sition,
the spirit, the mental faculties. It shows itself in peevishness, in
imbecility, in such a passive, slavish subjection to the rules and
interests of mere artificial life, as to admit no hope almost of spiritual
progression.

The nursery is also intellectual. The mind of your child is unfolding as
well as its body; and hence the former, as well as the latter, demands the
nursery. How much of the mental vigor and attainments of children depend
upon the prudent management of the nursery. Hence parents should

"Exert a prudent care
To feed our infant minds with proper fare;
And wisely store the nursery by degrees
With wholesome learning, yet acquired with ease.
And thus well-tutored only while we share
A mother's lectures and a nurse's care."

Parents may abuse the minds of their children in the nursery, either by
total neglect, or by immature education, by too early training and too
close confinement to books at a very early age, thus taxing the mind beyond
its capacities. This is often the case when children betray great precocity
of intellect; and the pride of the parent seeks to gratify itself through
the supposed gift of the child. In this way parents often reduce their
children to hopeless mental imbecility.

Again, parents often injure the minds of their children by their misguided
efforts to train the mind. Even in training them to speak, how imprudent
they are in calling words and giving ideas in mutilated language. It is
just as easy to teach children to speak correctly, and to call all things
by their proper names, as to abuse their vernacular tongue. Such
mutilations are impediments to the growth of the intellect. The child must
afterwards be taught to undo what it was taught to do and say in the
nursery. But as this subject will be fully considered in the chapter on
Home Education, we shall refrain from further comment here.

The nursery is moral and spiritual. The first moral and religious training
of the child belongs to the nursery, and is the work of the mother. Upon
her personal exhibition of truth, justice, virtue, &c., depends the same
moral elements in the character of her child. In the nursery we receive our
first lessons in virtue or in vice, in honesty or dishonesty, in truth or
in falsehood, in purity or in corruption. The full-grown man is the matured
child morally as well as physically and intellectually. The same may be
said of the spiritual formation