ENGLISH JOURNAL OF EDUCATION; SPECIALLY DESIGNED AS A Medium of Correspondence AMONG PAROCHIAL CLERGYMEN, AND ALL PROMOTERS OF SOUND EDUCATION; "The LORD give you a loyal Nobility and a dutiful Gentry; a pious, learned, and * May WISDOм and KNOWLEDGE be the stability of your Time, and the FEAR of EDITED BY GEORGE MOODY, M.A., Rector of Gilston, near Harlow. BODI 1845. VOL. III. LONDON: DARTON AND Co., 58, HOLBORN HILL; SLATTER, OXFORD; STEVENSON, CAMBRIDGE; WHYTE & CO., EDINBURGH; BIBL My friends, I had announced my intention of speaking to you to-day respecting the Norman period of English history; I hope I may hereafter be able to do what I promised, for the subject is a very interesting one. But, as we are so near the end of the year, I felt as if I would rather address you upon some topic more directly connected with yourselves and the work in which you are engaged. At Christmas time one wishes to exchange friendly greetings and good wishes; to strengthen one another with recollections of the past and hopes for the future. Our friend, Mr. Moody, no doubt, with this feeling, asked me to write something for the January month of the Journal, on the Progress and Prospects of Education. The title sounded to me rather alarming; I was afraid one might be tempted to put down a great many fine words about schools which have been opened, money which has been collected, principles which have been recognized; and that those who know any thing about the matter practically, and have been working hard, would complain that I was very ignorant of what they were thinking and doing, and that mere talk did not help them at all. I thought, therefore, that the safer and truer plan would be, to say whatever occurred to me in reference to your labours, first of all to yourselves; I should then be reminded that the business is a real one, and one which requires real hearts and hands; I should feel less as if I were merely putting down thoughts and speculations in my study; I should not be able to think of education as an abstract thing, and must perforce connect it with the masters who teach, and the children who learn. And there is an additional reason for this course in the circumstances of the past year. If the progress of education be marked by the de bates which take place in parliament about it, by the number of meetings which are called together for the purpose of promoting it, by the speeches and controversies to which it gives rise, we should have little to report for the year 1844; compared with most of its recent prede * Exeter Street, Strand, Dec. 21, 1844, by Rev. F. D. MAURICE. VOL. III. No. 1. B cessors it would seem like a blank. People have been busy about a great many other matters, foreign and domestic, some of them, no doubt, touching closely upon your work, all remotely affected, as every thing must be affected, by it, but the work itself has not been a topic for much debating or declamation; the newspapers have seldom noticed it, or only in connexion with other topics. Now, considering how much it was in every one's mouth, a year or two ago, this fact might seem to indicate that at present we are stationary. I hope we may draw just the opposite inference from it. I do not say, that amidst the clatter of tongues this work may not be going on, but certainly that is not the work, that is in itself no sign that the work is making progress. There have been a great many agricultural meetings in the country during the last twelvemonth. Gentlemen have talked very learnedly, and with great enthusiasm, about fattening sheep, and manuring the ground. But the sheep were not fed, the ground was not manured by their speeches; they might encourage the farmer to better processes of tillage, but the tillage itself must go on, and there must be sun and showers to co-operate with human labour, otherwise the soil would continue in a very hard and hopeless condition, in spite of all these recommendations and encouragements. Even so is it in the other case; whatever suggestions you may have gathered from addresses or from books, whatever stimulus they may have given to your exertions, in those exertions themselves must be our hope of any change in the moral condition of our land. Yet, those exertions themselves, the more earnestly you make them, will every day lead you to a deeper conviction of their own helplessness, unless there were some living powers in the plants which you cultivate, and something answering to sun and rain to call those powers forth. It is strange how naturally one falls into agricultural comparisons when one is speaking of schools and school teaching. In fact, it happens inevitably, for our language, and, I suppose, nearly every language spoken by a cultivated nation, has bound the two thoughts together so closely that they can be hardly put asunder. That word cultivated' which I have just used, and which I have used once before, is, itself, as you all know, a proof of this. You can hardly speak it without connecting thoughts of the soil with thoughts of human hearts and human understandings; you feel that it is not a chance connexion; you did not make it, but you found it. And I would wish you reverently to consider those parables of our Lord in which it is brought out. He himself said to his disciples, of His parable of the sower, 'If ye understand not this, how can ye understand all parables?' as if the spirit and meaning of a parable lay in it; as if in that especially He were pointing out a resemblance which actually existed, and which He wished them, under his guidance, to be continually tracing out. I make these remarks, because they will help you to see what I mean by progress of education. I cannot say that I like this phrase ; the word progress suggests to us the movement of a carriage on a railway; it was at Euston Square at 10 in the morning, it is at Liverpool by 8 or 9 at night. I cannot see that education advances in this manI do not think the man is intended to leave behind him all the ner. |