be wanted for any missionary who can be advantageously employed, while so much temporal and spiritual prosperity attends us? May we be permitted to know how much interest you feel in the salvation of sinners, and how sincerely you pray that the Lord would send labourers into his harvest, by the zeal you manifest in performing the part assigned you in the work? Union of effort is necessary. No one individual can sustain the whole burden. God has ordained it otherwise, that every one may have a part in the glorious work, whether he have much or little to give. Remember the notice the blessed Saviour took of the widow's mite, and banish the foolish idea, that because you have but little to give, it is not of much importance whether you give it or not. This is the grand fault which occasions perhaps nine tenths of our vast deficiencies. Determine first, conscientiously, how much it is your duty to give, and then be sure and give it. If your circumstances be so poor, that you cannot give more than three cents a year to this specific object, make it a matter of the more importance that that amount be not neglected. Give it its direction, through some branch or auxiliary; or, if you can have access to neither, by some careful hand, toward the general treasury: and give it such a direction as you will be sure it will not lose its way. And let your prayers accompany it. Banish also the idea that applications for money, to sustain the cause of the Gospel, are inconsistent with your religious feelings, on class meeting occasions, or any other. If your religious feelings are right, and embrace a just sense of duty, and a willingness to perform it, a lively interest in procuring the means to send the Gospel to the destitute is as surely mingled with those feelings, as a spirit of prayer for their salvation is. In strict conformity to this sentiment, Methodism commenced its glorious career. With the voice of free grace, proclaiming salvation to all the lost sons and daughters of Adam, was also mingled the voice of appeal to the people of God, to aid in sending the Gospel of this salvation to the ends of the earth. Men and brethren, help!' said the venerable Wesley, Was there ever a call like this since you first heard the Gospel? Help to relieve your companions in the kingdom of Jesus, who are pressed above measure. Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ. Help to send forth able and willing labourers into your Lord's harvest: so shall ye be assistants in saving souls from death, and hiding a multitude of sins. Help to propagate the Gospel of your salvation to the remotest corners of the earth, till the knowledge of our Lord shall cover the land, as the waters cover the sea.' Listening to this call, as embracing a part of their religious duty, others have aided in sending forward the Gospel, according to their means and our wants, until it has overspread our land. In the same spirit we are called on to aid, according to our enlarged means, and the greater wants of others, in sending it still forward to the destitute in other regions. We shall be unworthy of the name of Methodists, if we be found defi

cient in this matter.

If we wake up to our duty, then will God bless and prosper us; for he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."

EDUCATION.

Review of the Journal of the Proceedings of a Convention of Literary and Scientific Gentlemen, held in the Common Council Chamber of the City of New-York, October, 1830.'

NEXT to religion itself, and perhaps to civil order, there is no one subject that we can bring before our readers, of deeper or more universal importance than that of Education. If any who read this first sentence shall think it extravagant, we beg that they will not therefore throw down the article, or turn away from it, but do us (and we hope themselves also) the favor to read on. Its subject is one in which every individual is interested: every parent and every child; every brother and every sister; every Christian and every citizen. It embraces within its broad and comprehensive grasp the entire community, and spreads itself over the whole interests of man, from the cradle to the grave,-in time and in eternity. 'The great design of a liberal education,' says the late excellent and judicious Dr. Benjamin Rush, is, to prepare youth for usefulness here, and for happiness hereafter.'

That education is uncongenial with, or unfriendly to religion, or to any solid and substantial interest of man, is so far from being true, that it can have been only in ignorance, or in knavery which preys upon ignorance, that such a sentiment ever had an origin. That it should continue to be cherished in this age of the world and of Christianity, and above all in this country, would be a reflection so deeply disgraceful, that we are anxious to give the fullest and most practical proof of its utter falsehood; and at the same time, to throw around our own communion, especially, a still stronger guard, against the possible admission or propagation of a sentiment as well so degrading in itself, as so pernicious in the consequences which it must inevitably draw after it. That ignorance is the mother (or the nurse) of devotion, of sound morals, of civil or religious liberty, or of individual, domestic, or social happiness, is an idea worthy of the dark superstition, or of the (if possible) darker craft, in which it was engendered, and has been fostered; but it is not the doctrine of Christianity, or of Methodism. It is as diametrically opposite to the one as it is to the other.

