"
"That this is the only method to be relied upon in moral education, they
conceive may be shewn by considering upon whom the pernicious effects of
the theatre, or of the ball-room, or of the circulating library,
principally fall. Do they not fall principally upon those, who have
never had a dignified education. 'Empty noddles, it is said, are fond of
playhouses,' and the converse, is true, that persons, whose
understandings have been enriched, and whose tastes have been corrected,
find all such recreations tiresome. At least they find so much to
disgust them, that what they approve does not make them adequate amends.
This is the case also with respect to novels. These do harm principally
to barren minds. They do harm to those who have no proper employment for
their time, or to those, who in the manners, conversation, and conduct,
of their parents, or others with whom they associate, have no examples
of pure thinking, or of pure living, or of a pure taste. Those, on the
other hand, who have been taught to love good books, will never run
after, or be affected by, bad ones. And the same mode of reasoning, they
conceive, is applicable to other cases. For if people are taught to
love virtue for virtue's sake, and, in like manner, to hate what is
unworthy, because they have a genuine and living knowledge of its
unworthiness, neither the ball, nor concert-room, nor the theatre, nor
the circulating library, nor the diversions of the field, will have
charms enough to seduce them, or to injure the morality of their minds.
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