the analogy!  In the one case you have an aggregation of particles crystallized into shape, without organism, life or motion.  In the other, you have life, growth, expansion.  In the first you have a mass of limestone, neither more nor less than insensate matter, utterly incapable of any alteration from within itself.  In the second, you have a living body, a mind, affections instinct with power, gifted with vitality, and forming the attributes of a being allied to and only a little lower than the angels.  These constitute a life which, by its inherent force, must grow and unfold itself by a law of its own, whether you educate it or not.  Some development it will make, some form it will assume by its own irrepressible and spontaneous action.  The question, with us, is rather what that form shall be; whether it shall wear the visible robes of an immortal with a countenance glowing with the intelligence and pure affection of cherub and seraph, or through the rags and sensual impress of an earthly, send forth only occasional gleams of its higher nature.  The great work of education is to stimulate and direct this native power of growth.  God and the subject, co-working, effect all the rest.

In the wide sense in which it is proposed to consider the subject of education, three things are pre-supposed—­personal talents, personal application, and the divine blessing.  Without capacities to be developed, or with very inferior capacities, education is either wholly useless, or only partially successful.  As it has no absolute creative power, and is utterly unable to add a single faculty to the mind, so the first condition of its success is the capacity for improvement in the subject.  An idiot may be slightly affected by it, but the feebleness of his original powers forbids the noblest result of education.  It teaches men how most successfully to use their own native force, and by exercise to increase it, but in no case can it supply the absence of that force.  It is not its province to inspire genius, since that is the breath of God in the soul, bestowed as seemeth to him good, and at the disposal of no finite power.  It is enough if it unfold and discipline, and guide genius in its mission to the world.  We are not to demand that it shall make of every man a Newton, a Milton, a Hall, a Chalmers, a Mason, a Washington; or of every woman a Sappho, a De Stael, a Roland, a Hemans.

The supposition that all intellects are originally equal, however flattering to our pride, is no less prejudicial to the cause of education than false in fact.  It throws upon teachers the responsibility of developing talents that have scarcely an existence, and securing attainments within the range of only the very finest powers, during the period usually assigned to this work.  To the ignorant it misrepresents and dishonors education, when it presents for their judgment a very inferior intellect, which all the training of the schools has not inspired with power,