in its general tendency a friend to the promotion of virtue and to the discouragement of vice.  It sets us often unquestionably above many of the corruptive opinions and customs in the midst of which we live.  It leads us also frequently to the contemplation of the Divine Being in all the variety of his works.  It gives us amiable, awful, and sublime conceptions of him.  As far, therefore, as it is capable of doing this, it is a useful, though it be only a subordinate source of our purity, and we may therefore adopt it innocently.  But we are never to forget, at the same time, that, though it may help us occasionally to resist corrupt temptations, and to encourage desirable propensities, yet it cannot do every thing for us that is necessary, and that we are never to overlook, on this account, the necessity of the influence of the Holy Spirit.

To shew in what the education, which under these limitations I am going to propose, may consist, I shall revive the controversy between the philosophical moralists and the Quakers, as described in the eighth chapter of the first volume.  The philosophical moralists contended, that knowledge was to be preferred, as being more to be relied upon than prohibitions:  that prohibitions were often causes of greater evils than they were intended to prevent; that they themselves were friends to occasional indulgencies; that they saw nothing necessarily or inherently mischievous in the amusements of the world; that it was not wise to anticipate danger by looking to distant prospects, where the things were innocent in themselves; that ignorance of vice was no guardian of morals; that causes, and not sub-causes, were to be contended against; and that there was no certain security but in knowledge and in a love of virtue.  To this the Quakers replied, that prohibitions were sanctioned by divine authority; that as far as they related to the corrupt amusements of the world, they were implied in the spirit of Christianity; that the knowledge, which should be promotive of virtue, could not be inculcated without them; that knowledge again, if it were to be acquired by the permission of occasional indulgences, or by being allowed to pass through scenes which might be dangerous to virtue, would be more ruinous than ignorance by a prohibition of vice; that ignorance of vice was an essential in Christian morals; and that prohibitions therefore were indispensably necessary, and better to be relied upon, than any corrupt knowledge, which might arise from an acquaintance with the customs of the world.

This then was the state of the controversy, as described in the first volume.  And in this state it was left.  But, to explain the education which I have in view, I shall now bring it to a conclusion.