classification, machinery, &c. as if the capital of national morality could be increased by making a joint stock of it. Hence you see these infant schools so patronized by the bishops and others, who think them a grand invention. Is it found that an infant-school child, who has been bawling all day a column of the multiplication table, or a verse from the Bible, grows up a more dutiful son or daughter to its parents? Are domestic charities on the increase amongst families under this system? In a great town, in our present state of society, perhaps such schools may be a justifiable expedient- a choice of the lesser evil; but as for driving these establishments into the country villages, and breaking up the cottage home education, I think it one of the most miserable mistakes which the well-intentioned people of the day have yet made; and they have made, and are making, a good many, God knows. THE pith of my system is to make the senses out of the mind not the mind out of the senses, as Locke did. Could you ever discover any thing sublime, in our sense of the term, in the classic Greek literature? I never could. Sublimity is Hebrew by birth. I should conjecture that the Proverbs and Ecclesiastes were written, or, perhaps, rather collected, about the time of Nehemiah. The language is Hebrew with Chaldaic endings. It is totally unlike the language of Moses on the one hand, and of Isaiah on the other. Solomon introduced the commercial spirit into his kingdom. I cannot think his idolatry could have been much more, in regard to himself, than a state protection or toleration of the foreign worship. When a man mistakes his thoughts for persons and things, he is mad. A madman is properly so defined. Charles Lamb translated my motto Sermoni propriora by-properer for a sermon! July 28. 1832. FAITH AND BELIEF. THE sublime and abstruse doctrines of Christian belief belong to the church; but the faith of the individual, centred in his heart, is or may be collateral to them.* Faith Mr. Coleridge used very frequently to insist upon the distinction between belief and faith. He once told me, with very great earnestness, that if he were that is subjective. I throw myself in adoration before God; acknowledge myself his creature, simple, weak, lost; and pray for help and pardon through Jesus Christ: but when I rise from my knees, I discuss the doctrine of the Trinity as I would a problem in geometry; in the same temper of mind, I mean, not by the same process of reasoning, of course. moment convinced a conviction, the possibility of which, indeed, he could not realize to himself— that the New Testament was a forgery from beginning to end-wide as the desolation in his moral feelings would be, he should not abate one jot of his faith in God's power and mercy through some manifestation of his being towards man, either in time past or future, or in the hidden depths where time and space are not. This was, I believe, no more than a vivid expression of what he always maintained, that no man had attained to a full faith who did not recognize in the Scriptures a correspondency to his own nature, or see that his own powers of reason, will, and understanding were preconfigured to the reception of the Christian doctrines and promises. — ED. August 4. 1832. DOBRIZHOFFER.* I HARDLY know any thing more amusing than the honest German Jesuitry of Dobriz "He was a man of rarest qualities, Who to this barbarous region had confined But he to humbler thoughts his heart inclined: And Dobrizhoffer was the good man's honour'd name. "It was his evil fortune to behold The labours of his painful life destroy'd; His flock which he had brought within the fold And all of good that Paraguay enjoy'd |