hardened; where there was gentleness, we see roughness and coarseness; where there was obedience, we find murmuring, and self-will, and pride; where there was a true and blameless conversation, we find now something of falsehood, something of profaneness, something of impurity.  I can well conceive what it must be to a parent to see his child return from school, for the first time, with the marks of this grievous change upon him:  I can well conceive how bitterly he must regret having ever sent him to a place of so much, danger; how fondly he must look back to the days of his early innocence.  And if a parent feels thus, what must be our feelings, seeing that this evil has been wrought here?  Are we not as those who, when pretending to give a wholesome draught, have mixed the cup with poison?  How can we go on upholding a system, the effects of which appear to be so merely mischievous?

Believe me, that such questions must and ought to present themselves to the mind of every thinking man who is concerned in the management of a school:  and I do think that we could not answer them satisfactorily, that our work would absolutely be unendurable, if we did not bear in mind that our eyes should look forward, and not backward; if we did not remember that the victory of fallen man is to be sought for, not in innocence, but in tried virtue.  Comparing only the state of a boy after his first half-year, or year, at school, with his earlier state as a child, and our reflections on the evil of our system would be bitter indeed; but when we compare a boy’s state after his first half-year, or year, at school, with what it is afterwards; when we see the clouds again clearing off; when we find coarseness succeeded again by delicacy; hardness and selfishness again broken up, and giving place to affection and benevolence; murmuring and self-will exchanged for humility and self-denial; and the profane, or impure, or false tongue, uttering again only the words of truth and purity; and when we see that all these good things are now, by God’s grace, rooted in the character; that they have been tried, and grown up amidst the trial; that the knowledge of evil has made them hate it the more, and be the more aware of it; then we can look upon our calling with patience, and even with thankfulness; we see that the wilderness has been gone through triumphantly, and that its dangers have hardened and strengthened the traveller for all his remaining pilgrimage.

For the truth is, that to the knowledge of good and evil we are born; and it must come upon us sooner or later.  In the common course of things, it comes about that age with which we are here most concerned.  I do not mean that there are not faults in early childhood—­we know that there are;—­but we know also that with the strength and rapid growth of boyhood there is a far greater development of these faults, and particularly far less of that submissiveness which belonged naturally to the helplessness of mere childhood.