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AMERICAN SCHOOL SYSTEM.

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fœtid tide of official corruption, is so fearful as the gradual decrease in our habits of obedience. This is a result of the "inalienable right of liberty" which we enjoy so fully; and is shown in the impaired force of parental influence, a greater disregard of the rights and comforts of others, and an increasing tendency to evade or defy the authority of the law.'

It does not occur to the Board to ask-Is there no connexion between a prematurely forced education and this impaired parental influence?'

The City Superintendent of Schools- our second witness--we quote merely for corroboration, first, however, presenting the Engligh reader with a true American-drawn picture. What child could be so barbarous, so utterly lost to a sense of pleasure and sublimity, as to refuse to patronize such an institution as this pleasant public school?—

'From two and four hundred children in the primary and grammar schools, to eight hundred and a thousand in the primary departments, are each morning assembled quietly and systematically, without noise, confusion, or disorder. Amid the profoundest stillness and attention, a select portion of the Christian Scriptures is read by the principal; the Lord's prayer is then reverently repeated by the children in concert, at the close of which, and at the touch of the teacher's bell, their little voices break out into the beautiful music of their devotional and other songs, and then each class passes to its own room, under the charge of its instructor, to enter upon the various studies of the day. At the end of each hour, they are again assembled for a temporary recess, made delightful by vocal and instrumental music, and alternated with relaxation and exercise in the play-ground; and at the end of the school-day are dismissed with substantially the same formalities as solemnized its opening. Thus pleasantly and happily the hours pass away in an atmosphere of love, kindness, and improvement; and the acquisition of knowledge is accompanied by the formation of habits of order, industry, punctuality, neatness, and mutual affection and regard.'

The character of the instruction afforded is such as we might expect in all public schools where children are taught by mere perfunctory teachers. The following extract will serve to throw some light on our

previous quotation:

'That culture which regards exclusively or primarily the mere attainment of knowledge, to whatsoever extent it may be carried, or to whatsoever degree of advancement it may be enabled to arrive, cannot be otherwise than essentially and fatally defective. And yet it is not to be denied that hitherto the course of instruction in all our systems of popular education, public and private, has far too generally assumed this direction. Hence, while the boundaries of science have been almost indefinitely extended in every direction, and while knowledge has been almost universally diffused throughout every civilized community, no corresponding advancement has been made in public and private morality and virtue.'

This writer demands a compulsory system, in order to bring in the fifty thousand truants.

We have one witness more. The Ven. Archdeacon Sinclair, treasurer of the National Society, lately visited America, with the special view of inquiring into the merits of the common school system. We take the following from his Report. First, on the character of the education received by the children:

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'Such as were absent,' says a Philadelphia report, suffered less by their inattention than many of those whose morals have been thus undesignedly injured at the country's expense!'

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Another morsel:

'I think,' remarked a teacher, ‘I ought to give a little more of moral instruc tion, for already two of my scholars have been hanged for murder.'

The teachers come next; and we are told that the complaints are constant of the inability of the teacher, his moral habits, and the bad condition of the schools."

Another and still stronger testimony is from the editor of the Massa chussetts 'Journal of Education,' who declares that not one teacher in ten is fit to have the care of children, and expresses his belief that State must be shaken to ruins under the present training of American youths.'

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We have here testimony to three things:

1. That the common school system does not entice the child who most need education to school. The probability is, that those who could well afford to pay take advantage of the gratuitous character of the instruction.

2. That it fails to secure the very first condition of good educationnamely, good teachers.

3. That under this system, the habits of obedience and the morals of the children are rapidly deteriorating.

We may safely prediet, under these circumstances, that this much lauded experiment will very soon be relinquished by those who have any care for the best interests of America. Already many of the most influential of the ministers of religion are setting their faces against it. If the churches should follow, the end will not be distant.

We ought to remark, that for the quotations from Archdeacon Sinclair's book we are indebted to an article in the 'Patriot' news paper, The book is now out of print, but if the question of National Education should come before Parliament again, we believe that it is the author's intention to re-write and expand it.

A Christian Common-Place Book.

SELECTIONS FROM THE SERMONS OF THE REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER, OF BROOKLYN, NEW YORK.

You have seen a ship out on the bay, swinging with the tide, and seeming as if it would follow it; and yet it cannot, for down beneath the water it is anchored. So many a soul sways towards heaven, but cannot ascend thither, because it is anchored to some secret sin.

Our best actions are often those of which we are unconscious; but this can never be unless we are always yearning to do good.

In my garden at the West, I used

sometimes to notice that the finest heads of lettuce were not in the beds, but on some southern ridge, where they I had chanced to grow. It seemed as though random seeds always did the best, from a kind of wild emulation; but they never grew without the sowing, and the chance-sown seed was never

wild.