We cannot indeed be surprised, for it is not surprising, that the systems of education heretofore mostly in use, and still much too generally so, have had to encounter both the apathy of prejudice, and the actual resistance of direct hostility. It has not been, how

ever, to true and useful learning that even the great body of the people have ever manifested any opposition; but to that empiricism of pretenders, who have substituted for learning the formality of spending in halls of learning, so called, a specified time, in passing through certain mechanical forms, in order to acquire, as a matter of course, the mystic sheepskin,' and to palm that upon the world, and upon the Church, as an unquestionable proof of learning, and, above all, as an indispensable if not a sufficient passport to the Christian Ministry! It is from such literary quackery, and from such attempts to forge for them and to fasten upon them monkish chains like these, that the people, and especially Christian people, who have not so learned Christ, recoil in disgust,—and justly. "The common people,' as Dr. Rush remarks do not despise scholars because they know more, but because they know less than themselves. A mere scholar can call a horse or a cow by two or three different names, but he frequently knows nothing of the qualities or uses of those valuable animals.' It is the confining the idea of learning to that sort of education, this wall of separation erected in her temple to bar out the body of the people, that we wish to demolish. We wish to throw open the inmost doors of the temple to the whole community; to let them taste as well as see the rich repast within, and thereby to make them, from practical and fruitful experience of its excellence, the fast and steady friends and supporters of all liberal and truly useful knowledge.

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But here a question may perhaps be made as to what is useful. On this question we are aware that there may be sentiments as various as the circumstances of individuals, and according as their own education, and their subsequent associations, pursuits, and habits, have rendered their field of experience, observation, and reflection, more or less extended or contracted. In the volume before us there is a beautiful and valuable passage on this point, in a paper communicated by Dr. Lieber, of Boston. It is in answer to an objection made by certain Scottish economists, that the truly useful or professional lectures, (in universities designed for professional education, after a college course has been finished,) would be attended numerously, and would afford a decent income to the professors, whilst those which are not attended so numerously are proved, by this very fact, not to be needed. In reply, Dr. Lieber says,

'It would lead me beyond the limits of the present subject, were I to give my views respecting that word useful, so popular in our time, and, in my opinion, so often misunderstood, so vaguely applied; a word, which indicates something so powerful in respect of all the lower branches of human concerns, and is so devoid of meaning, wherever we elevate ourselves above that point. But it is necessary for me to state, that utility, in the meaning in which it is taken most commonly, that is, as turning directly to account, ought by no means to be the sole standard in establishing a university, nay, not even the

