I would particularly urge this point, which is the most important and most delicate of all. Before we can decide on what should constitute a true primary normal school, we must determine what ought to be the character of a simple elementary school, that is, a humble village school. The popular schools of a nation ought to be imbued with the religious spirit of that nation. Now without going into the question of diversities of doctrine, is Christianity, or is it not, the religion of the people of France? It cannot be denied that it is. I ask then, is our object to respect the religion of the people, or to destroy it? If we mean to set about destroying it, then, I allow, we ought by no means to have it taught in the people's schools. But if the object we propose to ourselves is totally different, we must teach our children that religion which civilized our fathers; that religion whose liberal spirit prepared, and can alone sustain, all the great institutions of modern times. We must also permit the clergy to fulfil their first duty, the superintendence of religious instruction. But in order to stand the test of this superintendence with honor, the schoolmaster must be enabled to give adequate religious instruction; otherwise parents, in order to be sure that their children receive a good religious education, will require us to appoint ecclesiastics as schoolmasters, which, though assuredly better than having irreligious schoolmasters, would be liable to very serious objections of various kinds. The less we desire our schools to be ecclesiastical, the more ought they to be Christian. It necessarily follows, that there must be a course of special religious instruction in our normal schools. Religion is, in my eyes, the best — perhaps the only basis of popular education. I know something of Europe, and never have I seen good schools where the spirit of christian charity was wanting. Primary instruction flourishes in three countries, Holland, Scotland and Germany; in all it is profoundly religious. It is said to be so in America. The little popular instruction I ever found in Italy came from the priests. In France, with few exceptions, our best schools for the poor are those of the Frères de la Doctrine Chrétienne (Brothers of the Christian Doctrine.) These are facts which it is necessary to be incessantly repeating to certain persons. Let them go into the schools of the poor, let them learn what patience, what resignation are required to induce a man to persevere in so toilsome an employment. Have better nurses ever been found than those benevolent nuns who bestow on poverty all those attentions we pay to wealth? There are things in human society, which can neither be conceived nor accomplished without virtue, that is to say, when speaking of the mass, without religion. The schools for the middle classes may be an object of speculation; but the country schools, the miserable little schools in the south, in the west, in Britanny, in the mountains of Auvergne, and, without going so far, VOL. IX. No. 25.

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the lowest schools of our great cities, of Paris itself, will never hold out any adequate inducement to persons seeking a renumerating occupation. There will doubtless be some philosophers inspired with the ardent philanthrophy of Saint Vincent de Paule, without his religious enthusiasm, who would devote themselves to this austere vocation; but the question is not to have here and there a master. We have more than forty thousand schools to serve, and it were wise to call religion to the aid of our insufficient means, were it but for the alleviation of the pecuniary burthens of the nation. Either you must lavish the treasures of the State, and the revenues of the communes, in order to give salaries, and even pensions, to that new order of tradesmen called schoolmasters; or you must not imagine you can do without christian charity, and that spirit of poverty, humility, courageous resignation, and modest dignity, which Christianity, rightly understood and wisely taught, can alone give to the teachers of the people. The more I think of all this, the more I look at the schools in this country, the more I talk with the directors of normal shools and councillors of the ministry, the more I am strengthened in the conviction that we must make any efforts or any sacrifices to come to a good understanding with the clergy on the subject of popular education, and to constitute religion a special and very carefully-taught branch of instruction in our primary normal schools.

I am not ignorant, that this advice will grate on the ears of many persons, and that I shall be thought extremely dèrot at Paris. Yet it is not from Rome, but from Berlin, that I address you. The man who holds this language to you is a philosopher, formerly disliked, and even persecuted, by the priesthood; but this philosopher has a mind too little affected by the recollection of his own insults, and is too well acquainted with human nature and with history, not to regard religion as an indestructible power: genuine Christianity, as a means of civilization for the people, and a necessary support for those on whom society imposes irksome and humble duties, without the slightest prospect of fortune, without the least gratification of self-love.

If it be yet a question, whether Christianity is true, it is a very grave question; the mind and labor employed on it have been well employed, and centuries more may be wisely devoted to the investigation of it. But it is not so; the intelligence and virtue of society are on the side of the Bible. The argument for it has not been answered; no attempt to answer it has been made, by any man of reputation, during the last thirty years. The men, especially, who have most at stake in the fortunes of this government, who will have to bear the responsibility of a failure in our experiment of republican liberty, in the judgment

of the world and of posterity, are, by a countless majority, sincere believers in the christian religion. And shall it be a question, what use they are to make of this religion, in the education of their children, and in attempting to build up a literature for their country?

