high above, its immediate purport. Thus, what parable could come home more naturally to the business and bosoms of a population strenuously engaged in the accumulation of wealth and management of its uses, than that of the talents; and which other could, at the same time, be more fittingly applied to that educational life to whose results our attention is necessarily directed to-day? For education can assuredly not be better defined than as the drawing out, and bringing to a beneficent growth and increase, what has been implanted by nature, aided by circumstance. It is not merely the accumulation of knowledge, or the perfecting of technical ability; but the improvement and development of all the powers of a human being—moral as well as mental and physical—by the application of those powers to life, its claims and its duties—till (to use the figure of the other parable which in
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