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An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance

by John Foster · English · Gutenberg #8940 · 570,435 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance

Author: John Foster


        
Release date: September 1, 2005 [eBook #8940]
                Most recently updated: August 22, 2014

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8940

Credits: Produced by Distributed Proofreaders


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN ESSAY ON THE EVILS OF POPULAR IGNORANCE ***




Produced by Distributed Proofreaders









An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance

By John Foster.

Revised and Enlarged Edition.




  "A Work, which, popular and admired as it confessedly is, has never
  met with the thousandth part of the attention which it deserves. It
  appears to me that we are now at a crisis in the state of our country,
  and of the world, which renders the reasonings and exhortations of
  that eloquent production applicable and urgent beyond all power of
  mine to express."

  Dr. J. Pye Smith.




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If the circumstance of a manner of introduction somewhat different from
what would be expected in a composition of the essay class were worth a
very few words of explanation, it might be mentioned, that the
following production has grown out of the topics of a discourse,
delivered at a public anniversary meeting in aid of the British and
Foreign School Society.

When it was thought, a good while after that occasion, that a more
extensive use might be made of some of the observations, the writing was
begun in the form of a Discourse addressed to an assembly, and commencing
with a sentence from the Bible, to serve as a general indication to the
subject. But after some progress had been made, it became evident that
anything like a comprehensive view of that subject would be incompatible
with the proper limits of such a composition.

In relinquishing, however, the form of a public address, the writer
thought he might be excused for leaving some traces of that character to
remain, in both the cast of expression and the theological sentiment; for
reverting repeatedly to the sentence from Scripture; and for continuing
the use of the plural pronoun, so commodious for the modest egotism of
public discoursers.

In the general design and course of observations, the essay retains the
character of the original discourse, which was, in accordance to the
presumed expectations of a grave assembly, an attempt to display the
importance of the education of the people in reference, mainly, to moral
and religious interests. There are special relations in which their
ignorance or cultivation are of great consequence to the welfare of the
community. Some of these are of indispensable consideration to the
legislator, and to the political economist. But it is in that general and
moral view, in which ignorance in the lower orders is beheld the cause of
their vice, irreligion, and consequent misery, that the subject is
attempted, imperfectly and somewhat desultorily, to be illustrated in the
following pages.

Nor was it within the writer's design to suggest any particular plans,
regulations, or instrumental expedients, in promotion of the system of
operations hopefully begun, for raising these classes from their
degradation. His part has been to make such a prominent representation of
the calamitous effects of their ignorance, as shall prove it an aggravated
national guilt to allow another generation to grow up to the same
condition as the present and the past. In the course of attempting this,
occasions have been seized of exposing the absurdity of those who are
hostile to the mental improvement of the people. If any one should say
that this is a mere beating of the air, for that all such hostility is now
gone by, he may be assured there are many persons, of no insignificant
rank in society, who would from their own consciousness smile at the
simplicity with which he can so easily shape men's opinions and
dispositions to his mind whether they will or not. He must have been the
most charitable or the most obtuse of observers.

It is feared the readers of the following essay will find some defect of
distribution and arrangement. To the candor of those who are practised in
literary work it would be an admissible plea, that when, in a preparation
to meet a particular occasion for which but little time has been allowed,
a series of topics and observations has been hastily sketched out, it is
far from easy to throw them afterwards into a different order. The author
has to bespeak indulgence also, here and there, to something too like
repetition. If he qualifies the terms in which this fault is acknowledged,
it is because he thinks that, though there be a recurrence of
similarities, a mere bare iteration is avoided, by means of a diversity
and addition of the matter of illustration and enforcement.

Any benevolent writer on the subject would wish he could treat it without
such frequent use of the phrases, "lower orders," "subordinate classes,"
"inferior portion of society," and other expressions of the same kind;
because they have an invidious sound, and have indeed very often been used
in contempt. He can only say, that he uses them with no such feeling; that
they are employed simply as the most obvious terms of designation; and
that he would like better to employ any less ungracious ones that did not
require an affected circumlocution.

In several parts of the essay, there will be found a language of emphatic
censure on that conduct of states, that predominant spirit and system in
the administration of the affairs of nations, by which the people have
been consigned to such a deplorable condition of intellectual and
consequently moral degradation, while resources approaching to immensity
have been lavished on objects of vanity and ambition. So far from feeling
that such observations can require any apology, the writer thinks it is
high time for all the advocates of intellectual, moral, and religious
improvement, to raise a protesting voice against that policy of the states
denominated Christian, and especially our own, which has, through age
after age, found every conceivable thing necessary to be done, at all
costs and hazards, rather than to enlighten, reform, and refine the
people. He thinks that nothing can more strongly betray a judgment
enslaved, or a time-serving dishonesty, in those who would assume to
dictate to such an advocate and to censure him, than that sort of doctrine
which tells him that it is beside his business, and out of his sphere, as
a Christian moralist, to animadvert on the conduct of national
authorities, when he sees them, during one long period of time after
another, not doing that which is the most important of all things to be
done for the people over whom they preside, but doing what is in substance
and effect the reverse; and doing it on that great scale, which contrasts
so fearfully with the small one, on which the individuals who deplore such
perversion of power are confined to attempt a remedy of the consequences.

