held in contempt, and humble powers are everywhere making high
employments contemptible. Our children need to be educated to
fill, in Christian humility, the subordinate offices of life which
they must fill, and taught to respect humble callings, and to
beautify and glorify them by lives of contented and glad industry.
When public schools accomplish an end so desirable as this, they
will fulfil their mission, and they will not before. I seriously
doubt whether one school in a hundred, public or private,
comprehends its duty in this particular. They fail to inculcate
the idea that the majority of the offices of life are humble, that
the powers of the majority of the youth which they contain have
relation to those offices, that no man is respectable when he is
out of his place, and that half of the unhappiness of the world
grows out of the fact, that, from distorted views of life, men are
in places where they do not belong. Let us have this thing
altogether reformed.




LESSON IX.

PERVERSENESS.


"Because she's constant, he will change.
And kindest glances coldly meet,
And all the time he seems so strange,
His soul is fawning at her feet."
COVENTRY PATMORE.