God, the conscious immortality of the soul; the underlying facts of Christian revelation it would evaporate in poetical mists. Its meaning was hidden, and phraseology reverent. "It came with a Judas kiss." The real strength of its warfare lay rather in its ally, the historical criticism. All supernatural, miraculous events were to be thrown in the line of a perfectly natural development; the beauty and significance of the biblical miracles and the Incarnation were lauded in rapturous phrases, but the fact persistently denied. Legend and myth, poetry and symbol are all allowed, but the reality, the fact, never. The later conflict came from the most candid, powerful, and thoroughgoing foemen Christianity has ever faced the men of science. The achievements that turned the world upside down gave a new method to all; civilization seemed at first to do away with religion and to drive the very God from the heavens. The smoke of that tremendous duel is now clearing away, and we can see that Christianity was never so well founded in the minds and hearts of believers, but the power of attack and the honest desertion of many earnest seekers after truth have made the onslaught a crisis to be remembered humbly and reverently. Coleridge has done more than any other man to prepare the Christian thinker for this thrice-waged battle. His real power was as an interpreter of spiritual facts, a foremost leader in the "rediscovery of the inner life." What Wesley had done in the practical way of mighty revival in the lives and hearts of millions he interpreted with a philosophy of Christian experience that could be defended in the highest courts of reason and could sing its joy unashamed in the face of the most learned and merciless criticism. He gave a new impulse to all liberal evangelical thinking. He seemed at a sad loss about conducting his own life, yet out of this painful experience as a student of spiritual life he gave a message that quickened and broadened the manliest life of England. The man scathed by his friends for lack of service to men, supposed to be always dreaming, was able to replace reason in religion, whence it had been dethroned, and to give new guidance to Christian feeling, the very years when new dangers were abroad in a restless and stormy era. "I take up this work," he says, "of the inspiration of Scripture with a real purpose to read it as I should any other

work- -as far, at least, as I dare. For I neither can nor dare throw off a strong and awful prepossession in its favor certain as I am that a large part of the life and light by which I see, love, and embrace the truth, and the strength coorganized into a living body of faith and knowledge, has been directly or indirectly derived to me from this sacred volume." "More that finds me than all I have experienced in all other books put together." So his idea of experience, practical reason, gave a basis for his defense of the Bible, and his doctrine of the immanent God got men ready for the scientific attack. Nobody reads Coleridge now. His marvelous contributions to Christian thought at this crisis hour have been absorbed by the eager minds of countless disciples. The gold from the mighty brain, melted in the hot furnace fires of sorrow and temptation in his own life, has passed into the current coin of modern religious thought. Coleridge lived to be an old man, and died at the house of a friend, Dr. Gilliam, near London. He spent the last hours of his life dictating sentences for his great system of philosophy-laying bricks for the first courses of his tower of Babel, upon which his dream-rapt eyes had been for years fondly gazing as it lifted its air-hung turrets before him. The more we look into it, the more perplexing is the paradox of Coleridge's life, the stranger the fate of his influence. His methodical friends never tired of holding him up as a terrible example of wasted powers and paralyzed genius. But they are slowly fading, while the name of Coleridge stands in letters of light. His books are well-nigh forgotten, but he still calls forth the high respect of thinking men. His poor, struggling, half-defeated life is now seen to end in victory. An author without readers, a leader without disciples, a life to be remembered with pity, he is nevertheless sure of a place among the immortals. So we come round to the question with which we began, our circle yet unsquared, and end by still asking, Who was Coleridge?

Franklin M Elfech

ART. VIII-MORAL EMPHASIS IN EDUCATION.

EDUCATION has to do with mind preeminently. It is the assisted development of mind, and with it the construction of character. The nature of the education determines the character. This is a commonplace. But, like many common truths, it needs more attention as well by the man on the street who wants his child to grow up good and useful, and the metaphysical moralist interested academically in the evolution of the race. The growth of mind is the growth of character. Man has a mind, a subject of the mental life, a spiritual substance back of all mental activity-call it mind, soul, or spirit. By the mind or soul is not meant a mere aggregation of psychical activities. Mind is not matter. Material mind with all its activities accounted for by physical laws is a vanishing theory. With materialists of to-day man has no mental subject, and all activities are accounted for by physiology. The increased study of the relation of mind to body is a demand in education. But it is far from finding that mental activity can be wholly accounted for by physiology. Man has a soul, affected in multiform ways by the physical body; nevertheless a distinct reality, the ground and agent of his intellectual, volitional, and emotional life. The mind is a unit. It acts always as a whole. While we speak of "faculties of mind," "divisions of mind," and the like, these are only to facilitate expression, and have no existence in actuality.

