tained by a Redeemer through the sacrifice of his death, when the nature of that sacrifice and the conditions of salvation, with the whole science of redemption, are perfectly unknown. The visitor must be on his guard against giving countenance to any volubility on religious matters; he must take no other test of newness of life than a change of conduct; nor must the mere outward conduct be his guide, he must both try and prove his faith as he would teach a child to walk; now trying him in the leading strings of affection, now placing him a little from him that he may, when his strength appears failing, rush back into his arms without falling; nor must he be surprised, if he occasionally make a false step or a stumble, for this should only fill him with greater anxiety and induce him to renewed efforts. Day by day he must pray with him and for him, for renewed strength and assistance from on high; and lure him by the promises of the gospel, to the comforts of redeeming grace, and by the sweet love wherewith he is called from sin, to a perception of the beauty of holiness, and to that world of which holiness in this is the type and shadow.

But as religion is the most important thing that can by any possibility concern the individual, as on it depends the happiness or misery of the immortal soul, the visitor should not presume to instil his own particular religious notions on his object; it will be his duty carefully to ascertain to what Christian sect he may belong, and on all occasions to obtain the co-operations of the Christian minister. It would be bigotry in the extreme and cruelty as great, to take the opportunity which poverty and sickness gives us over both the body and the mind, to infix the dogmas of our sect. There are always the broad and fundamental doctrines, the essentials of religion, such as Christians of all denominations admit, which may be applied without difficulty, to all circumstances in which the poor may be sunk. And these are written with a sunbeam throughout the Bible. But there are other non-essential points upon which the world ever has and always will be at issue-which an honest Christian would as soon think of enforcing upon the conscience, as he would the doctrine of transubstantiation, or of purgatory. He is not to perplex the mind with the subtilties of schoolmen or of fiery controversialists. Nay, he ought not to drop a hint that Christians disagree at all, much less that they do so upon the means of salvation. In the hour of trial, or when sickness lies heavy on the body, and death is perhaps staring the poor victim in the face, it is not a time to disturb the smallest particle of holy faith, or to raise a single difficulty or doubt relating to a non-essential point. God's mercy, through a Saviour's love, the Comforter's eternal presence, is surely enough to rouse the soul to a sense of gratitude, and to convince it of sin, and call it to repentance.

In this godly effort of restoring a stray sheep to the fold of its shepherd, the crook of gentleness and tenderness will be the best instrument; and this must be accompanied with the simplest forms of speech, and the excitement of the clearest ideas in the mind. All effort must be either lost or concealed; the anxiety about the soul should never appear greater than that for the body; for it must be ever

recollected that the ignorant have a very short way of judging of sincerity, they generally measure it by the purse strings; and to attempt to convince or change them from the power of Satan unto God, by an abrupt introduction of sacred subjects would, in all probability, for ever after present an insuperable difficulty to its prosecution. First, let the love of Christ shine through the visitor, let the Christian character stand forth in all its humble, unobtrusive, mild, and gentle brightness; and when by his efforts of love the poor have drunk deeply into the spirit of Christian virtue, when they become sensibly affected by the purity of his motives, and by the tenderness of his regard, when they shall feel all the force of his compassion, and by his kind and benignant behaviour become entranced by the peace and serenity that springs from righteousness and holiness of life; then, and not till then, may he venture, as one having authority, to reason on justice and on judgment to come, and his moral force will be irresistible; for the power of the Holy Ghost will go with him, and the shadow of the Most High shall encompass him.

:

Another important object of the visitor of the poor, will be the education of their children; for it is to the want of this education, that half the misery of the poor may be ascribed; but the visitor must sedulously labour to impress upon the minds of those he visits, that education must begin at home, that the parent must consider that moral training is the first step to all subsequent acquirement, and that physical education for the purposes of causing health and cheerfulness is also necessary. He or she must impress upon the visited, the beneficial effect of cleanliness, and the danger of badly ventilated apartments, of damp and cold that by a proper attention to these things, much sickness, both among the children and themselves, would be avoided. At the same time the effects of habit should be pointed out, and the dreadful consequence of vicious example; the responsibility of parents for the conduct of their offspring-how a want of due care for them in their childhood, will almost to a certainty be paid back to the parents, in a want of care for them in their old age. And above all other things, education should not be pointed out as a good thing only to enable the child to get on in the world, but as infinitely more valuable in improving its disposition and habits, raising it above vulgar and degrading pursuits, and implanting in it a love of industry and virtue. The visitor of the poor will soon be convinced, that without the auxiliary of an Infant School, he will be able to do comparatively little in this object. If there be none in the town in which his exertions are made, he must establish one; if he cannot do this, he must endeavour to assimilate one of the best Dame Schools in the place, as much as possible, to one—and in doing this, at times, he will do as much as in forming an actual Infant School. It will of course be necessary, though it will be no easy task, to get the good Dame into his* views, but sometimes the half is better than the whole; and if he can withdraw the children from the contaminating influence of the vicious examples of their parents, and the

* We have generally written in the inasculine gender, but these remarks, after all, apply more to females than men, as it is from their exertions with the poor, that good may be anticipated.

streets, he will do much negatively: but much positive good may be done by these means; moral control will be at least attempted, the passions will be brought under subjection, the manners will be improved, and cleanliness will be necessary. Nor should the attention

of the visitor of the poor be confined to the infants only, it should be his ambition to see every idle child in his district at school; to take away fifty and leave ten, would be to expose the fifty to the corrupt habits and vices of the ten, who would, without the greatest care were exercised, most assuredly be their associates out of school hours. The visitor must use all his influence for this purpose, which, if achieved, would be doing more good for society than the gaining of a battle. It will indeed require all his skill, his unceasing perseverance, his unremitting attentions; but the reward of seeing those who would otherwise have been lost, rising (though in however small degree) in intelligence and virtue, will amply compensate his exertions. But the visitor must not suppose, that after he has done this, his care and anxiety will be at an end; he will find that to whatever school such children may be sent, dissatisfaction will be continually expressed at either the mode of instruction, or the conduct of the teachers of the school; he will, to a certainty, hear complaints, that the master has beat my boy without any cause,-or the mistress has kept my girl, and she is no worse than others. But in these, and in the multitude of various complaints that may be made, the visitor must go with the masters or mistresses of the schools; he must on no account lower them in the estimation of the poor; or, ruin to the school itself is almost certain to follow. Several schools have been broken up, through the injudicious attention of visitors to the foolish complaints of the parents. It may easily be supposed, that the schoolmaster's task must be no envious one: to deal with the most depraved and brutal habits, and that obtuseness of intellect which is found in those whose intellectual powers have been long unexercised-requires a knowledge of human nature, an experience, a talent, and an enthusiasm rarely to be met with in the same individual. He must be the friend of the poor, but he must be doubly the friend of the pious and assiduous teacher: his office, one of the noblest that can belong to a human being, entitles him to the respect and friendship of any man, however high his rank; and if it should be found, that he is even of low origin, and that his manners are homely and his intellect inferior, it ought to be one of the first efforts of the visitor to raise him above himself,-to raise him in self-estimation, to place him beyond the contempt of the vulgar, to increase his intelligence and his influence among the poor by every means within his power. It is to be lamented, that some of the most benevolently disposed individuals, who have to do with the "schools for the poor," treat the masters of their schools with the most unchristian indifference and contempt. They seem to think, that the master is bound to do them homage, and that to show a cringing humility is the perfection of all virtue and what is worse, it by no means uncommonly happens, that a deadly antipathy is taken to the man who fails so to abase himself. But this is wrong, and it should be reprobated. Respect in these cases should be mutual; not only on one side. The master is

not to be treated as a servant-as a menial; but as a man engaged in the same holy work of making the world better than it is, and perhaps of being more instrumental in this object than a member of any other profession.

In the work of education, the visitor must go hand in hand with the conductors of the schools; they should be engaged in every benevolent undertaking; their influence among the poor should be increased in all possible ways; they should be made to keep up a constant connection between the poor and themselves; the poor should be taught to look on them as among their best friends, and to have their dearest interests at heart. Thus the schoolmaster would be made a most valuable instrument of good; his interest in the school, and in the children of the school, would be increased, and the effects of that interest would be felt in a manner the most encouraging and advantageous.