In this world, it is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us

rich.

When a man unites with the church,

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he should not come saying, 'I am so holy that I think I must go in among the saints,' but, 'O brethren, I find I am so weak and wicked that I cannot stand alone; so, if you can help me, open the door and let me enter.'

A man will confess sins in general; but those sins which he would not have his neighbour know for his right hand, which bow him down with shame like a wind-stricken bulrush, those he passes over in his prayer. Men are willing to be thought sinful in disposition; but in special acts they are disposed to praise themselves. They therefore confess their depravity and defend their conduct. They are wrong in general, but right in particular.

No man can go down into the dungeon of his experience, and hold the torch of God's word to all its dark chambers, and hidden cavities, and slimy recesses, and not come up with a shudder and a chill, and an earnest cry to God for divine mercy and cleansing.

Men think religion bears the same FLRT relation to life that flowers do to trees. The tree must grow through a long period before the blossoming time; so they think religion is to be a blossom just before death, to secure heaven. But the Bible represents religion, not as the latest fruit of life, but as the whole of it-beginning, middle, and end. It is simply right living.

When engineers would bridge a stream, they often carry over at first bat a single cord. With that, next, they stretch a wire across. Then strand is added to strand, until a foundation is laid for planks; and now the bold engineer finds safe footway, and walks from side to side. So God takes from us some golden-threaded pleasure, and stretches it hence into heaven. Then he takes a child, and then a friend. Thus he bridges death, and teaches the thoughts of the most timid to find their way hither and thither between the shores.

God has appointed certain insects, birds, and beasts to be destroyers. They consume decaying matters; they roll up and feast on filth. To their palate life is unseasoned and insipid, but death has flavour. Such, also, are minor critics in literature, cynics in morals, and heresy-hunters in religion.

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Many pray to be made men in Christ Jesus,' and think in some miraculous way it will be given to them; but God says, 'I will try my child, and see if he is sincere,' and so he lays a burden upon him, and says, Now stand up under it, for thus you are to grow strong.' He sends a provocation, and says to him, 'Be patient.' He throws him into perplexities, and says, Where now are thy resources?' If the ambitious ore dreads the furnace, the forge, the anvil, the rasp, and the file, it should never desire to be made a sword. Man is the iron, and God is the smith; and we are always either in the forge or on the anvil. God is shaping us for higher things.

Three natural philosophers go out into the forest and find a nightingale's nest, and forthwith they begin to discuss the habits of the bird, its size, its colour, and the number of eggs it lays, and one pulls out of his pocket a treatise of Buffon, and another of Cuvier, and another of Audubon, and they read and dispute till at length the quarrel runs so high over the empty nest, that they tear each other's leaves, and get red in the face, and the woods ring with their conflict; when, lo! out of the green shade of a neighbouring thicket, the bird itself, rested, and disturbed by these side noises, begins to sing. At first its song is soft and low, and then it rises and swells, and waves of melody float up over the trees, and fill the air with tremulous music, and all the forest doth hush; and the entranced philosophers, subdued and ashamed of their quarrel, shut their books, and walk home without a word.

I am suspicious of that church whose members are one in their beliefs and opinions. When a tree is dead, it will lie any way; alive, it will have its own growth. When men's deadness is in the church, and their life elsewhere, all will be alike. They can be cut and polished any way. When they are alive, they are like a tropical forestsome shooting up, like the mahogany tree, some spreading, like the vine; some darkling, like the shrub; some lying, herblike, on the ground; but all obeying their own laws of growth,-a common law of growth variously expressed in each,-and so contributing to the richness and beauty of the wood.

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Record of Christian Missions.

THE CHRISTIAN SPECTATOR is avowedly a Nonconformist periodical. Indeed, it has not sought at any time to conceal the fact that it would be identified with the most advanced rank of Dissent-its dissidence' being, necessarily, one of the vital principles of its Christianity. But we have very rarely, we believe, sought to obtrude this feature before our readers, and in the 'Record of Christian Missions' we have not merely studiously, but of freest choice and pleasure, made no distinction of sects or denominations. Here we are glad, as we read and write, to look at the world from the purely Christian point of view only,―to endeav to look at it in some measure as we may when we shall see all things without de dark glass of the present life. We have rejoiced, yea, and we shall rejoice, the same joy over all the successes of missionary effort. We ask not whether this man or that has turned from his dead idols to serve in the ranks of Episcopary Independency-we only ask, has he turned unto the living God? For we believe that we walk most closely in the footsteps of the great Son of God when we recognise his children only as Sons with him of God, and heirs of the same glorious promisc.

