related to the genius of the Christian Sabbath, would carry the religious education of our best families to a precision and a firmness, which, to speak leniently, it has scarcely yet approached. Hours of the week might be gracefully occupied to agree with the scriptural studies of the Holy Day. And there, as in an institution beyond the partialities and interruptions of the household, and yet scarcely standing out of the shadow of its eaves,-amidst the generous and inciting passions of a collegiate emulation,—might our children command a proficiency and reach a mastery, that would be an armour of light, proof against the weapons of infidelity,—and a wing of immortality, soaring above the enticements of the world. Happy homes, when the sabbath sunlight shall rest on them,

no holy office suspended, no benignant influence restrained, within their precincts,-which shall send forth their groups to the Christian Seminary as well as to the Christian Temple, welcoming their return to stead and hearth with fairer smiles and fonder blessings! Very different Sabbath Schools do we hope to see: but far, ever far, be the period when their facility shall be disused and their principle be surrendered!

We are no apologists for any evil which may be detected in the administration of the system. We are no blind admirers of its too obvious defects. But it is power, and we desire its perfect action. It is infancy, and we seek its holy growth. There are peculiarities

in it which ought to redeem it from the destruction which awaits the fashion of the hour and the expedient of the age. It deserves a heraldic perpetuity.

Public gratitude has not failed to record its beneficial influence. Slow as its suffrage commonly is, and in this testimony most reluctant, it is all but universally acknowledged to have been the principal agent of the change, which, it is admitted, has taken place in our national manners. This is now a page of unquestioned History. We are a different people. There were opponents of the innovation. They would gladly have preserved the pastimes of village buffoonery and rudeness. They mixed up the national character with sports of barbarous cruelty and strife. Ignorance was the only aliment on which such brutal revels could depend. They are well nigh swept away. There were, indeed, senators, who denounced the change as the depression of public spirit and the breaking down of patriotic bravery; the confessed means which wrought that change even the mighty Horsley most unworthily and unprovokedly assailed. But the encomiasts of that former state of things are few, are reserved, are self-ashamed. The enemies of Sabbath-School Instruction are too scattered to band, too imbecile to argue, too abashed to confront. The senate and the cathedral will never again ring with these idle declamations.

We are bound, in estimating the measure of any national good, not merely to guage the positive merits

of that measure, but the collateral benefits. That which can establish for itself a very scanty proof of immediate influence, may often justly claim a large indirect operation. And were we unable to show the rise of a distinct intelligence, among the commonalty, as the effect of this system, still should we prove greatly in its favour if we could adduce its beneficial bearing on all intellectual improvement. Now we are confident of its actual sweep. But there is more than this. It has given a universal impulse. Look around on the March of Education. How much has it been exalted in its character and enlarged in its compass ! Three results are specially manifest. The first is, the mental elevation of the wealthier classes, which, at no distant date, were little raised in mental culture above the hind. It was when the common people felt the desire, and formed the resolve, to learn, that those who are socially superior betook themselves to letters in self-defence. A second consequence was, the abrogation of that great inequality of mind which existed in a former century. There was a deep abyss dividing one rank of the nation from the other. Riches created no such inequality as did mind. It removed orders farther from each other which were already sufficiently apart. The educated were as a scantling to the uneducated. A true sympathy was impossible. But now no order, as an order, is left in ignorance. And thus knowledge binds all the members of the commonwealth together, informs them all, and assi

milates them all. And a third advantage is, the character it has stamped upon all education. The grammar-school taught a lore too little popular: every where instruction is now adjusting itself to the spirit of the times. Religious instruction was scarcely known in any of those foundations, nor even in the Universities themselves: now no course is endured, even by those who seem scarcely affected by their own dictum, which is not governed by religion. All this is substantial gain to the great cause of a diffused, impartial, and Christian, education. But to what may it be attributed? The majestic river rolls out of this humble spring. The mighty city has sprung up from this hidden quarry.

Nor is it unjust to enquire, when we examine the pretensions of any benevolent scheme, what evil is prevented, as well as what good is secured. A population which is unenlightened, may, for a time, be quiescent. But there is no security for its peaceful, or rather its torpid, habits. In a moment, fear or revenge may lash it into fury. A tempest, even at the time we suppose, was blazing upon the neighbour coast. It was of fearful violence and duration. It swept all the mounds of authority, all the ornaments of civilization, before it. And whence did it burst? From a people goaded to vengeance by their wrongs, but a people in every sense most untaught. Theirs was not the reason to understand the charm of liberty or the majesty of law. Theirs was not the virtue to

hail the blessedness of civil order and the duty of individual restraint. No torrent could plunge with more headlong violence. Doubtless their leaders were more intelligent and more wicked than themselves. But they were congenial instruments. The lowest of the people were but the pack of those cruel hunters, and, cheered by their halloos, bayed in deep cry for carnage and for blood. When it was feared that this anarchy would inundate our country, the first waves were stemmed by its awaking mind. It loved not misrule: it brooked not infidelity: it coveted not massacre. Its heart was stout against such lures as these. If the skirt of the storm went over us, it was but as the shrinking banner of a flying foe. The lightning played around the conductor of our purest institutions with a lambent gleam, its fork having struck, and its bolt having exploded, far away. The Sabbath School System was the salvation of the empire !

It may be said, and not without a colour of justice, that the very ignorant, that the rudest of our mobs, were the most zealous adversaries of certain Foreign principles which were once supposed to threaten the health of our national mind, and the stability of our constitutional existence. A distinction must needs be made which appeals for its truth to history. The lawlessness of those principles it required a true, a religious, virtue to resist. They were resisted. Yet the true resistance was not indiscriminating. To whatever guilty excesses those principles had led, the