because they hope to get another shilling to-morrow, and in
the meantime have a recognition of their title. This recognition of title
is just what I would refuse. I deny their right to a parallel or equal
position; their true position is auxiliary, and as auxiliary it ought to
be limited and restrained without scruple, as a regard to the paramount
matter of education may dictate.

But why after all is the classical training paramount? Is it because we
find it established? because it improves memory or taste, or gives
precision, or develops the faculty of speech? All these are but partial
and fragmentary statements, so many narrow glimpses of a great and
comprehensive truth. That truth I take to be that the modern European
civilisation from the middle age downwards is the compound of two great
factors, the Christian religion for the spirit of man, and the Greek, and
in a secondary degree the Roman discipline for his mind and intellect. St.
Paul is the apostle of the Gentiles, and is in his own person a symbol of
this great wedding--the place, for example, of Aristotle and Plato in
Christian education is not arbitrary nor in principle mutable. The
materials of what we call classical training were prepared, and we have a
right to say were advisedly prepared, in order that it might become not a
mere adjunct but (in mathematical phrase) the complement of Christianity
in its application to the culture of the human being formed both for this
world and for the world to come.

If this principle be true it is broad and high and clear enough, and
supplies a key to all questions connected with the relation between the
classical training of our youth and all other branches of their secular
education. It must of course be kept within its proper place, and duly
limited as to things and persons. It can only apply in full to that small
proportion of the youth of any country, who are to become in the fullest
sense educated men. It involves no extravagant or inconvenient assumptions
respecting those who are to be educated for trades and professions in
which the necessities of specific training must limit general culture. It
leaves open every question turning upon individual aptitudes and
inaptitudes and by no means requires that boys without a capacity for
imbibing any of the spirit of classical culture are still to be
mechanically plied with the instruments of it after their unfitness has
become manifest. But it lays down the rule of ed