When we carefully examine the conduct of an enlightened and affectionate mother or nurse with the infant, as soon as it can distinguish right from wrong and good from evil, we find it to consist of two kinds, which are perfectly distinct from each other. The one regards the comfort and physical welfare of the child;--the other regards the regulation of its temper, its passions, and its conduct. It is of the latter only that we are here to speak. When this moral training of the judicious mother is examined, we find it uniformly and entirely to consist in an indefatigable watchfulness in preventing or checking whatever is evil in the child, and in encouraging, and teaching, and training to the practice of whatever is good. She is careful to enforce obedience and submission in every case;--to win and encourage the indications of affection; to check retaliation or revenge; to subdue the violence of passion or inordinate desire;--to keep under every manifestation of self-will;--and to soothe down and banish every appearance of fretfulness and bad temper. In short, she trains her young charge to feel and to practise all the amiable and kindly affections of our nature, encouraging and commending him in their exercise;--while, on the contrary, she prevents, discourages, reproves, and if necessary punishes, the exhibition of dispositions and conduct of an opposite kind. This, as every one who has examined the subject knows, is the sum and substance of the mother's educational efforts during this early period of her child's progress;--and what we wish to press upon the observation of the reader is, that the child at this period is literally incapable of learning any thing else which at all deserves the name of education. He may be taught to be obedient; to be submissive; to be kind and obliging; to moderate, and even to suppress his passions; to controul his wishes and his will;--to be forbearing and forgiving;--and to be gentle, peaceable, orderly, cleanly, and perhaps mannerly. Is there any thing else?--Is there any one element of a different kind, that ever does, or ever can enter into the course of an infant or young child's education? If there be, what is it?--Let it be examined;--and we have no hesitation in saying, that if it be "education," or any thing that deserves the name, it will be found to resolve itself into some one or other of the moral qualities which we have above enumerated. If therefore children, during the earlier stages of their educational progress are to be taught at all, religion and morals _must_ be, the subjects, seeing that they are for a long period capable of learning nothing else. And it is here worthy of especial notice, that in teaching religion and morals, there is a negative as well as a positive scale;--and experience has uniformly demonstrated, that if the parent or teacher neglect to improve the child by raising him in the positive side, he will, by his own efforts, sink deeper in the negative.