The two ‘Books’ are published separately in order that each may be put into the hands of the readers for whom it is designed; but, because parents and teachers should make a particular study of such moral teaching as they may offer to the young people for whom they are responsible, it seems desirable that the two volumes should form one of the ‘Home Education Series.’ Questions are appended for the use of more serious students. The more or less casual ordering of young people which falls to their elders might become more purposeful if it were laid down upon some such carefully considered ground-plan of human nature as this book attempts to offer. The scheme of thought rests upon intuitive morality, as sanctioned by the authority of Revelation.
The systems of morality formulated by authoritative writers upon ethics are, perhaps, expanded a little to include latent capacity for every kind of goodness in all normal human beings. Some attempt has been made to define certain limitations of reason, conscience, and the will, the disregard of which is a fertile cause of error in human conduct.
What is sometimes described as the ‘immanence of God’; the capacity of man for relations with the divine; and the maimed and incomplete character of the life in which these relations are not fulfilled, are touched upon, because these matters belong to a knowledge which is ‘the chief end of man.’ The allusions and excerpts which illustrate the text have been carefully chosen from sources that fall within everybody’s reading, because the object is rather to arrest the attention of the reader, and fix it, for example, upon the teaching of Scott and Plutarch, than to suggest unknown sources of edification. We are all too well content to let alone that of which we do not already know something.
AMBLESIDE, May 1905.
A somewhat arbitrary use has been made of certain terms — ‘daemon,’ for example — when such use appeared to lend itself to clearness or force in putting the case.