be hereafter committed to your charge. Only try your pupils, and mark
the kindling of the eye, the lighting up of the countenance, the revival
of the flagging attention, with which the humblest lecture upon words,
and on the words especially which they are daily using, which are
familiar to them in their play or at their church, will be welcomed by
them. There is a sense of reality about children which makes them rejoice
to discover that there is also a reality about words, that they are not
merely arbitrary signs, but living powers; that, to reverse the saying
of one of England's 'false prophets,' they may be the fool's counters,
but are the wise man's money; not, like the sands of the sea,
innumerable disconnected atoms, but growing out of roots, clustering in
families, connecting and intertwining themselves with all that men have
been doing and thinking and feeling from the beginning of the world
till now.

And it is of course our English tongue, out of which mainly we should
seek to draw some of the hid treasures which it contains, from which we
should endeavour to remove the veil which custom and familiarity have
thrown over it. We cannot employ ourselves better. There is nothing
that will more help than will this to form an English heart in
ourselves and in others. We could scarcely have a single lesson on the
growth of our English tongue, we could scarcely follow up one of its
significant words, without having unawares a lesson in English history
as well, without not merely falling on some curious fact illustrative
of our national life, but learning also how the great heart which is
beating at the centre of that life was gradually shaped and moulded. We
should thus grow too in our sense of connexion with the past, of
gratitude and reverence to it; we should rate more highly and thus more
truly all which it has bequeathed to us, all that it has made ready to
our hands. It was not a small matter for the children of Israel, when