The bond that subsists here is a family bond; it is a blood relationship, and cannot with impunity be ignored. (b) We remark again, that such an order of study and teaching as that enjoined is the most practical one, in the character and permanence of its results. It is practical just because it is philosophical, teaching the student how to distinguish between things essential and non-essential, and how to subordinate facts and details to the accomplishment of exalted ends. It converts the department of philology from a fastidious study of words to the practical study of language as the medium of communication between man and man. English literature rises at once from the study of names and dates and the compilation of authorities, to the higher work of analyzing the human mind in representative authorship, and rendering to us for our personal guidance the elements of literary power. So as to English composition. "Nothing can be more frivolous" says Cousin, "than that rhetoric which pursues the form alone." Such a rhetoric is alike unphilosophic and useless. It is because, upon the better method, the form is subservient to the life beneath it, and precept gives place to principle, that it is a practical method. It does something for the student. It leaves a tangible product in his hands for judicious use and enjoyment. Now that he is the recipient of new ideas which he himself can develop and apply in fullest accordance with the nature of his need, he is thereby more of a man among men, and more potential in his work.

We insist that the graduates of our colleges should go forth to the varied vocations of life with just such a practical English culture. The clergymen and physician, the jurist and journalist; the very man of business in the daily contact of trade, all are demanding such a teaching-a something given them applicable to the real experiences of life, as well as to the retirement of the schools.

Is it too much to say that the philosophic method of instruction, as distinct from the technical and formal, is one of the great needs of our American system of education in all its departments?

If we now ask the question, why such a method of studying English is not more generally adopted in our institutions, the answer is a plain one, and to a certain degree exonerates us

We have already seen that it is not from any general want of the knowledge of such a method or desire to apply it. The difficulty is this! The character of the preparatory English with which the great majority of our American students come to us is not such as to admit of anything more than a general historical culture.

This is far too true in most departments of study, as the experience of our leading professors indicates. In the English department it has a special application, inasmuch as it is comparatively new, and the tendency to a superficial method or total neglect is unusually strong. Here, then, we are brought once again to what may be called the most vital question before the educated mind of this land-the question of upper schools. It is not the question of post-graduate courses which is being agitated, and for which we are not as yet prepared, that is the main question. It is not even the question of collegiate courses, per se, but of pre-collegiate. If these be properly established and adjusted, the college will largely administer itself, and special schools appear among us when demanded by an advancing scholarship.

In a recent issue of one of our leading journals, we read, "In a land where education is so universally prized, it is remarkable that, even now, in our one hundreth year, there is no preparatory school of national reputation."

It refers, by way of comparison, to Harrow, Eton, and Rugby, in England. Whatever may be said of the truthfulness of this assertion, as it respects those schools among us, which are devoted to the interests of the ancient languages, the remark is literally true as to the study of English.

It is in this connection that President Porter, in his American Colleges, contends for the more general and careful study of English in unison with other branches, putting the student at once in a condition to become an intelligent recipient of collegiate instruction.

"The neglect of such culture," he writes, "in too many of the so-called classical schools of this country is inexcusable, and so long as this neglect continues, the colleges must suffer under reproaches which should not properly rest upon them." This is the precise point at which the difficulty lies, in that, despite our theories and honest resolves to the contrary, we are

obliged in a sense to do that work in the college which ought to have been done in the upper school. The higher institutions are thus completely in the hands of the lower. Students must be received as they come to us, and in proportion to the meagreness of the preparation, so will it be difficult to do any satisfactory work in the line of that advanced education for which the college as such exists. There is then but one remedy, and it is practicable.

It is the more thorough and comprehensive study of elementary English in our upper schools, whereby the work, at present necessitated in our first collegiate year, may be remanded to its proper place in the preparatory department, and the college professor begin at once upon the basis of such work, the application of the philosophic method. In addition to exercises in punctuation, orthography, English grammar, and declamation, we see no reason why the entering student should not come to us tolerably well acquainted with the main historical facts of our language and literature, as well as with a good amount of intelligent practice in the simpler forms of discourse. Excellent manuals in all these branches are now accessible, and the student coming with his facts is prepared to enter at once upon the study of those leading principles, to which such facts give origin.

