Whether on education the Greeks thought more wisely than we do or not,[318] they certainly contemplated the subject from a more elevated point of view. They regarded it as the matrix in which future generations are fashioned, and receive that peculiar temperament and character belonging to the institutions that presided at their birth. Their theories were so large as to comprehend the whole developement of individual existence, from the moment when the human germ is quickened into life until the grave closes the scene, and in many cases looked still further; for the rites of initiation and a great part of their ethics had reference to another world. On this account we find their legislators possessed by extreme solicitude respecting the character of those teachers into whose hands the souls of the people were to be placed, to receive the first principles of good or evil, to be invigorated, raised, and purified by the former, or by the latter to be perverted, or precipitated down the slopes of vice and effeminacy, by which nations sink from freedom to servitude. Among them, moreover, it was never matter of doubt, whether the light of knowledge should be allowed to stream upon the summits of society only, or be suffered to descend into its lower depths and visit the cottages of the poor. Whatever education had to impart was, in most states, imparted to all the citizens, as far as their leisure or their capacity would permit them to receive it. The whole object, indeed, of education among the Greeks was to create good citizens, from which it has by some been inferred that they confined their views to the delivering of secular instruction. But this is to take a narrow and ignorant view of the subject, since religion was not only an element of education but regarded as of more importance than all its other elements taken together. For it had not escaped the Hellenic legislators, that in many circumstances of life man is placed beyond the reach and scrutiny of laws and public opinion, where he must be free to act according to the dictates of conscience, which, if not rightly trained, purified, and rendered clearsighted by religion, will often dictate amiss. It is of the utmost moment, therefore, that in these retired situations man should not consider himself placed beyond the range of every eye, and so be tempted to lay the foundation of habits which, begun in secrecy, may soon acquire boldness to endure the light and set the laws themselves at defiance. Accordingly over those retired moments in which man at first sight appears to commune with himself alone, religion was called in to teach that there were invisible inspectors, who registered, not only the evil deeds and evil words they witnessed, but even the evil thoughts and emotions of the heart, the first impulses to crime in the lowest abysses of the mind. Consistently with this view of the subject, we discover everywhere in Greek history and literature traces of an almost