and thither by each desire that in turn comes
uppermost--but to be self-restrained, self-balanced, governed by the
joint decision of the feelings in council assembled, before whom every
action shall have been fully debated and calmly determined--that it is
which education, moral education at least, strives to produce." [151]

The first seminary of moral discipline, and the best, as we have already
shown, is the home; next comes the school, and after that the world, the
great school of practical life. Each is preparatory to the other, and
what the man or woman becomes, depends for the most part upon what has
gone before. If they have enjoyed the advantage of neither the home nor
the school, but have been allowed to grow up untrained, untaught, and
undisciplined, then woe to themselves--woe to the society of which they
form part!

The best-regulated home is always that in which the discipline is the
most perfect, and yet where it is the least felt. Moral discipline acts
with the force of a law of nature. Those subject to it yield themselves
to it unconsciously; and though it shapes and forms the whole character,
until the life becomes crystallized in habit, the influence thus
exercised is for the most part unseen and almost unfelt.

The importance of strict domestic discipline is curiously illustrated
by a fact mentioned in Mrs. Schimmelpenninck's Memoirs, to the following
effect: that a lady who, with her husband, had inspected most of the
lunatic asylums of England and the Continent, found the most numerous
class of patients was almost always composed of those who had been
only children, and whose wills had therefore rarely been thwarted
or disciplined in early life; whilst those who were members of large
families, and who had been trained in self-discipline, were far less
frequent victims to the malady.

Although the moral character depends in a great degree on temperament
and on physical health, as well as on domestic and early training and
the example of companions, it is also in the power of each individual to
regulate, to restrain, and to discipline it by watchful and persevering
self-control. A competent teacher has said of the propensities and
habits, that they are as teachable as Latin and Greek, while they are
much more essential to happiness.

Dr. Johnson, though himself constitutionally prone to melancholy, and
afflicted by it as few have been from his earliest years, said that "a
man's being in a good