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till that time , arid who were determined not to lose the enjoyment of hearing the addresses of Dr . Hutton and other respected ministers . The numbers thus augmented amounted to about a hundred arid forty . The Rev . J 7 R Beard took the chair . and after _ s _ Qmg _ o . bsef-vatiQns
tending to show the advantages of nSeetings in which the social and the religious affections are blended together , and to recommend the adoption among Unitarians of conference and prayer meetings , remarked that the subject of popular education , to which their minds were now
naturally drawn , was in abler hands than his own , and he would therefore say a few worcls on that higher education which was imparted to the children of , the ficher classes , in which he saw many serious defects and many baneful errors .
He would define education to be the transfusion of the Christian spirit into the heart and head ; and if this was what education ought to be , he was afraid the education of the edu- ^ cated classes was neither liberal nor useful to the extent it might be and ought to be . The public mind was not sufficiently prepared for making
our schools the place for religious education , and even the intellectual education of the present day was too passive : so ^ . much was taught memoriter , so much was taken upon the authority of the teacher , that the pupil did not exercise the highest faculties of his mind ; and partly on this account it was that orthodoxy remained so much amongst us .
The Rev . J . J . Taylkr next addressed the meeting on the extension and improvjBinje ^ j ? jLp w Qpj ? Iat 3 Cxd , uca . r tion . He believed that so large a portion of the human race , having all their thoughts directed to the mere question of obtaining a subsistence , had an injurious effect on the tone of our thinking and feeling . It was & mistake to suppose that a nation must be happy , if the people had all the , ph ysical wants of their nature
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amply provided for . If the national debt were extinguished , and every class of society were abundantly supplied with the means of subsistence , if at the same time the moral and religious condition of the people were not . improved , we should'in less-than-fiv-e ^ years ^ e ^ i n-a-ve r ^ lttt better condition than at present . There were numerous institutions
for the education of the people of this country ; they taught the people almost every thing but that which , would be most conducive to their happiness , —a knowledge of their moral duties , social relations , and clear views of the unity of their interest and well-being as individual members of one great family . In Prussia and some of the smaller
states of Germany * ( states deemed despotic by us , ) there were not only schools to instruct the people in reading , writing , &e . but schools for the proper and adequate education of schoolmasfefrs , -where they went through a course of natural philosophy , in the most enlarged sense of the term , becoming thereby
acquainted with the physical , moral , and intellectual nature of man ; and the consequence of this was , that the peasantry of those states were amongst the most moral and intelligent of any in Europe . One chief difficulty in the way of obtaining for the people of this country an adequate moral education , arose from
the opposition made to it by the clergy of the established church . When men obtained clear views of their moral duties to themselves and to each other , it was impossible to retain them long under false and gloomy views of religion < and hence the true cauce of the opposition to
popular education made by the church clergy ., The first object of a national system of education , supported by the combined energies of the nation , and corrected by its enlightenment , should be the teaching the people the useful arts , together with what was of far more import-
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CORRESPONDENCE . 309
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 1, 1833, page 309, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2623/page/21/
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