What remains, therefore, but that our American colleges and classical schools assume a position in this matter, that will be in keeping with the high ideals of such institutions! Some of our presidents and leading educators are doing already a noble work in this direction. The movement, however, must be a well-understood, combined, and vigorous one. To secure such unity of action has been and is the great difficulty. We are free to say, however, that if such general coöperation cannot be secured, a few of our leading institutions should take high ground on this subject, and at all hazards maintain it. The first colleges of this country, educationally, if not numeri cally, are not to be those whose doors are widely open to an indiscriminate preparation, but those whose standards are high and ever higher, as the interests of a liberal culture demand, who, disdaining to enter into those petty inter-collegiate rivalries, which obtain far too largely among us, take, at length, into their own hands the jurisdiction of the schools, which supply them and determine their character.

One thing is evident: if the grand department of English in our colleges is ever to become what it ought to become-a prominent factor in the very highest culture-and if the method upon which we are teaching it is ever to rise to the scientific and practical, then must the lovers of English and higher education address themselves with becoming ardor to the work before them. If our methods are wrong, we are to correct them. If, being right, they cannot be applied, a way must be opened for their application. The teaching of English is applied philosophy. We submit that the model instructor in English and all other branches is a philosopher, and not a pedagogue or pedant, an expositor of generic and germinal principles and not an official censor of recitations.

It is to Plato and Socrates that we are to resort as examples, and not to Diogenes or Cato.

Art. X.-HOW A PASTOR WOULD MEET

INFIDELITY.

By Rev. EPHER WHITAKER, Southold, L. I.

THE present phases of infidelity in this country are mainly three, viz.: materialism, spiritualism, and secularism. We name them in the reverse order of their destructiveness to the souls of men in our own day and land.

Materialism proposes to convert star-dust into life and plants and animals and man by physical forces only; also to generate ideas of virtue, duty, right, and wrong, moral obligation, by external excitement of the senses and consequent impressions of the brain; to turn thought into material motion and the movements of matter into thought.

But it is needless to master all the details and consequences of the theories of Lamarck and Oken and Vogt, in order to understand their main positions as materialists. So with Comte, Mill, Spencer, as well as Häckel, Bückner, Cope, Chapman, and others. And whoever accepts their doctrines must reject those of Moses, Isaiah, Paul, and John, and our Lord Jesus Christ.

One way of dealing with this phase of infidelity is to show that materialists do not agree as to the facts which their theories include. Take, for example, life and its origin. Some hold with the assertion of Lamarck, made at the beginning of this century, that "life is only a physical phenomenon." Others accept Spencer's dictum, that life is "the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations." We can understand that. For there is the stove with the self-regulating damper, and we can see the continuous adjustment of the internal relations of the fires to the external relations of the temperature. That, according to Spencer, is life.

Some maintain that "the evolution of life" includes its origin, and others attribute this to creation. Thus, Mr. Darwin speaks of "life with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms, or into one," but Dr. Chapman says there are no vital forces which are not convertible into physical ones;" and Prof. Barker has undertaken to prove "the correlation of vital and physical forces," and he has undoubtedly proved the inadequacy of his own logic.

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Some say that spontaneous generation takes place at the present time, and that the "mind is the impression of the brain derived from the external world through the medium of the senses,” and “if a Newton could be developed from an ancient Briton, or his living representative, an Australian, an Australian could be developed from an

Others say, produce your ape developed into an Australian or ancient Briton. And not seeing him brought into view, they deny that mind is only impressions of the brain. They also reject the evidence adduced in support of spontaneous generation. They do not admit that the origin of a living being is parallel to the origin of a crystal. They say, with Prof. Tyndall, that notions of natural evolution " represent an absurdity too monstrous to be entertained by any sane mind."

On the other hand, Mr. Darwin avers that man does come through the monkey from some far remote animal greatly inferior to the monkey. While Mr. Wallace, another advocate of the theory of natural selection, declared that this will not account for the development of man, and appeals to the differences between savage men and the brutes in respect to their brains, their hair, their voices, and other features. He says he does not know how Mr. Huxley passes from those vital phenomena which consist only of movements of particles of matter to those other phenomena which we term thought, sensation, or consciousness."