"
Why? Because it prevents vice, poverty, misery, and relieves the state of
the support of paupers and criminals. "A good education," says Miss
Sedgwick, "is a young man's best capital." Says Governor Everett to
parents, "Sow the seed of instruction in your son's and daughter's minds.
It will flourish when that over-arching heaven shall pass away like a
scroll, and the eternal sun which lightens it, shall set in blood." Says
the Rev. Robert Hall, "I am persuaded that the extreme profligacy,
improvidence, and misery, which are so prevalent among the laboring classes
in many countries, are chiefly to be ascribed to the want of education."
What indeed can we look for but wretchedness and guilt from that child that
has been left by its cruel parents to grow up "darkening in the deeper
ignorance of mankind, with all its jealousies, and its narrow-mindedness,
and its superstitions, and its penury of enjoyments, poor amid the
intellectual and moral riches of the universe; blind in this splendid
temple which God has lighted up, and famishing amid the profusions of
Omnipotence?" And, parents, let me ask you, if you thus neglect the proper
education of your children, and as a consequence, such pauperism of estate,
of mind, and of morals, come upon them, will you not have to answer for all
this to God?
"Oh, woe for those who trample on the mind,
That fearful thing! They know not what they do,
Nor what they deal with!"
Your children, thus neglected, will become victims to inordinate passion,
without power to discern between reality and illusion, ignorant of what is
true happiness, living for mere sense, with their moral nature enclosed in
the iron mail of superstition, while the good seeds of truth sown upon
their hearts "wither away, because they have no depth of earth.
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