actual historical results of thorough Sunday-school instruction, under the guidance of the Church, as a part of the great whole of religious influence, and a method of moral power now clearly providentially indicated.

It requires, therefore, no great sagacity to see that the institution has already become a part and a mode of the national life; that it has ceased to be experimental, and has become historical; and that both those who make and those who write history must recognize this vitalizing force of the modern ages. Those who ignore or neglect this great power in this last half of the nineteenth century are unhistorical. And especially must the present and future development of the Republic of Liberty depend upon this and all other forms of culture which purify the heart, correct the judgment, and recognize God as the great Sovereign of mind, and Source of moral power.

Let it not be deemed strange, therefore, that this institution is slowly correcting its own mistakes, gradually perfecting its course of study, and making its literature; and that great public men in the United States, governors and judges, senators and assembly-men, learned gentlemen and splendid women, as well as the most humble, are sitting down humbly every Lord's Day before their classes of little ones, rich and poor, to give and receive lessons from the word of God.

The Sunday school is one grand reliance for the Christian culture of freemen, and the constitution of a pure, exalted statesmanship. It is, we repeat, truly national in the United States of America.

In 1786, Bishop Asbury, of the Methodist- Episcopal Church, established the first Sunday school proper on the Western Continent. In 1861, the number of Sunday-school children in the Republic was estimated to be considerably above three millions. Since that time, the numbers in attendance have increased rapidly; the Sunday-school force of the Methodists alone having reached over a million and a half.

It is even more important to state, that the institution is revealing more distinctly its organic life. It rises up as the great training department of the Church, full of energy and missionary power. Its graded classes and normal discipline give it order in "theory and practice," and secure permanence as well as rapid development. Let American statesmen and philanthropists cherish the Sunday school.

ACADEMIES.

The word "academy," as commonly used in this country, has a peculiar meaning. It applies to intermediate institutions between common schools and colleges. We have seen, that, in our public schools, the highest grade reaches the academies, and becomes, to some extent, a scientific and classical school, actually free to all. The growing intelligence of our children and young people of both sexes, however, requires institutions of higher grade; and they are found in nearly every county, and especially at the centres of distinct communities, in buildings of great beauty and convenience, with regular gradations of studies and classes. They are under the direction of teachers and executive officers generally well educated, sometimes masters of their respective sciences and of the art of teaching; thus furnishing to our more aspiring and promising young people a sound symmetrical education, which answers a good purpose for business and professional life, or a preparation for college.

In all these institutions, the languages, the natural sciences, and mathematics are taught, and in some of them with great thoroughness. Their students number from perhaps thirty to five hundred each, many of whom remain from one to three years, and others for even a longer period, going through a practical or preparatory course of great value, and securing a mental drill and development which give them great power in the future. The number of students now annually issuing from our academies, seminaries, and

collegiate institutes, is becoming so large as to perceptibly elevate the average range of general intelligence and the standard of national character. Germany might as well do without her gymnasium as America without her academy.

These institutions are sometimes founded and supported by the counties and municipalities, and partially endowed by the State; but much more generally they are erected by the churches. The great Christian denominations, while they omit from their courses of instruction and discipline every thing which is peculiarly sectarian, feel the obligation imperative to provide liberally for the education of their own children and the general public under the thorough transforming influence of Christianity. They insist that true education must recognize God and his holy word; must present Christ in the atonement, and the Holy Ghost in regeneration, as the restorer of heart and intellect and volition to their originally-intended righteousness. While, therefore, they seek thus to guard against infidel demoralization in the higher training of their young men and women, they look for the divine blessing upon their schemes of science and true wisdom.

The churches expend large sums of money, freely given by the rich and the poor, to build, and, at least in part, endow, these institutions. It is a form of Christian enterprise in which their very best minds, lay and clerical, expend their most sacrificing and consecrated efforts, not unfrequently for a lifetime, actually to rear the national fabric in soundness, strength, and beauty. These schools, to a greater or less extent under the patronage of the evangelical churches, have ceased to be regarded as ecclesiastical establishments for local or sectarian purposes, and come to be considered, as they really are to a large degree, great public vitalizing forces in every commonwealth for the proper culture of the rising generation, the growth of the State, and the exaltation of the Republic.

Thus, in the most enlightened as well as the darkest age

of the world, the Church appears as the grand conservator of learning, the regenerator of society, and the strength of the nation.

We also use the word "academy" in its higher sense. The Military Academy at West Point; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Boston, founded in 1780; the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, founded in 1799; the Academy of Natural Science, Philadelphia, founded in 1818; the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, established in 1807; the National Academy of Design, and the Medical Academy, at New York, are all institutions of high grade for improvement in the arts and sciences. The historical, classical use of the term "academy" is not so frequent here as on the continent of Europe. It is, however, sometimes applied generally to all the higher institutions of learning.

COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES.

In a former part of this work, we have seen that the broad common sense and true statesmanship which regard high mental culture, under the control of religion, as vital to the Commonwealth, came with our fathers to this country. This spirit incorporated the Bible, the pulpit, the public school, and the college into the very framework of society; and there, despite the rage of infidels, Romanists, and charlatans, they have ever since remained, not as dead in operative elements, but living, expanding forces, without which the growth of our nation would have been utterly impossible. Let any man who doubts the soundness of this conclusion undertake to account for our national development and power, leaving out the Bible, the pulpit, the common school, and the college, and he will soon convict himself of inexcusable superficiality and ridiculous narrowness of thought and opinion.

It cannot be claimed that the greatest wisdom has controlled our higher educational movements in this country.

We have shown and felt, in this respect as well as others, the weakening influence of ultra democracy. More regard for the general, and not less for the particular, more for the whole, though not less for the local interests of the people, or, in other words, stronger centralization, would have given us fewer but much better colleges and universities, and a much riper, broader scholarship. We have not unfrequently wasted our means by localizing tendencies and divisions, thus producing a large number of colleges and universities quite unworthy of the name.

If we have in this manner subjected ourselves to just criticism, and even damaging ridicule, we have, nevertheless, increased our academic popular power, and done in this what we do in every thing,- allowed the free range of facts and elective affinities to correct our opinions and revise our actions. We have learned, to some extent, where are our true centres, and what are our true methods. We are slowly accumulating the logic of age: for though our history includes but a small number of years, and denies us the moral force of a venerable antiquity, the rush of events in our new country crowds our brief years with so large a number of facts, and so much vitalizing force, that time, actually brief, becomes virtually long; and it is no vain boast that we are much older than our years. It will be found to be historical at length, as it certainly is philosophical, that republican liberty rapidly multiplies the ages by its powerful attractions of wisdom and facts, the vigor of its thinking, the recklessness of its ventures, and the velocity of its movements. These strange elements of a new measurement of duration are gradually coming to the surface; but they are only beginning to be recognized by thinkers in America and Europe. They will force their own acknowledgment when a few years have gone by, and it comes to appear, that in vitalizing power, if not in the numbers of their alumni, Yale and Michigan are older than Cambridge and Oxford.

The State and the Church are separate in America, and