said or sung, "The boy's the father of the man." When I
mingled with my schoolmates, and the unexpected possession of my various
wealth had transpired, I found many of them very kind and _fatherly_
indeed, for they borrowed my money, ate my cake, broke my playthings,
and my heart they left just in the same state as it as before.

But I will no longer dwell upon the portraiture of that saddest of all
created things, the despised of many. I was taught the hard lesson of
looking upon cruelty as my daily bread, tears as my daily drink, and
scorn as my natural portion. Had not my heart hardened, it must have
broken. But before I leave what I call the desponding epoch of my
schoolboy days, I must not omit to mention a species of impious
barbarity, that had well-nigh alienated my heart for ever from religion,
and which made me for the time detest the very name of church.
Christianity is most eminently a religion of kindness; and through the
paths of holy love only, should the young heart be conducted to the
throne of grace, for we have it from the highest authority that the
worship of little children is an acceptable offering and may well mingle
with the sweetest symphonies that ascend from the lips of seraphs to the
footstool of the Everlasting. Our God is not a God of terrors, and when
he is so represented, or is made so by any flint-hearted pedagogue to
the infant pupil, that man has to answer for the almost unpardonable sin
of perilling a soul. Let parents and guardians look to it. Let them
mark well the unwilling files that are paraded by boarding-school
keepers into the adjacent church or chapel, bringing a mercenary puff up
to the very horns of the altar, and let them inquire how many are then
flogged, or beaten, or otherwise evil-entreated, because they have
flagged in an attention impossible in the days of childhood, and have
not remembered a text, perhaps indistinctly or inaudibly given--let
those parents or guardians, I say, inquire, and if but one poor youth
has so suffered, let them be fully assured that that master, whatever
may be his diligence, whatever may be his attainments, however high his
worldly character may stand, is not fit to be the modeller of the
youthful mind, and only wants the opportunity to betray that bigotry
which would gladly burn his dissenting neighbour at the stake, or lash a
faith, with exquisite tortures, into the children of those whom, in his
saintly pride, he may call heretical