Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/77

 tion of the mind as defies the skill of the teacher. When lassitude has come on from too long continued mental labours, or when, in the eager pursuit of particular intellectual objects, the mind has got a bent so strong as to render a return to other studies peculiarly difficult or unpleasing, there are two means of restoring, at once, its elasticity and its equipoise; the one is the relaxation to be found in active amusements, and the other is the genial suffusion of feeling through the soul, by the excitement of pure and tranquil moral emotions. Now, if the former be the means ordinarily to be resorted to, as always at hand, and always efficacious, we should hold the latter also at command, when a more thorough refreshment of the mental system is found to be needed.

And here I cannot avoid a passing reference to the fact, of the very happy influence of a due and fervent attendance upon religious exercises—public and private, in bringing the mind home to its resting and to its starting points, and in favouring its recovery of that clearness and freshness of perception, and of that well-poised self-control and easy appliancy, which are lost in a course of severe application. I am prepared to affirm that, to the studious especially, and whether younger or older, —spent in happy exercises of the heart, devotional and domestic—a Sunday given to the, is the best of all means of refreshment for the mere intellect. A Sunday so passed, is a liquefaction of the entire nature—a dispersive process, dispelling mental cramps and stagnations, and enabling every single faculty again to get its due in the general diffusion of the intellectual power.

If this be true, and I have the firmest persuasion that it is so, the general inference it suggests is easily applied to the business of education; and the recollection of it will have its weight with parents in cherishing the religious and social affections among their children. It is very certain that