f Christianity into the tender and
comparatively pure mind and heart of the child, ere the cares and
corruptions of the world have reached and seared it,--at that period the
child in this college is to be carefully excluded therefrom, and to be
told that its influence is pernicious and dangerous in the extreme. Why,
the whole system is a constant preaching against Christianity and
against religion, and I insist that there is no charity, and can be no
charity, in that system of instruction from which Christianity is
excluded. I perfectly agree with what my learned friend says in regard
to the monasteries of the Old World, as seats of learning to which we
are all indebted at the present day. Much of our learning, almost all of
our early histories, and a vast amount of literary treasure, were
preserved therein and emanated therefrom. But we all know, that although
these were emphatically receptacles for literature of the highest order,
yet they were always connected with Christianity, and were always
regarded and conducted as religious establishments.

Going back as far as the statutes of Henry the Fourth, as early as
1402,[3] in the act respecting charities, we find that one hundred years
before the Reformation, in Catholic times, in the establishment of every
charitable institution, there was to be proper provision for religious
instruction. Again, after the time of the Reformation, when those
monastic institutions were abolished, in the 1st Edw. VI. ch. 14, we
find certain _chantries_ abolished, and their funds appropriated to the
instruction of youth in the grammar schools founded in that reign, which
Lord Eldon says extended all over the kingdom. In all these we find
provision for religious instruction, the dispensation of the same being
by a teacher or preacher. In 2 Swanston, p. 529, the case of the Bedford
Charity, Lord Eldon gives a long opinion, in the course of which he
says, that in these schools care is taken to educate youth in the
Christian religion, and in all of them the New Testament is taught, both
in Latin and Greek. Here, then, we find that the great and leading
provision, both before and after the Reformation, was to connect the
knowledge of Christianity with human letters. And it will be always
found that a school for instruction of youth, to possess the privileges
of a charity, must be provided with religious instruction.

For the decision, that the essentials of Christianity are part of the
common