importance. The more abstract treatment of the theory of Education is doubtless, if true in its philosophy, of universal application. It sweeps the whole field. But this will engage our attention only within carefully prescribed limits, and when we leave this portion of our subject we have to restrict ourselves on all sides. The education of every human being is determined by potent influences which do not properly fall within the range of our consideration here. The breed of men to which the child belongs, the character of his parents, the human society into which he is born, the physical circumstances by which he is surrounded, are silently but irresistibly forming him. The traditions of his country, its popular literature, its very idioms of speech, its laws and customs, its religious life, its family life, constitute an aggregate of influence which chiefly make him what he is. With these things we have to do only by way of a passing reference; we have not to deal with them. By their constant presence they mold the future man, himself unconscious. They are the atmosphere of the humanity of his particular time and place, and in breathing it, he is essentially a passive agent. Our business is rather with the conscious and active elements of moral and intellectual growth. We have to make the passive creature of circumstances a free, self-conscious, rational agent, endowed with purposes and ideals, and we have to find the means of best doing this. The passive activity of our nature is not to be ignored in our educational methods; it is to be turned to use as one of our most potent instruments; but it is mainly the self-conscious forces that we have to educe and direct. Even in doing this we are bound by external conditions, and must take note not only of the almost irresistible forces around us, but of minor conditions of time, place, and circumstance.

Aim and Characteristic of the Educational Process.

Each successive century, and the traditions and circumstances of each country, nay, the genius of each people, present to us the educational problem in ever-changing aspects. Educational systems can not be manufactured in the study. Our theory of the end of all education, and the means by which that end has to be attained, may be, or rather ought to be, always the same; but the application of that theory must vary with varying external conditions. What present defects have we here and now, and to what dangers are we exposed? is the form which the practical question must take with us. Now I would say that one of our chief dangers in these days is the over instruction of willing and ingenuous boys. We are in the very midst of what will afterward be designated the information epoch of Education. We are in danger of confounding the faculty for swallowing with the faculty for digesting. To borrow words from biological science, we sometimes proceed as if the mind of man grew by accretion and not by intus-susception. The system of universal examinations has encouraged this. Now a system whereby the teachers of the country are converted into 'coaches,' is, by its very nature,

hostile to the true conception of Education. No school which converts itself into a coaching establishment is a place of education in the proper sense of that term. There is a repose, a calm, a stability in the steady march of all sound Education, which is alien to the feverish spirit that animates the ante-chamber of an examination room.

The aim of the educationist is not the giving of information, nay, not even instruction, though this is essential, but mainly discipline; and the aim of discipline is the production of a sound mind in a sound body, the directing and cherishing of the growth of the whole nature, spiritual and physical, so as to make it possible for each man, within the limits of the capacity which God has given him, to realize in and for himself, with more or less success, the type of humanity, and in his relation to others to exhibit a capability for wise and vigorous action. This result will not be attained by pressure. By anticipating the slow but sure growth of nature, we destroy the organism. Many and subtle are the ways in which nature avenges itself on the delicate, complicated machinery of man; but avenge itself somehow it will and must.

It is difficult to say which is the more pernicious, that system which overstrains the active intelligence of the willing and ambitious boy, or that which fills his mind, while it is yet mainly passive, with the results of mature thought, and endows him with a kind of miniature omniscience. Those who survive such methods of training may, doubtless, be very useful agents, very serviceable machines, but they will rarely initiate. With a few exceptions, their minds will be either exhausted or overlaid. That elasticity of mind which enables a man always to rise to the level of the varying requirements of the day and hour in the Family and the State; that free movement of will which is ever ready to encounter more than half-way the vicissitudes and exigencies of life, with a consciousness that its powers and capacities are not itself, but only the instruments of the life of reason, and that they are ever within his power to regulate and adapt his servants, not his masters; that soundness of brain and muscle which reacts on his inner self by giving steadiness to his moral purpose, will assuredly not be promoted by forcing more and more subjects into the school curriculum, and applying the pressure of constant examinations by outside authorities. We want men who will be ready for the crisis of life as well as for its daily routine of duty, and who will, by their mere manner of encountering even their ordinary work,, contribute to the advance of the commonwealth in vigor and virtue. Such men alone are fully competent for all the services which their country may demand from them. Such men may be slowly grown; they can not be manufactured under a system of pressure. Great Britain has had many such; Scotland has been prolific of them. The intellect, the will, and the arm of Scotsmen have done, we flatter ourselves, their fair share in creating the British Empire; and they have done it all by virtue mainly of their breed, and by such restricted education as Arithmetic Latin,

and the Shorter Catechism afforded. No superincumbent load of impossible tasks oppressed their minds while yet immature.

Do not draw a hasty inference from what has now been said. The requirements of the time in which we live, the industrial competition of one nation with another, the revolution in the arts of war, all demand that the materials of education should change with changing conditions of life. I am quite alive to this necessity—but the inner Form (if I may here use this term) must remain ever the same. For after all that can be said, the main object of our efforts must, on one side at least, be the growth of Power in the future man. If we would secure this, the pursuit of it must control and regulate the instruction we give, and the method of giving it. Above all, we must not be in a hurry. Having faith in the quiet processes of Nature, we must, as educators, be calm, deliberate, and ever regard the end.

Formal End of Education-Power.

The power which we desire to foster is the product of will and of natural force. It is difficult to separate these two elements in any act, but for purposes of thought they may be regarded as distinct. I shall refer again to the element of natural force; our present concern is with power in its intellectual and moral relations, which is Will. It operates in the region of intelligence and emotion alike. The ground and root of intellectual and moral activity is ultimately, I believe, the same, and the end is the same-the Ethical Life. If this can be shown analytically, we shall reduce to unity the whole idea of Education in its merely formal aspect, and supply a conception which, while helping us to estimate the value of educational instruments and methods, will, at the same time, exalt and guide our conceptions of duty as educators.

