IN every transition-stage of the world's history the question of education naturally comes to the front. So much depends on the first impressions of childhood, on the first training of the tender shoot, that it has always been acknowledged, from Solomon to Forster, that to "train up a child in the way he should go" is among the most important duties of fathers and citizens. To the individual, to the family, to the State, the education of the rising generation is a question of primary importance. Plato began the education of the citizens of his ideal Republic from the very hour of their birth; the nursing child was taken from the mother lest injudicious treatment should mar, in the slightest degree, the perfection of the future warrior. On this point modern and ancient wisdom clasp hands, and place the education of the child among the most important duties of the State. The battle at present raging between the advocates of "secular" and "religious" education--to use the cant of the day--is a most natural and righteous recognition of the vast interests at stake when Church or State claims the right of training the sons and daughters of England. No one has yet attempted to explain why it should be "irreligious" to teach writing, or history, or geography; or why it should "destroy a child's soul" to improve his mental faculties. It is among the "mysteries" of the faith, why it is better for our poor to leave' them to grow up in both moral and intellectual darkness, than to dissipate the intellectual darkness by some few rays of knowledge, and to leave the moral training to other hands. If we left a starving man to die because we could only give him bread, and were unable to afford cheese in addition, all would unite in declaiming at our folly: but "religious" people would rather that our street Arabs grew up both heathens and brutes, than that we should improve their minds without Christianizing their souls. Better let a lad grow up a thief and a drunkard, than turn him into an artizan and a freethinker. There can scarcely be a better proof of the unreasonableness of Christian doctrine, than the Christian fear of sharpening mental faculties, without binding them down, at the same time, in the chains of dogma. Only a religion founded on reason can dare to train children's minds to the utmost, and then leave them free to use all the power and keenness acquired by that training on the investigation of any religious doctrine presented to them. We, who have written Tekel on the Christian faith, share in the opinion of the Christian clergy, that man's carnal reason is a terrible foe to the Christian revelation; but here we begin to differ from them, for while they regard this reason as a child of the devil, to be scourged and chained down, we do homage to it as to the fairest offspring of the Divine Spirit, the brightest earthly reflection of His glory, and the nearest image of His "Person"; we would cherish