Such an one and no other, I conceive, has had a liberal education; for he is, as completely as a man can be, in harmony with Nature.  He will make the best of her, and she of him.  They will get on together rarely; she as his ever beneficent mother; he as her mouth-piece, her conscious self, her minister and interpreter.

Where is such an education as this to be had?  Where is there any approximation to it?  Has any one tried to found such an education?  Looking over the length and breadth of these islands, I am afraid that all these questions must receive a negative answer.  Consider our primary schools, and what is taught in them.  A child learns:—­

1.  To read, write, and cipher, more or less well; but in a very large proportion of cases not so well as to take pleasure in reading, or to be able to write the commonest letter properly.

2.  A quantity of dogmatic theology, of which the child, nine times out of ten, understands next to nothing.

3.  Mixed up with this, so as to seem to stand or fall with it, a few of the broadest and simplest principles of morality.  This, to my mind, is much as if a man of science should make the story of the fall of the apple in Newton’s garden, an integral part of the doctrine of gravitation, and teach it as of equal authority with the law of the inverse squares.

4.  A good deal of Jewish history and Syrian geography, and, perhaps, a little something about English history and the geography of the child’s own country.  But I doubt if there is a primary school in England in which hangs a map of the hundred in which the village lies, so that the children may be practically taught by it what a map means.

5.  A certain amount of regularity, attentive obedience, respect for others:  obtained by fear, if the master be incompetent or foolish; by love and reverence, if he be wise.

So far as this school course embraces a training in the theory and practice of obedience to the moral laws of Nature, I gladly admit, not only that it contains a valuable educational element, but that, so far, it deals with the most valuable and important part of all education.  Yet, contrast what is done in this direction with what might be done; with the time given to matters of comparatively no importance; with the absence of any attention to things of the highest moment; and one is tempted to think of Falstaff’s bill and “the halfpenny worth of bread to all that quantity of sack.”

Let us consider what a child thus “educated” knows, and what it does not know.  Begin with the most important topic of all—­morality, as the guide of conduct.  The child knows well enough that some acts meet with approbation and some with disapprobation.  But it has never heard that there lies in the nature of things a reason for every moral law, as cogent and as well defined as that which underlies every physical law; that stealing and lying are just as certain to be followed by evil consequences,