Now, this mind is character. The mind does not produce character. It is character. As the mind, so is the man, the woman. As the mind grows, so grows character in kind and degree. Mind is the man. Another commonplace; but a significant truth needing emphasis. But while mind is character, what makes mind? What determines the character of mind-the character of character? What gives cast and trend to the mind that is the man? In one word, environment. I use this word in its full content, to include ancestry, heredity, and personal, family, social, racial, national conditions. These all enter into the making of mind. Some of these affect us mediately and some immediately. Some affect us

without our asking or being asked. Some affect us by personal contact and willing, personal mental activity. Racial, hereditary, ancestral conditions are beyond our control. But national, family, social, personal come close to us. We are in these; and these are forming mind-character. The changes in the character of persons and nations produced by changes in environment are as widespread as the race. There is no place where surroundings so directly and forcefully tell upon the making of character as our educational institutions. Here active, positive effort is made to environ and develop the mind. The student is not at school merely to absorb. Even absorbing would be a powerful factor in his making. He is there to be molded, changed, developed, characterized. This is the business of the school. It is the duty, the office of the teacher to create environment by positive effort. And the student will become what his school is. Let this thought impress itself on parents, guardians, and intending students. Let them cease writing for catalogues to compare expenses and sending or going where a paltry dollar can be saved. But let them compare surroundings-moral, social, intellectual conditions. It is in these the boys and girls are to be immersed, and they will be fashioned in character in agreement with these. Here is a third commonplace, but a tremendous truth. A truth for the times whose wide preaching is demanded is the education of the mind as a moral factor. By this is not meant mere teaching of ethics or of psychology; but such instruction as shall bring the student to a vivid consciousness that he is a moral being, that the cultivation of the moral is the highest office of education, and that all education should contribute thereto.

Every school of thought regards the moral nature in man the differentiating one and the highest. And yet it is one of the surprises and anomalies of the education of Christendom that the care and development of man's highest nature is, in the system, relegated to a subordinate place. There is no plea here for the recognition and teaching in our schools of shibboleths, notions, doxies, and the sectarian narrownesses with which our blessed Christianity is overburdened; but for the recognition and teaching of the fact that the student has a soul, and that this soul must be cultivated

morally and upon the principles of the highest morality known to history and the race. Just as any other institution recognizes the most significant factor in its objects and work, and plies the highest and most effective means for the realization of its ends, so the school must come to recognize the moral in mind as the supreme factor in man, and provide means for its care and culture at least as adequate as those employed in any other department of education. Now, this study of the moral and its culture must be comparative. These are the days of comparative study. Ethics, psychology are in the curricula of our schools. They have a large place. Psychology in education is becoming a craze. People are seeking a better knowledge of mind in order to its more perfect cultivation. The mind is divided into faculties, and an attempt made to weigh their relative value in education. But what education? An education where the moral is neither the end nor the chief field of work. The principle is excellent; but it is not applied where it ought to be. People generally emphasize what they regard as of superior importance. It is a significant fact that with all our boasted civilization and educational prominence the moral in man is not practically regarded as the predominantly significant. The study must be comparative. We must know what the moral is, what the best moral is, and the best way is to grow the best moral. A man stated recently in public address, "Christianity is the best moral system." Did he know this? How did he know this? A man gives his means to send the Gospel to non-Christian peoples, because he says the Christian system is the highest morality. Does he know it, and how? He knows it by comparison, or he does not know it at all-by a comparison intellectual or experimental. People vociferate over our Christianity as the highest morality who actually do not know whether their assertions are true or not. It is the greatest moral teaching and moral reality, but how do we know this? By comparing it with all other moral systems. The Asiatic is usually intellectually converted before he is evangelically converted-he sees first that what we have is better than he has and accepts the better. Parliaments of religion are useful so far as they result in a just comparison-the moral best of the Orient with the moral best of the Occident.