To enumerate all the duties of the visitors of the poor would require a volume, but there is one duty that is incumbent upon him to consider carefully, before he takes up this most Christian office; that is the duty of preparing-of EDUCATING himself for the task: he must look first at his motives; if these be inferior, his exertions will never be crowned with a full and perfect success. He must not attempt doing good to others from a vain emulation of others: he must not be induced to exertion by party or sectarian spirit: he must forget party and sect entirely, and care about pleasing no one but the Author and Finisher of his faith. He must think seriously upon what he undertakes; and having made up his mind to the work and put his hand to the plough, he must not think of looking back. Firm in purpose, pure in intent, holy in his aspirations, patient in his difficulties, persevering in his objects, with dignity and without pride, with pity and not contempt, with a bosom yearning, but with a steadfast mind-he must go FORWARD, not to do partial good, not only to attend to temporary afflictions, not only to remedy particular evils, but to change, both physically and morally, the population of his district; to remove the causes, as well as to remedy the evils that abound; to raise by reason, by knowledge, by piety, and by charity, the minds of the poor in the scale of morality; to make better husbands, better wives, better fathers, better mothers, better children, better neighbours. To refine the manners, to improve the taste, to relieve the wants, and, above all things, to enforce providence and forethought; to teach self-knowledge, to teach the poor to teach themselves, to assist themselves, to love themselves, and to blend with this self-love the love of God, as a motive to action, and as a reward to virtuous effort and industrious exertion.

VOL. I.-May, 1835.

PP

298

REVIEW OF BOOKS.

Outline of a System of National Education. Cochrane and M'Crone,

London. pp. 349.

Ir it be the duty of a country to provide for the bodily wants of the poor, it is surely also a duty to provide for their mental necessities: if it be the province of the legislature to punish offences, it is assuredly a paramount duty to prevent them. As crime is conceived by the mind, before it becomes perpetrated, so is it necessary, in all our efforts to stop certain acts, to look at the motives which prompt them; and in doing this we go back to the mind. We bring forward the witnesses who can, in the remotest manner, attest to some flagrant act of the individual; we trace all the circumstances connected with the crime of the accused, we strain points, we reconcile differences, we, with the most pains-taking accuracy, note down all the evidence relating to time and place, but we do not take into consideration at all, the physical state, or the mental state, of the culprit; we never go back into the years of his childhood, to search for evidence of vicious example; we do not make a review of all the circumstances with which he was surrounded, previously to his career of infamy. We never stop to inquire how ignorant is this being, what neglect he has suffered, what powerful spell has bound him to this course of life, nor what have been his ideas concerning his relations with society, or by what sad misfortune were they early imbibed, and how they grew with his growth and strengthened with his strength. No: we think it enough to have evidence that he is a poor guilty being, and we send him prematurely before his judge-to him who does and will take into extenuation of his offence, the circumstances that we somewhat too culpably reject. But knowing this to be a characteristic of the Divine Being, ought we not to liken ourselves unto his image, and endeavour to transform ourselves to his likeness? Ought we not rather to put the poor sufferer beyond the reach of contaminating influence? Ought not the government, before they punish for violations of law and common right and justice, provide for every individual the means of being made acquainted with the laws of their country, and of that great and comprehensive moral law upon which those laws are founded? Can we do other than brand with a high degree of moral culpability, that government who shall refuse to impart to the people at large, and to every individual in particular, a sound and comprehensive education, embracing a knowledge of the law of God, of duty to God and man, of nature's laws, and of the civil laws and institutions of the country. The systems pursued in this country are by no means sufficient for the wants of the people. By the narrow and bigoted restrictions imposed upon them by their founders and supporters, they are completely farcical, and operate as a blind to conceal the fearful extent of popular ignorance. And yet we complain of the degradation of the population, of the increase of crime, of pauper indolence, and of the prevalence of drunkenness ; but can we wonder that the stream is polluted, when the fountain