highest. It is the very character of utility, that common life itself provides for it, but it does not and cannot provide for things or objects, whose effects, though the most noble, are the more distant. Science is always useful in a higher sense. It ennobles the mind; and the most abstract sciences, which at first glance, may appear the most useless, are the least excepted from this assertion. I ask simply and plainly, who is able to give a definition of the word useful, with regard to sciences? Certainly some are more important for a university than others, because they answer certain purposes, for which a university is established, more fully than others; but all are useful, and to determine their degree of usefulness, by the number of students who attend the lectures, in which they are treated, would be, in my opinion, somewhat like judging the usefulness of Christianity by the small number of persons, who in some countries, and in some ages, attend divine service. But let us consider those sciences which are generally admitted to be useful. I have mentioned that mathematics and astronomy are attended to in the German universities, in a way that would not afford an income of any consideration to the professor, from the fees of his pupils. The case would be quite the same in this country, and who is there, who has attended at all to science, or literature, and does not acknowledge that the very highest branches of mathematics, and astronomy, have had the most momentous influence upon mankind, have infused their influence into natural philosophy, chemistry, navigation, and through these into the ordinary business of life. The most abstract function of a La Grange is in connection with the most common concerns of our daily life. Is it forgotten, that most of the brilliant and influential inventions of the last half century, are founded upon laws scientifically established before the respective inventions for practical life? If the view of the Scottish economists was true in its full extent, the immediate consequence would be that science would rather follow common life, than advance before it; astronomy then would have to follow navigation, instead of pressing boldly forward, unconcerned whether every step could be turned to account, and afterwards offering the whole result of its useless labours to the common concerns of life, which greatly profit by it. It seems to me that it is the very duty of a university to provide for branches which, by the natural course of things-as in every country they take a certain course—are left unprovided for. I will give an instance. Every one in this country studies the constitution, and is naturally led to do so. It would seem to me not necessary, then, to appoint a professor for the history of the United States alone; perhaps even some evils would be connected with such a chair, as he must necessarily view it in the light of one or the other party of his time; whilst I would urge strongly the establishment of a professorship of general history, (perhaps connected with some other professorship,) because the ordinary course of things in this country, or in fact any whiere, does not naturally lead to that salutary, noble study, that truly republican and religious study, which unfolds to us the great book of experience, teaching us wisdom from the experience of extinct races, from what they had gained or lost, enjoyed or suffered, and offering a warning from the grave in the lessons of past times, and giving warmth and expression to religious

feeling by showing how He, who appears in every leaf and insect, in the eternal laws of nature, and the fine construction of physical man, manifests his god-like wisdom still more to the adorer of his greatness in the moral construction of man, and the great ways on which he conducts nations and ages through apparent disorder to his own great ends. Truly, it is edifying to see the development of the bright butterfly from the slow caterpillar; but it is much more edifying to see the development of one single principle of liberty, or science, or social order.'

One of the special objects contemplated in the establishment of the Wesleyan University, as well as of the University of New-York, is a more equal and general diffusion of knowledge, by the extension of the blessings of education to that numerous class of our fellow citizens, and especially of our rising population, which hitherto has had the benefit of them but in a very limited degree. In the organization of the government of this great country, it should never be forgotten, as was remarked by Mr. Gallatin, in his interesting speech before the Convention, that the people are sovereign,—not de jure only, but de facto :--not of right merely, but in fact. In this view of the subject, as the same eminent statesman added, there is but one question left:-Shall we be governed by ignorance or by knowledge? On this single question depends the solution of the all important problem, whether our institutions shall be so administered as to become a model for imitation, or a shoal to be avoided:'-whether ambitious, wicked, and aspiring demagogues shall lead hoodwinked an ignorant populace, mount upon the party contests artfully fomented among them into offices of emolument and power, and involve them in civil broils, if not in civil war and bloodshed, for the fiendish purpose of riding in the whirlwind, and rioting in the storm. This is a matter in which Methodists have as deep a stake, and as solemn a responsibility, as any other portion of the community. And while in the Church they acknowledge no sovereign, among either preachers or people, but the Lord Jesus Christ and his laws alone; in the State, they, both ministers and people, as unequivocally subscribe to―and as uniformly and steadily support, the above principles, as any other class of citizens whatever. Indeed, the efforts they are making, and especially the ministry, to give the utmost diffusion within the compass of their means to the lights of education and useful knowledge, and consequently to civil and religious liberty, is the most efficient and unanswerable, because it is a practical and palpable refutation of the cruel and designing slanders uttered and echoed against them. It proves the sincerity at least of their professed conviction that their principles and system are in perfect harmony with our free institutions. All that is necessary for our guidance. in this matter is, that the affairs of Church and State, may for ever and wholly be kept separate and distinct; and that the radical difference between the nature, the origin, and the ends of their con