ining of the young soul to virtue was surrounded with something of
the awful holiness of a sacrament; and those who laboured in this
sanctified field were exhorted to a constancy of devotion, and were
promised a fulness of recompense, that raised them from the rank of
drudges to a place of highest honour among the ministers of nature.

Everybody at this time was thinking about education, partly perhaps on
account of the suppression of the Jesuits, the chief instructors of
the time, and a great many people were writing about it. The Abbe de
Saint Pierre had had new ideas on education, as on all the greater
departments of human interest. Madame d'Epinay wrote considerations
upon the bringing up of the young.[274] Madame de Grafigny did the
same in a less grave shape.[275] She received letters from the
precociously sage Turgot, abounding in the same natural and sensible
precepts which ten years later were commended with more glowing
eloquence in the pages of Emilius.[276] Grimm had an elaborate scheme
for a treatise on education.[277] Helvetius followed his exploration
of the composition of the human mind, by a treatise on the training
proper for the intellectual and moral faculties. Education by these
and other writers was being conceived in a wider sense than had been
known to ages controlled by ecclesiastical collegians. It slowly came
to be thought of in connection with the family. The improvement of
ideas upon education was only one phase of that great general movement
towards the restoration of the family, which was so striking a
spectacle in France after the middle of the century. Education now
came to comprehend the whole system of the relations between parents
and their children, from earliest infancy to maturity. The direction
of this wider feeling about such relations tended strongly towards an
increased closeness in them, more intimacy, and a more continuous
suffusion of tenderness and long attachment. All this was part of the
general revival of naturalism. People began to reflect that nature was
not likely to have designed infants to be suckled by other women than
their own mothers, nor that they should be banished from the society
of those who are most concerned in their well-being, from the cheerful
hearth and wise affectionate converse of home, to the frigid
discipline of colleges and convents and the unamiable monition of
strangers.

Then the rising rebellion against the church and its faith perhaps
cont