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What, now, can we say of our Episcopal brethren, when we find them quarrelling over not even a form of principle, but the mere time for the application of a rule of government, and month after month fighting each other in the columns of their missionary journals? In such a war are the Colonial Chronicle' and the 'Church Missionary Intelligencer' now engaged. And about what? does the reader ask. Why, simply and solely about the time that bishops should be sent to missionary stations! Says the Chronicle'-Bishops first, priests second, laymen third, the heathen last as though that was to be the order of their accession to heavenly and spiritual dignities! Says the 'IntelligencerAny Christian first who will do the work of a Christian in seeking to convert sous to God! Of course the Intelligencer' is right, but is it not an indignity to our common Christianity to discuss such a question? Who, in his heart, believe that there should be no missions until there is a 'Bishop' to superintend them? The 'Chronicle' says so-but any good Christian will say, the Chronicle' is but asleep, or at worst tipsy-and though a tipsy Christian may be an the wine of spiritual or sectarian pride may be so strong as to overcome a good man unawares. Good Christian men, both of you drop the subject, and for once let your Episcopacy give way to your Christianity!

But there is a paragraph in the 'Intelligencer' which, as

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anomaly, yet

Dissenters,

we are

anxious to quote for the sake of Dissent itself. It relates to right of individual

action in religious matters, and expresses a good' opinion so

aptly and well that

Iwe quote it with unusual pleasure. We are not sure whether certain Nonconformist churches might not study it. Is not the reader of the same opinion?

But is it true that individual earnestness, unless brought into action by the authority of the Church, and moving in the precise channel which that authority prescribes, is to be considered as something irregular, defective, without any scriptural warrant that it will be recognised, and even when it is blessed, yet from its inherent inadequacy to any great work, carrying with it only a very limited

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needs wait for the Church's call, before it addresses itself to do God's work, and improve the present, yet quickly passing opportunity? One of the most remarkable missionary movements in the early missionary action of the Christian Church, as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, was the occupation of Antioch as a missionary station. What decided its selection ? The apostles at Jerusalem, as the body in which was centralized the power of action, did they recognise its importance as a door of access to heathen lands beyond, and did they select the men who were to go forward to the fulfilment of this important undertaking? Not at all its occupation was, as it were, incidental, under unseen influences, not under human direction. "They who were scattered abroad went everywhere preaching the word." They went in different directions, as circumstances led them, and some of them reached to Antioch, and there, in a new place, they commenced a new work, of which the apostles knew nothing. It was a more matter of individual earnestness; and yet so large and important did the work become, that when tidings of these things came unto the ears of the church which was in Jerusalem, they sent forth Barnabas, that he should go as far as Antioch. We say, then, that the theory, plausible as it seems, and likely to impose on some minds, is not scriptural nay, indeed, and likely to tie up all the actings of individual to some central human authority, to which everything must be deferred, and which must dictate in all matters, would be to interfere with the free action of the Spirit of God, who is the great living administrator, dwelling in the mystical body of Christ's people, and working through the various members as seemeth best to him for the accomplishment of his own purposes.' Now let us leave sects and forms, and come to the work that is being done for Christ.

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earnestness

The Bishop of New Zealand is an evangelist as well as a bishop. We have quoted before from his admirably written journals. He has lately been making a tour of his extensive and rather romantic diocese, and in the most familiar style has described what he has seen. He is here endeavouring, not too obtrusively or pertinaciously, to establish friendly intercourse with the savages. There is a painter's hand as well as a Christian's heart in the subjoined sketches :

'As we approached Lopevi, the mountain presented a grand appearance, with light misty clouds, resting on the top of the great cone of cinders, which seemed as fresh as if the volcanic fire had but just gone out. The base of the mountain was fringed with bright foliage, resting upon the dark masses of igneous rock, against which a thin line of sparkling surf was breaking gently, as each heave of the deep blue sea rolled in from without. At the sight of our boat the rocks swarmed with men and boys, jumping from mass to mass as we rocked along ; and if we paused for a moment, throwing themselves into the sea to swim to the boat. At one place a large canoe was launched, but it was swamped immediately by the crowd which rushed into it. Knowing that our boat would soon be in the same plight if we allowed any number of swimmers to approach us, we held on our course till we came to the west side of the island, where a smooth beach of dark sand offered a convenient landing-place. Most of our pursuers had been left behind; but there was still a considerable number ready to receive us, and among them an old man partially blind, who had persevered in following us for some distance, waving, as he went along, a bunch of a tree in token of friendship. With some trouble we made the rest of the party sit down on the beach, while

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