jected and his Gospel counted a superfluous thing ; whereas, if the sad, humiliating, terrifying truth of Satan's rampant rule around us and in us were admitted or perceived, who would not cry out for deliverance? who would not flee for refuge to the hope set before him in that Gospel?

To worldly minds, such language as this is unintelligible; it is intolerable: we, therefore, address it to those who through faith, have overcome the world, and who look back as from a high mountain's top, upon the dark valley of confusion and error and strife from which they have escaped. We appeal to their past experience of the bondage in which they were held by Satan, until Christ made them free; and to their consciousness of never having fully believed the fact of Satan's empire over them, or traced his continual working in them, until they had cast off that yoke. Our great enemy is a very subtle spirit; and the nearer we stand to the means of escape, the more carefully does he blind us to the existence of danger. He cares not how moral we be, or how exact in every external observance, so long as we make that relative righteousness the root of our hope, instead of exhibiting in it the fruit of our faith.

Such, however, is not the case; so high a tone of outward morality does not prevail, in the books now under consideration, which are placed in the hands of our young people of both sexes, as an indispensable branch of polite education, or even of any education beyond that acquired at a charity school; while of the high standard supplied by the Lord Himself, they are often kept in utter ignorance; knowing no more of civil polity, the social

institutions, and domestic ordinances established under the Theocracy, than they do of the interior economy of a Union workhouse. That is to say, they may occasionally have heard either the one or the other animadverted on, as a subject of casual remark, or argumentative discussion; but if questioned on the minutiae of both, it is a point as to the amount of ignorance that they would display on each respectively. This is very lamentable; and the consequences are equally so. We rarely find the pious parents of a family enabled to rejoice over their offspring, but rather mourning the premature blight that has fallen on what they hoped to see ripening to a golden harvest. Why is this? Good grain, we will presume, was sown in the infant mind; but as education proceeded, such quantities not only of tares but of thorns and thistles, nettles and every pernicious weed, were cast into the ground, that the delicate blade was choked, overpowered, crushed down, and compelled to wither away. The systems brought under the youthful eye are according to the course of this world, in its most ungodly form: the facts on which their attention is fixed in order that they may be always retained in the memory, are the natural produce of such systems, emphatically "works of the flesh;" and the guise in which they are served up to the youthful imagination is surely such as to engender a distaste for the majestic sobriety and simplicity of Holy Scripture. Yet pious parents send their children to school, or engage classical instructors at home, or place in their hands the identical books that such would use, "to form their minds," and then almost doubt the faithfulness

of God, because the sowing of the wind yields either nothing at all or a harvest of whirlwinds!

It is time to produce a sample. We are amazed, on taking up a volume of Plutarch's Lives, at the fact of such a book being found on the shelves, we will not say of any Christian, but of any moral or decent family. Yet it is a standard work, education is defective without it; and though every page, teems with the poisonous fruits of rank heathenism, though the writer's thoughts and views and feelings are those of an idolatrous pagan, and the facts recorded are all presented through the same medium; and both conveyed in language as gross as the subject is unholy, still all this must be reflected from, and if possible durably impressed on the tender mind of youth; and the immortal creature who has been baptized into the faith of the pure Gospel, who has duly learned to designate himself "A member of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of Heaven;" who has been carefully taught that his body must be the temple of the Holy Ghost, and that if he have not the Spirit of Christ he is none of His;-this immortal creature has a book put into his hands, not merely for casual perusal, but for careful and diligent study, which is, from beginning to end, one mass of abominations.

At present, boys are the subject of these remarks, which, however unpalateable, however dissimilar from the usual treatises on education, we do fearlessly challenge any human being to confute without putting the plain commands of God completely out of the question. To that touchstone the fearful system of mental training shall be brought; and no Christian parent shall lay down these pages (unless

she lay them down unread) without having been compelled to see the naked deformity of such system. The plan at first adopted was to write for the children; but a deeper examination of the subject has brought conviction to the writer's mind that instead of offering an antidote to them, it is better to analyse the poison in the presence of those who may thereby be dissuaded from administering it: and who might, if they would, by a determined effort accomplish that without which the curse of an offended God will ere long be felt desolating the whole country-the substitution of a truly Christian for the truly heathenish plan of education that prevails in schools and in colleges.

The edifying details of Spartan morality and Spartan modesty, as regards our own sex, will not here be touched upon. It is indeed most lamentable to observe that, in modified forms of Grecian History, expressly prepared for families, and sometimes by Clergymen too, the vile customs detailed by Plutarch, while they are a little pruned down and glossed over, are still perpetuated; and instead of being alluded to as melancholy proofs of the deep abasement into which man has fallen by original sin, and the lower depths that his spiritual enemies continually plunge him into, by the inspiration of a wisdom that cometh from beneath,-earthly, sensual, devilish,-they are excused, almost justified on grounds of expediency. We are gravely told that the Spartan girls, dancing in public altogether denuded of clothing, committed no real breach of modesty, nor deserved to fall in the general estimation! We just compare this with the plain fact, that when the nakedness of our first parents became a matter of consciousness to them,

and they felt their need of covering, "Unto Adam also and his wife did the LORD GOD make coats of skins and clothed them." The frightful immorality that otherwise prevailed, we also pass over; and the horrible practice of submitting every new-born child to the inspection of an assembly of heartless monsters, who pronounced, according to its apparent vigour, whether it should be nourished or cast alive into a black cavern to be devoured by reptiles. We merely purpose shewing the peculiarities of Spartan legislation as regarded the youthful male citizens, and the bondsmen of that renowned state: the institutions of which it is deemed essential that every young christian gentleman should become conversant with, as a model of self-denying heroism, wisdom and policy!

Holy Scripture records this solemn command of God, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.' Intercourse with evil spirits, and the possession of supernatural gifts derived from them, are so distinctly mentioned, so impressively forbidden, that to doubt their reality is to doubt the truth of revelation. The Delphic Oracle was one of these infernal agencies, and therefore in its nature and working truly diabolical. The whole constitution of these famous laws is described as originating with the evil spirit at Delphos, to whom Lycurgus offered sacrifice for that purpose: and this is merely noticed to shew how directly opposed to all that a Christian is taught to hold sacred is the Spartan matter, at its very root.

The first ablution bestowed on a new-born infant, was not water but wine, for the express purpose of killing it, if not strong enough to bear so cruel an operation. Then, if adjudged by the old savages of