affection; to check
retaliation or revenge; to subdue the violence of passion or inordinate
desire;--to keep under every manifestation of self-will;--and to soothe
down and banish every appearance of fretfulness and bad temper. In
short, she trains her young charge to feel and to practise all the
amiable and kindly affections of our nature, encouraging and commending
him in their exercise;--while, on the contrary, she prevents,
discourages, reproves, and if necessary punishes, the exhibition of
dispositions and conduct of an opposite kind. This, as every one who has
examined the subject knows, is the sum and substance of the mother's
educational efforts during this early period of her child's
progress;--and what we wish to press upon the observation of the reader
is, that the child at this period is literally incapable of learning any
thing else which at all deserves the name of education. He may be taught
to be obedient; to be submissive; to be kind and obliging; to moderate,
and even to suppress his passions; to controul his wishes and his
will;--to be forbearing and forgiving;--and to be gentle, peaceable,
orderly, cleanly, and perhaps mannerly. Is there any thing else?--Is
there any one element of a different kind, that ever does, or ever can
enter into the course of an infant or young child's education? If there
be, what is it?--Let it be examined;--and we have no hesitation in
saying, that if it be "education," or any thing that deserves the name,
it will be found to resolve itself into some one or other of the moral
qualities which we have above enumerated. If therefore children, during
the earlier stages of their educational progress are to be taught at
all, religion and morals _must_ be, the subjects, seeing that they are
for a long period capable of learning nothing else. And it is here
worthy of especial notice, that in teaching religion and morals, there
is a negative as well as a positive scale;--and experience has uniformly
demonstrated, that if the parent or teacher neglect to improve the child
by raising him in the positive side, he will, by his own efforts, sink
deeper in the negative. Selfishness, as exhibited in the natural
depravity of human nature, will in all such cases strengthen daily; and
all the evil passions which selfishness and self-will call into
exercise, will then be strengthened and confirmed perhaps for life.

But while we perceive that the young are incapable of learning any thing
els