Character was valued by this man, and his statement as to the relative importance of study is valuable to parents and teachers. “Reading and writing and learning I allow to be necessary, but yet not the chief business. I imagine you think him a very foolish fellow that should not value a virtuous or a wise man infinitely before a scholar. Not but that I think learning a great help to both, in well-disposed minds; but yet it must be confessed also that in others not so disposed, it helps them only to be the more foolish or worse men. [Sidenote: How Locke would choose a teacher] “I say this, that when you consider the breeding of your son, and are looking out for a schoolmaster, or a tutor, you would not have, as is usual, Latin and logic only in your thoughts. Learning must be had, but in the second place, as subservient only to greater qualities. Seek out somebody that may know how discreetly to frame his manners: place him in hands where you may, as much as possible, secure his innocence, cherish and nurse up the good, and gently correct and weed out any bad inclinations, and settle in him good habits. THIS IS THE MAIN POINT; and this being provided for, learning may be had into the bargain.” To how great an extent are Protestants following this excellent advice? In what schools for Protestant boys and girls is innocence cherished? where is the good nourished? where are bad inclinations gently weeded out, and good habits settled? where do these things take a position ahead of book learning? “Virtue,” continues Locke, “as the first and most necessary of those endowments that belong to a man or gentleman, was based on religion. As the foundation of this, there ought very early to be imprinted on his mind a true notion of God.” Here one finds a clear conception of Christian education, which parents of to-day would do well to study. [Sidenote: Cramming a papal method] The study of the classics, together with the memory work which was the chief characteristic of these studies, was not the only defect in papal education; hence it is not the only error from which educators, led, as one must believe, by the spirit of truth, have from time to time broken away. The cramming system, so justly denounced by thinking minds as one of the most far-reaching defects of the present school system, is a mark of papal education wherever it may be found. And probably no generation has passed which has not heard some voice lifted against this pernicious practice of the schoolroom. The God of heaven recognizes that the human mind contains the highest possibilities of earth; the child is a part of himself; and when wrong methods of education are used in dealing with developing minds, He, the head of the body, of which we are members, feels the hurt; so it is that Christian education is an emanation from the mind of God.