Real End of Education-Culture.

Citizenship is
For, in a cer-

Power, however, can not work on nothing; and we have next to consider it in its concrete relations in order that we may discern and exhibit: the Content as well as the Form of the Educational Idea. True that our range of discussion is in this place finally limited by the practical object which we have immediately in view-the production of the good citizen; but this, though our primary, is not our ultimate aim. not the end of human life, but only the means to an end. tain sense, the ultimate reference of all thought and action of man is to himself as a personality. Christianity, which teaches the most thoroughgoing ultraism, also teaches this; and in teaching this, it deepened the foundation of the modern doctrine of Culture which had been laid by the Greeks. Speaking quite generally, Culture may, for want of a better word, be accepted as the end of all exercise of intellectual and moral power, and therefore in its ultimate result the Real end of Education, just as power is the Formal end.

Culture must have a Center.

But in accepting 'Culture' as a fit expression for the real end of Edu

cation, we have to examine carefully the features of this god as they appear on the canvas of modern littérateurs, and distinguish our own conception from theirs. No finality, no perfectness is possible for man, and Culture therefore must be restricted, viewed educationally, to the idea rather of a process than of an attained and staple product. It is the harmonious and continuous growing of a man in all that pertains to humanity. Culture in the sphere of Education is, I say, a continuous process-the harmonious balancing of all the varied forces that constitute the life of a human soul. Now, such a balancing is impossible save round some center. From this may be deduced two practical conclusions on Education in respect of its Content. First, that intellectual culture will be most thorough when a man has some leading subject as the center of his intellectual activity; and secondly, that moral culture, the harmonious growth of the soul, is possible only where there is a center round which all the moral and æsthetic elements of our nature turn. That center is God himself, round which reality, the sentiments, emotions, hopes, and aspirations of the moral life range themselves. In God alone the ethical life has true existence. If for God we substitute self, we substitute an empty and barren fact in the room of a pregnant and lifegiving idea.

When I say that it is an essential condition of vigorous intellectual growth that a man should have some prime subject of thought and study, I do not of course mean that every man must be a specialist. A specialist, in the strict sense of the term, is a man who has so used up both his powers and his mental interests in one specific direction as to weaken his capacity for all other objects, and to narrow his mental range. A study prosecuted so exclusively weakens the judgment for all else. A leading subject, but not an exclusive subject, is wanted, and this will be found to strengthen the judgment for all else. In the moral region, again, the permanent center of all our thought and activity, which is God, so far from narrowing, expands the growing man. The central idea is like a sun, under which the whole being lives and grows, and from which each individual part draws warmth and strength. Culture without this center is the depravation of a great idea, and has no object higher than self. Self can form no true center to self.

Culture must be Active.

Moral Culture, further, must not only find its center outside of self in God, but it must express itself in action, if it is to live. It is a misuse of terms to call that Culture which, laboring under the baleful influence of self-worship, has forgotten that power can fulfill itself only in action. With some minds of strong æsthetic proclivities, Culture issues in a kind of paralysis of judgment. The soul floats in the dim and dreamy potentialities of sentiment. The man of this kind of Culture indulges himself in the perpetual contemplation of himself and his surroundings, is frequently distinguished for a spurious amiability, nourishes feeling in a self

imposed retirement from the duties of citizenship, occupies himself with the contemplation of his own refined sensibilities, ever repeating to himself the words which Cicero puts into the mouth of the god of Epicurus, 'Mihi pulchre est: Ego beatus sum.' This result indeed is the very Nemesis of Culture when it has lost its way. This is the fate of the literary no less than of the religious recluse. Depend upon it, Nature, which is strong and virile, will have none of this: it demands the active manifestation of such power as we have, in expressed thought or living deed. Thus, then, only does moral Culture reach its true aim, by first centering itself in God, and next by forgetting itself in action.

Culture, then, which, for want of a better word, we may accept as an expression of the sum of the end of Education in respect of Content, as distinguished from the end of Education with respect to Form (which end is Power), is the harmonious growing of all that is in man. As a harmonious growing of intellect it demands a prime intellectual study, but discourages specialism. As a harmonious and therefore balanced growing of the moral life, it must have a center round which it may balance itself, other than itself; and that center of truth and reality is God, the source and sustainer of life, the beginning and the end of human endeavor: finally, as a living and wholesome as well as a harmonious growing, it has to seek the very conditions of its existence outside itself in action. It finds in the opportunities of life at once its nourishment, the conditions of its vitality, and the measure of its soundness. It lives neither from itself, in itself, nor to itself.

Practical conclusion in respect of Education.

Culture thus interpreted is not, you will at once see, unpractical in its aims in the hands of the educationist. For we find that it can not be truly promoted save by ever keeping in view the practical issue of all training the rearing of a religious people, and the preparation of youth for social duty and for the service of humanity, whereby alone they can truly serve and fulfill themselves. In its practical relations to the Science and Art of Education, the term will be found pregnant with instruction as regards method also. For in the intellectual sphere, as we have seen, it enjoins unity of purpose as opposed to fragmentary encyclopædism, and in the moral sphere the need of the Religious idea and the conception of social duty, without which all our moral sentiment and moral discipline would be jointless and invertebrate.

The educational skeptic will say, 'These be brave words: what has this culture to do with the education of the masses?' I might reply that I deal here with Education, and not merely with the education of those whose school time ends at twelve or thirteen years of age; but I do not choose to take refuge in a reply which would involve me in the confession that the education of one class of the community is essentially unlike that of another, and has different aims. Were it so, there would be no unity in the idea of Education-and this is to say that there would be no