For after all it concerns the child; and is it quite an accident that, weaning him away from lovely things that so lovelily call themselves ‘love,’ ‘home,’ ‘mother,’ we can find no more alluring titles for the streets into which we entrap him than ’Educational Facilities,’ ‘Local Examinations,’ ‘Preceptors,’ ‘Pedagogues,’ ‘Professors,’ ‘Matriculations,’ ‘Certificates,’ ‘Diplomas,’ ‘Seminaries,’ Elementary or Primary, and Secondary Codes,’ ‘Continuation Classes,’ ‘Reformatories,’ ‘Inspectors,’ ’Local Authorities,’ ‘Provided’ and ‘Non-Provided,’ ‘Denominational’ and ‘Undenominational,’ and ‘D.Litt.’ and ‘Mus.  Bac.’?  Expressive terms, no doubt!—­but I ask with the poet

     Who can track
     A Grace’s naked foot amid them all?

Take even such words as should be perennially beautiful by connotation-words such as ‘Academy,’ ‘Museum.’  Does the one (O, “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Clapham Academy!”) call up visions of that green lawn by Cephissus, of its olives and plane trees and the mirrored statues among which Plato walked and held discourse with his few?  Does the other as a rule invite to haunts (O God!  O Montreal!) where you can be secure of communion with Apollo and the Nine?  Answer if the word Academy does not first call up to the mind some place where small boys are crammed, the word Museum some place where bigger game are stuffed?

And yet ‘academy,’ ‘museum,’ even ‘education’ are sound words if only we would make the things correspond with their meanings.  The meaning of ‘education’ is a leading out, a drawing-forth; not an imposition of something on somebody—­a catechism or an uncle—­ upon the child; but an eliciting of what is within him.  Now, if you followed my last lecture, we find that which is within him to be no less, potentially, than the Kingdom of God.

I grant that this potentiality is, between the ages of four and sixteen, not always, perhaps not often, evident.  The boy—­in Bagehot’s phrase ’the small apple-eating urchin whom we know’—­ has this in common with the fruit for which he congenitally sins, that his very virtues in immaturity are apt, setting the teeth on edge, to be mistaken for vices.  A writer, to whom I shall recur, has said: 

If an Englishman who had never before tasted an apple were to eat one in July, he would probably come to the conclusion that it was a hard, sour, indigestible fruit, `conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity,’ fit only to be consigned to perdition (on a dust heap or elsewhere).  But if the same man were to wait till October and then eat an apple from the same tree, he would find that the sourness had ripened into wholesome and refreshing acidity; the hardness into firmness of fibre which, besides being pleasant to the palate, makes the apple ‘keep’ better than any other fruit; the indigestibility into certain valuable dietetic qualities, and so on....

In other words—­trench, manure, hoe and