As the chisel reveals the form which the marble may be made to assume,
so education unfolds the innate capacities of men. In all things else
how poor the comparison! how faint the analogy! In the one case you have
an aggregation of particles crystallized into shape, without organism,
life or motion. In the other, you have life, growth, expansion. In the
first you have a mass of limestone, neither more nor less than insensate
matter, utterly incapable of any alteration from within itself. In the
second, you have a living body, a mind, affections instinct with power,
gifted with vitality, and forming the attributes of a being allied to
and only a little lower than the angels. These constitute a life which,
by its inherent force, must grow and unfold itself by a law of its own,
whether you educate it or not. Some development it will make, some form
it will assume by its own irrepressible and spontaneous action. The
question, with us, is rather what that form shall be; whether it shall
wear the visible robes of an immortal with a countenance glowing with
the intelligence and pure affection of cherub and seraph, or through the
rags and sensual impress of an earthly, send forth only occasional
gleams of its higher nature. 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