Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/35

 CHAPTER II. HAPPINESS THE NECESSARY CONDITION OF HOME EDUCATION

IT need hardly be said that the happiness which we speak of as a necessary condition of home education involves much more than what can come in our way while treating of intellectual culture merely. Family happiness is the fruit of a sound and vigorous moral and religious training; and it mainly consists in the prevalence of those sentiments which such a training should diffuse. But even although these momentous subjects are not included in the intention of the present volrune, they might yet find a place, incidentally, inasmuch as that, apart from the felicity which results from virtue and piety, even the intellectual culture of a family must be obstructed, and the success of the entire process of instruction will be rendered very doubtful.

Yet as, to do justice to a theme so important and so various, would occupy a volume, the subject must of necessity be now adverted to only in a casual manner, and merely so far as some reference to it is requisite for conveying a general idea of the domestic educational economy, such as we conceive of it.

Moral training then, using the term in the fullest sense, is affirmed to be a prerequisite to intellectual culture, as well for other reasons, because it is the indespensable condition of that FAMILY HAPPINESS, deprived of