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Preparation neglected.

up his sign, before he is called in to heal the maladies of the body. It is long before he can inspire confidence enough in the people to be intrusted with their most difficult cases of ailing, and very likely the noon of life is passed before he can consider himself estabe lished. But it is not so with the teacher. He gains access to the sanctuary of mind without any difficulty, and the most tender interests for both worlds are intrusted to his guidance, even when he makes preten sion to fo higher motive than that of filling up a few months of time not otherwise appropriated, and to no qualifications but those attained by accident. A late writer in the Journal of Education hardly overstates this matter:-"Every stripling who has passed four years within the walls of a college; every dissatisfied clerk, who has not ability enough to manage the trifling concerns of a common retail shop; every young farmer who obtains in the winter a short vacation from the toils of summer,-in short, every young person who is conscious of his imbecility in other business, esteems himself fully competent to train the ignorance and weakness of infancy into all the virtue and power and wisdom of maturer years,-to form a creature, the frailest and feeblest that heaven has made, into the intelligent and fearless sovereign of the whole animated creation, the interpreter and adorer and almost the representative of Divinity!"

Many there are who enter upon the high employment of teaching a common school as a secondary object. Perhaps they are students themselves in some

Teaching a secondary object.-Ignorance does not excuse.

higher institution, and resort to this as a temporary expedient for paying their board, while their chief object is, to pursue their own studies and thus keep pace with their classes. Some make it a steppingstone to something beyond, and, in their estimation, higher in the scale of respectability,-treating the employment, while in it, as irksome in the extreme, and never manifesting so much delight as when the hour arrives for the dismissal of their schools. Such have not the true spirit of the teacher; and if their labors are not entirely unprofitable, it only proves that children are sometimes submitted to imminent danger, but are still unaccountably preserved by the hand of Providence.

The teacher should go to his duty full of his work. He should be impressed with its overwhelming importance. He should feel that his mistakes, though they may not speedily ruin him, may permanently injure his pupils. Nor is it enough that he shall say, "I did it ignorantly." He has assumed to fill a place where ignorance itself is sin; and where indifference to the well-being of others is equivalent to willful homicide. He might as innocently assume to be the physician, and, without knowing its effects, prescribe arsenic for the colic. Ignorance is not in such cases a valid excuse, because the assumption of the place implies a pretension to the requisite skill. Let the teacher, then, well consider what manner of spirit he is of. Let him come to this work only when he has carefully pondered its nature and its responsibilities,

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