East and West, or, Once upon a Time

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 53 CHAPTER III. Few readers of novels care much about school training, school visiting, or systems of education, and as we have no particular theory of our own to forward we shall make no long stay among Mr. Shepherd's pupils. Neither religion nor education can be much served through histories of this...
More Description

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 53 CHAPTER III. Few readers of novels care much about school training, school visiting, or systems of education, and as we have no particular theory of our own to forward we shall make no long stay among Mr. Shepherd's pupils. Neither religion nor education can be much served through histories of this kind, and yet they both are so intimately interwoven with society that any view of human manners, from which all reference to these subjects should be systematically excluded, would be necessarily imperfect. A professedly religious novel is no more, generally speaking, than a dramatised tract, in which the adversary is made to get the worst of the argument, and must needs be a bad fellow because oferroneous thinking, which is not always the case in life. We take people as we find them, and if we do not call upon our readers to ride a hard steeple chase in order to gain a prominent object some distance off, it is because that which is called a moral purpose is only another word for some rigid and narrow system which my lord, the author, has set up for people to bow down before and worship. The school-house, a compact building, neither too high to be with difficulty heated, nor too low to admit a free current of fresh air, had to be approached through rubbish occasioned by the work going on for the chapel. Mr. Shepherd had determined, as soon as sufficient money was collected, to make sure of the school-house? for through the school he would make sure of the young, an object which was not always to be effected with the less malleable old. There is an instinct which generally directs a man to his proper calling, if he only would follow it, supposing always that his way be not choked up with conflicting necessities.Now, Mr. Shepherd was formed by the Father of all to be a teache...