human mind, by a treatise on the training proper for the intellectual and moral faculties.  Education by these and other writers was being conceived in a wider sense than had been known to ages controlled by ecclesiastical collegians.  It slowly came to be thought of in connection with the family.  The improvement of ideas upon education was only one phase of that great general movement towards the restoration of the family, which was so striking a spectacle in France after the middle of the century.  Education now came to comprehend the whole system of the relations between parents and their children, from earliest infancy to maturity.  The direction of this wider feeling about such relations tended strongly towards an increased closeness in them, more intimacy, and a more continuous suffusion of tenderness and long attachment.  All this was part of the general revival of naturalism.  People began to reflect that nature was not likely to have designed infants to be suckled by other women than their own mothers, nor that they should be banished from the society of those who are most concerned in their well-being, from the cheerful hearth and wise affectionate converse of home, to the frigid discipline of colleges and convents and the unamiable monition of strangers.

Then the rising rebellion against the church and its faith perhaps contributed something towards a movement which, if it could not break the religious monopoly of instruction, must at least introduce the parent as a competitor with the priestly instructor for influence over the ideas, habits, and affections of his children.  The rebellion was aimed against the spirit as well as the manner of the established system.  The church had not fundamentally modified the significance of the dogma of the fall and depravity of man; education was still conceived as a process of eradication and suppression of the mystical old Adam.  The new current flowed in channels far away from that black folly of superstition.  Men at length ventured once more to look at one another with free and generous gaze.  The veil of the temple was rent, and the false mockeries of the shrine of the Hebrew divinity made plain to scornful eyes.  People ceased to see one another as guilty victims cowering under a divine curse.  They stood erect in consciousness of manhood.  The palsied conception of man, with his large discourse of reason looking before and after, his lofty and majestic patience in search for new forms of beauty and new secrets of truth, his sense of the manifold sweetness and glory and awe of the universe, above all, his infinite capacity of loyal pity and love for his comrades in the great struggle, and his high sorrow for his own wrong-doing,—­the palsied and crushing conception of this excellent and helpful being as a poor worm, writhing under the vindictive and meaningless anger of an omnipotent tyrant in the large heavens, only to be appeased by sacerdotal intervention, was fading back into those