God is a spirit of truth; and in the realm of truth, therefore, the divine order, and the law of wisdom which reigns therein, shines forth with an especial clearness--with a higher degree of evidence or greater perspicuity than even in the region of nature, which for us is for the most part half-dark, or at the very best but a _chiaro-oscuro_--a mixture of light and darkness. But man, formed out of the dust of the earth, placed, as it were, in the very center of nature, as its first-born son or its earthly lord, is in this respect himself a natural being. Even in his susceptibility for higher and divine truth, man is tied to and is dependent on a similar and collateral grade of development in the life of nature, which can in no case be violently broken, nor a step in it arbitrarily overleaped, without involving the most disastrous consequences as the penalty of so unnatural a course. Even in education there reigns a similar law of gradual development according to the natural progression of the different ages of life. With the boy of good and natural abilities, who shows an aptness and willingness to learn when knowledge is presented to his mind, and implanted in a true and living form, the teacher’s first care is to improve this disposition, and to strengthen and to foster it, and, by furnishing it with the due measure and the right quality of intellectual culture, gradually to develop its powers. At this age the moral part of education will wisely confine itself to laying a foundation of good habits, to the careful exclusion of all evil communication and the deadly contagion of wicked example. In the soft and yielding character of the child there can scarcely be as yet any question about principles or sentiments. But the case is very different with youth. If at this time of life the moral character be not carefully formed simultaneously with its scientific cultivation, then is the good season irreparably lost, and rarely, if ever, can the deficiency be afterward supplied. For when this stage of intellectual and moral culture is once passed, when the mind has begun at last to move with greater freedom and to mature itself, the young man is at once admitted to the full light of science, or enters into the busy course of active life, to be there brought to the touchstone of experience.