Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/64



I request the reader to bear in mind, that, if I advert, in this volume, to subjects properly belonging to moral and religious treatment, I do not profess either to advance the principles on which such treatment should rest, or to illustrate the application of them.

And yet something must be said with the view of setting before the reader that of the domestic system which is present to my own mind, and which I consider as inseparably connected with the processes and the exercises of intellectual culture. Fully to develop the mental faculties apart from family felicity—apart from pure enjoyments—apart from love, and subordination, is what I cannot so much as conceive of as practicable; nor is there an exercise so abstruse as that I can imagine it to be prosperously conducted by the stern and cold-hearted teacher of a depressed anti reluctant learner.

The words and, although not synonymous, are absolutely inseparable in relation to the domestic system. At school, no doubt, there may be order where there is little or no love; but it is frightful to think of a home of which the same might be said. And if, in a family, we must not look for order without love, so neither can love exist, or be preserved, without order: and by, I mean, absolute government, and perfect obedience