But so completely has that expectation been disappointed, that now the
missionaries send home their children to be educated; alleging the
danger, lest their children become stumbling blocks, through the
apparent little difference between them and the heathen children.
And the difficulty is not, that they cannot there, as well as here, be
taught Latin, Greek, Mathematics--all the received sciences-the
branches of what is nominally education. It is not so much, that they
cannot there be shielded from evil influences abroad; as that their
children there want, what our children enjoy--the sight of magnificent
enterprises; a spirit of inquiry and freedom breathing all around them;
and the healthful contact and stimulus of multitudes of young minds, in
the like process of intellectual and moral training. It is such
nameless imperceptible influences, that awaken intellectual life, from
the mind, and determine the future man more than the teaching, which is
nominally education. Why else does the acknowledged excellence of the
teaching in the Prussian schools do so little to quicken intellectual
life--to form men of progressive thoughts?
We should be repaid the whole cost of the missionary enterprize, were
it only in the clearness and importance of the lesson thus taught us,
as otherwise we should hardly have suspected--the doctrine of our
mutual dependencies and tendencies to a common average--how our
intellectual life is subject to the law, "Whether one member suffer,
all the members suffer with it.
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