Let me not be understood to intimate a wish, to see the halls of science converted into arenas for theological polemics, and our young men engaged in the subtilties of metaphysical divinity, or the peculiar tenets of kindred sects. Christianity does not consist essentially in these things. The great questions of the origin of evil," foreknowledge, fate, free-will," must, indeed, be painfully studied by every thinking man. The mind is yet in its infancy which has not tried its strength upon them. We cannot reason, or think, long on any subject, without encountering them. The study of our moral sentiments, of law, and civil polity, all investigation of human character and the social relations, leads ultimately to these fundamental questions. And it is some satisfaction, to find, that if inquiry never succeeds in penetrating the mystery, it never fails to teach the much needed lesson of modesty and humility in the exercise of our intellectual powers. But, it should be considered, that these are not properly christian subjects; they are connected with the gospel, only because they belong to all religion. They are, really, subjects of a more general philosophy. They belong to our moral nature, and the universal providence of God; and are no otherwise related to Christianity than as Christianity involves the questions of dependence and accountability. They were earnestly and anxiously discussed before the coming of Christ, and where he was never heard of. They would continue to agitate the human mind, if the Bible were demonstrated to be false.

The peculiarities of Christianity are of another kind. It explains none of the mysteries of the divine or human nature; it leaves them all as it found them. It has to do only with the moral condition of man; it assumes his apostasy and misery here, and his responsibility to the Judge of the world, hereafter. It is a manifestation of God in the flesh, for the recovery of man to the image and favor of his Maker. Laying aside every prejudice and every feeling arising from other sources, who ever opens the sacred Scriptures without finding associations and emotions excited within him which no human production, no contemplation of nature herself, no train of unaided human thought

was ever known to awaken? We seem, at once, transported to another world. Another firmament overhangs us; other objects surround us; we are no longer conversant with the same minds; are no longer ourselves the same beings. It is not merely, that we have turned to the consideration of grave subjects. History is full of solemn scenes and solemn lessons. Philosophy has found her favorite themes in the serious and even melancholy aspects of our nature. The heart bleeds at the pictures which Pliny and Cicero have drawn of human existence.

Nor are we thus affected by the inspired volume, because it removes us, for the time, from the real world. Poetry does this. With one stroke of her wand, she calls up a new creation. She speaks, and the dead arise; time and space are annihilated. She strikes her harp, and the groves, the fountains, earth and air, are all instinct with life and joy. Yet how unlike to this is the transformation effected by the inspired volume. careful preparation, no studied scheme of thought, no laborious process of argument, no ingenious succession of images, with the simplicity of the original command, it says again, Let there be light, and there is light. We seem to stand before God. We hear him again among the trees of the garden. We see his image on the face of nature. We perceive his finger on the springs of life. We feel the inspiration of his breath in the monitions of conscience, and the impulses of holy feeling within us. Our animal nature, our earthly relations seem to be all mere accidents of our being, the trifles of our childhood. The visions of our fancy have disappeared; the great reality is known. We are no longer without God in the world. He has come once more to his own. The love, the tenderness, the grandeur, the glory of that coming, what tongue can tell, what heart conceive? Scarcely for a righteous man will one die, yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die; but God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet enemies, Christ died for us. The heart must be petrified, that is not melted. The soul is imbruted, which does not feel, that to be right, to be true, to be holy, to seek for glory and honor and immortality is the great end and perfection of life. The sum of Christianity is contained in this revelation of Christ, and in the consequent gift of the Holy Spirit, to convince, to convert and to sanctify. The Christian world are certainly justified in taking high ground on this subject; and I propose to suggest with a

little more distinctness, several reasons, to be found in the nature of the gospel itself, why its spirit should be assiduously cultivated in a course of academic education.

The first I have to mention is, that this is eminently a free spirit.

It is well understood by the advocates of error, that there is argument in a name. Infidelity has long challenged respect under the specious titles of liberality, philosophy, free-thinking; as if the religion of the Bible were narrow, unphilosophical, slavish. Unfortunately the history of the world and of Christianity itself has given a charm to these inspiring terms, which it requires no little resolution to dissolve, even when they are obviously made the mere watchwords of a party. Under these names great battles have been fought; great triumphs of principle achieved; the proudest honors of humanity gained. The revolution effected by Luther was alone sufficient to sanctify for centuries the venerated words inscribed on the banner of reform. It is hardly possible, that men should feel so much of the foundation they had rested on shaking and crumbling away, without suspicion of the whole. One of the immediate results of the reformation of old abuses of the church was, naturally, a degree of distrust of every thing ancient and established; and, in a certain class of minds, a proud, disdainful skepticism, in regard to the gospel itself under the idea of mental liberty. Revelation was associated with the superstitions of popery; to be a Christian and a papist was, to many, the same thing- equally servile and contemptible. Even to this day the language of indignant liberty upon the preposterous pretensions and thorough corruption of the Roman clergy, is dished up, for the thousandth time, whenever the worst passions of the worst men are to be made subservient to the purposes of demagogues and mountebanks. The cry of priestcraft, spiritual despotism, the union of church and State, is raised, in certain quarters, not only upon the question of missions, and sabbath mails, but of negro emancipation, and temperance, and education. We cannot attempt to free the bodies or the souls of men, without rousing the jealousy of this jealous goddess of liberty.

It is much to be regretted, that in our own country, where the first lesson of childhood and the latest sentiment that falters on the lips or warms the blood of age, is love of freedom, there should have been a tacit acquiescence in this false and impudent claim on the part of sceptics and disorganizers, to liber