I suppose that, by an extreme care, the period of childhood might be prolonged considerably; but still it must end; and the knowledge of good and evil, in its full force, must come.  I believe that this must be; I believe that no care can prevent it, and that an extreme attempt at carefulness, whilst it could not keep off the disorder, would weaken the strength, of the constitution to bear it.  But yet you should never forget, and I should never forget, that although the evils of schools in some respects must be, yet, in proportion as they exceed what must be, they do become at once mischievous and guilty.  And such, or even worse, is the mischief when, with the evil which must be, there is not the good which ought to be; for, remember, our condition is to know good and evil.  If we know only evil, it is the condition of hell; and therefore, if schools present an unmixed experience, if there is temptation in abundance, but no support against temptation, and no examples of overcoming it; if some are losing their child’s innocence, but none, or very few, are gaining a man’s virtue; are we in a wholesome state then? or can we shelter ourselves under the excuse that our evil is unavoidable, that we do but afford, in a mild form, the experience which must be learned sooner or later?  It is here that we must be acquitted or condemned.  I can bear to see the overclouding of childish simplicity, if there is a reasonable hope that the character so clouded for a time will brighten again into Christian holiness.  But if we do not see this, if innocence is exchanged only for vice, then we have not done our part, then the evil is not unavoidable, but our sin:  and we may be assured, that for the souls so lost, there will be an account demanded hereafter both of us and you.

LECTURE II.

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1 CORINTHIANS xiii. 11.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Taking the Apostle’s words literally, it might appear that no words in the whole range of Scripture were less applicable to the circumstances of this particular congregation:  for they speak of childhood and of manhood; and as all of us have passed the one, so a very large proportion of us have not yet arrived at the other.  But when we consider the passage a little more carefully, we shall see that this would be a very narrow and absurd objection.  Neither the Apostle, nor any one else, has ever stepped directly from childhood into manhood; it was his purpose here only to notice the two extreme points of the change which had taken place in him, passing over its intermediate stages; but he, like all other men, must have gone through those stages.  There must have been a time in his life, as in all ours, when his words, his thoughts, and his understanding were neither all childish,