{437} Although the obstacles to the progress of correct views on the subject of education, as well as to the adoption of the best means for promoting this all-important object, be too numerous easily to determine which are the most pre-eminently mischievous, I shall begin with those which appear to constitute the very “head and front of the offending.” These are created under the parental roof itself, where the first elements of education are almost always acquired, and where it is most obvious that _if any but good seed are sown_, the most precious part of the child's subsequent existence must be spent rather in the toilsome, painful business of extirpating weeds, than of bringing to perfection such plants as yield the wholesome bread of life. Hence, in a great measure, the little benefit, in numberless instances, from going to school; because, the short time generally allowed for this purpose (particularly in the case of girls) is too often occupied solely in clearing away and rooting out from the mind _that_ which must necessarily be removed before any useful and lasting knowledge can well be implanted. The first parental fault which I shall notice, is that by which children are first affected. It begins to influence them with the first dawnings of intellect—augments as that expands—accumulates like compound interest, and never ceases to exert its baneful power until fixed for life. This fault is the glaring and frequent contradictions between parental precepts and examples, although the least experience will suffice to convince any one who will consult it, that the latter will forever be followed rather than the former; nor will any thing ever check it but the fear of some very severe punishment—_the rod_ (for example) on the back of the far less guilty child, instead of the shoulders of the parental tempter. The father or mother who calculates on their children totally abstaining, unless by external force, from any vicious indulgence whatever, of which they see their parents habitually guilty, counts on a moral impossibility. As well might they expect water not to boil when sufficient heat is long enough applied, or dry tinder not to burn when brought in contact with fire; for these appliances are to water and tinder what vicious parental examples will always prove to the juvenile mind. Woe, double and triple woe, be to those who set them, for they incur the most awfully dangerous responsibility of rendering their children utterly worthless! I confidently appeal, as in a former lecture, to the experience of every one who now hears me, and I beseech them to ask themselves how many drinking, gambling, profane, lazy, idle fathers have they ever known whose sons were exempt from these vices? How many have they ever known who habitually gave way to bursts of anger and wrath—to a rude, dictatorial, despotic, quarrelsome disposition, especially in the