much of it is, than by ethical writings, which, soaring high in the serene air of Christian perfection, do not touch at a single point his unfledged moral experiences.

And this leads me to a remark which the classical teacher must have often made for himself, that classical, especially Greek literature, is far more religious than modern literature. It might be characterized in the words St. Paul applied to the Athenians: "Very religious." It is impossible to read studiously the Greek historians, poets, philosophers, without confronting, on almost every page, some one of the great religious questions which interest all thoughtful persons, and which deeply affect moral character. The Greeks were not

shy of religious suggestions, as we Anglo-Saxons are. Compare Shakspeare and Sophocles, the greatest English and the greatest Greek dramatist. The religious allusions in Shakspeare are very few; his reticence is not the contemptuous silence of unbelief, but the selfrestraint of deep and awe-struck reverence. Sophocles, and the Greek poets generally, pass from what we should call a secular to a sacred theme and tone with the utmost case, and without being conscious of any transition from one sphere of thought to another. This characteristic of Greek literature compels the classical student, in spite of himself, and often without being fully aware of what he is doing, to open his mind to the great questions concerning God and man's accountability and the soul's hercafter. In saying this, I shall not, of course, be understood as suggesting that the teacher "improve" an ethical maxim of Cicero, or a religious reflection in a Greek chorus, into a homily addressed to his class, and so turn a good recitation into a poor Sunday-school exercise. All moral instruction from this source, in order to be effective, must be indirect, suggestive, adapted to stimulate thought and inquiry, rather than decisive and magisterial. And yet I venture the assertion that no bright youth, studying under an active-minded teacher watchful of his oppor tunities, can have read the ordinary school and college classics without having entertained in his mind, with more or less seriousness, almost all the great religious questions that have occupied the best thought of man kind.

It may be supposed by some to be incumbent on me, at this point, to notice an objection sometimes urged against classical studies, and very strongly put by John Foster in his "Essay on the aversion of men of taste

to evangelical religion,"--that is, the danger of imbuing the youthful mind with paganized ideas of religion. This is one of those objections to classical study,--and there are many such,—that are rather plausible than real. The youthful mind runs about the same risk of having its theology confused by incursions from the Greek Pantheon that it does of having its astronomy disturbed by the fantastical guesses of the Pythagorean system. The veriest tyro in the classics makes a difference in his own mind between the religious ideas and the mythological personages and events of Greek and Roman literature. The one he sees to be the product of the conviction and the conscience. These ideas were seriously entertained; they impress him accordingly; they stand as links in the chain of comparative ethics, or as interesting facts in the history of natural religion. He instinctively compares them with the tenets of Christianity, and allots them their value according to the nearness of their approach to the doctrines of revealed religion. That they come to him with any authority, because they are found in the classics, or that in their attractive guise they steal into his heart and his creed, may be dismissed as a chimera. The alarm is the product of no man's experience. As for the gods and goddesses, the intrigues and scandals of classic mythology, these he perceives to be the products of a playful and often unchaste imagination, and they have no more effect on his theological opinions than the fairy stories of his infancy, or the machinery of the poets of his own race.

A more plausible objection is sometimes brought against the reading of the classic authors on the ground of their impurity. Plato himself objected to the drama for this reason. Let it be at once admitted that an un

chaste literature is wholly unfit to be "turned with daily and nightly hand" by boys and girls. This position need not be argued, but the admission would rule out a very large part of the dramatic literature of all nationshalf of the English and German, two-thirds of the French, three-fourths of the Italian, by far the larger portion of the Elizabethan Drama, almost all that of the Restoration, more than half the novels since Richardson's and Fielding's, and especially those written by women. By the side of the Gothic and romance literatures, those of Greece and Rome, especially the former, are of remarkable purity. Search the whole range of poetry, pagan and Christian, and where do you find so chaste a poet as Homer? Shakspeare certainly is not, nor Milton, nor Dante, nor Tasso, nor Goethe. Till you get to Scott, you will hardly find him, and you lose him again in the line of the Byrons, the Moores, the Morrises, and the Swinburnes. That there are gross passages here and there in the classical writers, on which the conscientious teacher would not wish to have his pupil's mind rest for an instant, is too true; it is none the less true, because such passages occur more frequently in modern literature; this fact, however, relieves classic literature of the odium of being especially guilty in this respect, and enforces, not on classic teachers only, but on all who direct the reading of young persons the duty of watching against evil from this

source.

Let us now specify two or three of the representative moral ideas which are prominent in classic literature, and which have great educating power over young minds. First, there is the idea of virtue as consisting in selfcontrol. The Greek language itself is a constant lesson of self-control.

The Greeks, better than any