“But who shall parcel out His intellect by geometric rules, Split like a province into round and square? Who knows the individual hour in which His habits were first sown, even as a seed? Who that shall point as with a wand and say, ‘This portion of the river of my mind Came from yon fountain’?”—_Prelude._ I need not again insist upon the nature of our educational tools. We know well that “Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.” In other words, we know that parents and teachers should know how to make sensible use of a child’s _circumstances_ (atmosphere) to forward his sound education; should train him in the discipline of the _habits_ of the good life; and should nourish his life with _ideas_, the food upon which personality waxes strong. =Only Three Educational Instruments.=—These three we believe to be the only instruments of which we may make lawful use in the upbringing of children; and any short cut we take by trading on their sensibilities, emotions, desires, passions, will bring us and our children to grief. The reason is plain; habits, ideas, and circumstances are external, and we may all help each other to get the best that is to be had of these; but we may not meddle directly with the personality of child or man. We may not work upon his vanity, his fears, his love, his emulation, or anything that is his by very right, anything that goes to make him a person. =Our Limitations.=—Most thinking people are in earnest about the bringing-up of children; but we are in danger of taking too much upon us, and of not recognising the limitations which confine us to the outworks of personality. Children and grown-up persons are the same, with a difference; and a thoughtful writer has done us good service by carefully tracing the method of our Lord’s education of the Twelve. “Our Lord,” says this author, “reverenced whatever the learner had in him of his own, and was tender in fostering this native growth.... Men, in His eyes, were not mere clay in the hands of the potter, matter to be moulded to shape. They were organic beings, each growing from within, with a life of his own—a personal life which was exceedingly precious in His and His Father’s eyes—and He would foster this growth so that it might take after the highest type.”[14]