The great work of education is to stimulate
and direct this native power of growth. God and the subject, co-working,
effect all the rest.
In the wide sense in which it is proposed to consider the subject of
education, three things are pre-supposed--personal talents, personal
application, and the divine blessing. Without capacities to be
developed, or with very inferior capacities, education is either wholly
useless, or only partially successful. As it has no absolute creative
power, and is utterly unable to add a single faculty to the mind, so
the first condition of its success is the capacity for improvement in
the subject. An idiot may be slightly affected by it, but the feebleness
of his original powers forbids the noblest result of education. It
teaches men how most successfully to use their own native force, and by
exercise to increase it, but in no case can it supply the absence of
that force. It is not its province to inspire genius, since that is the
breath of God in the soul, bestowed as seemeth to him good, and at the
disposal of no finite power. It is enough if it unfold and discipline,
and guide genius in its mission to the world. We are not to demand that
it shall make of every man a Newton, a Milton, a Hall, a Chalmers, a
Mason, a Washington; or of every woman a Sappho, a De Stael, a Roland, a
Hemans.
The supposition that all intellects are originally equal, however
flattering to our pride, is no less prejudicial to the cause of
education than false in fact.
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