A great trust has been confided to the officers of the Reform School;
but the power to do good is usually proportionate to the responsibility
imposed upon the laborer. In this view, much will be expected; but the
expectations formed ought not to relate so much to results as to the
wisdom and humanity with which the operations are conducted.
Massachusetts is charged with the support of a great number of
charitable and reformatory institutions. Their necessity springs from
the defects of social life; therefore their existence is a comparative
rather than a positive good; and he is the truest friend of the race who
does most to remove the causes of poverty, ignorance, insanity, mental
and physical weakness, moral waywardness, and crime.
THE CARE AND REFORMATION OF THE NEGLECTED AND EXPOSED CLASSES OF
CHILDREN.
[An Address delivered at the opening of the State Industrial School for
Girls, at Lancaster, Massachusetts.]
In man's limited view, the moral world presents a sad contrast to the
natural. The natural world is harmonious in all its parts; but the moral
world is the theatre of disturbing and conflicting forces, whose laws
the finite mind cannot comprehend. The majesty and uniformity of the
planetary revolutions, which bring day and night, summer and winter,
seed-time and harvest, know no change. Worlds and systems of worlds are
guided by a law of the Infinite Mind; and so, through unnumbered years
and myriads of years, birth and death, creation and decay, decrees whose
fixedness enables finite minds to predict the future, and rules whose
elasticity is seen in a never-ending variety of nature, all alike prove
that the sin of disobedience is upon man alone.
Pages:
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78