This interdiction comes with its worst appearance when it is put forth in
terms affecting a profound reverence of religion; a reverence which
cannot endure that so holy a thing should be defiled, by being brought in
any contact with such a subject as the disastrous effect of bad
government, on the intellectual and moral state of the people. The
advocate of schemes for the improvement of their rational nature _may_,
it seems, take his ground, his strongest ground, on religion, for
enforcing on _individuals_ the duty of promoting such an object. In the
name and authority of religion he may press on their consciences with
respect to the application of their property and influence; and he may
adopt under its sanction a strongly judicial language in censure of their
negligence, their insensibility to their accountableness, and their
lavish expenditures foreign to the most Important uses: in all this he
does well. But the instant he begins to make the like judicial
application of its laws to the public conduct of the governing
authorities, that instant he debases Christianity to politics, most
likely to party-politics; and a pious horror is affected at the
profanation. Christianity is to be honored somewhat after the same manner
as the Lama of Thibet. It is to stay in its temple, to have the
proprieties of homage duly preserved within its precincts, but to be
_exempted_ (in reverence of its sanctity!) from all cognizance of great
public affairs, even in the points where they most interfere with or
involve its interests. It could show, perhaps, in what manner the
administration of those affairs injures these interests; but it would
degrade its sacred character by talking of any such matter. But
Christianity must have leave to decline the sinister compliment of such
pretended anxiety to preserve it immaculate. As to its sacred character,
it can _venture that,_ on the strength of its intrinsic quality and of
its own guardianship, while, regardless of the limits thus attempted in
mock reverence to be prescribed, it steps in a censorial capacity on what
will be called a political ground, so far as to take account of what
concern has been shown, or what means have been left disposable, for
operations to promote the grand essentials of human welfare, by that
public system which has grasped and expended the strength of the
community, Christianity is not so demure a thing that it cannot, without
violating its consecrated character, go into the exercise of this
judicial office. And as to its _right_ to do so,--either it has a right
to take cognizance now of the manner in which the spirit and measures of
states and their regulators bear upon the most momentous interests, or it
will have no right to be brought forward as the supreme law for the final
award on those proceedings and those men. [Footnote: A censure on this
alleged desecration of religious topics, which had been pronounced on the
Essay (first edit.) by a Review making no small pretensions both
religious and literary, was the immediate cause that prompted these
observations. But they were made with a general reference to a
hypocritical cant much in vogue at that time, and long before. That it
_was_ hypocritical appeared plainly enough from the circumstance, that
those solemn rebukes of the profanation of religion, by implicating it
with political affairs, smote almost exclusively on one side. Let the
religious moralist, or the preacher, amalgamate religion as largely as he
pleased with the _proper sort_ of political sentiments, that is, the
servile, and then it was all right.]

It is now more than twenty years since a national plan of education for
the inferior classes, was brought forward by Mr. (now Lord) Brougham. The
announcement of such a scheme from such an Author, was received with hope
and delight by those who had so long deplored the condition of those
classes. But when it was formally set forth, its administrative
organization appeared so defective in liberal comprehension, so
invidiously restricted and accommodated to the prejudices and demands of
one part of the community, that another great division, the one in which
zeal and exertions for the education of the people had been more and
longer conspicuous, was constrained to make an instant and general protest
against it. And at the same time it was understood, that the party in
whose favor it had been so inequitably constructed, were displeased at
even the very small reserve it made from their monopoly of jurisdiction.
It speedily fell to the ground, to the extreme regret of the earnest
friends of popular reformation that a design of so much original promise
should have come to nothing.

All legislative consideration of the subject went into abeyance; and has
so remained, with trifling exception, through an interval in which far
more than a million, in England alone, of the children who were at that
time within that stage of their life on which chiefly a general scheme
would have acted, have grown up to animal maturity, destitute of all that
can, in any decent sense of the word, be called education. Think of the
difference between their state as it is, and what it might have been if
there had at that time existed patriotism, liberality, and moral
principle, enough to enact and carry into effect a comprehensive measure.
The longer the neglect the more aggravated the pressure with which the
subject returns upon us. It is forcing itself on attention with a demand
as peremptory as ever was the necessity of an embankment against the peril
of inundation. There are no indications to make us sanguine as to the
disposition of the most influential classes; but it were little less than
infatuation not to see the necessity of some extraordinary proceeding, to
establish a fortified line between us and--not national dishonor; _that_
is flagrantly upon us, but--the destruction of national safety.

As to national dishonor, by comparison with what may be seen elsewhere, it
is hardly possible for a patriot to feel a more bitter mortification than
in reading the description, as recently given by M. Cousin, of the state
of education in the Prussian dominions, and then looking over the hideous
exhibition of ignorance and barbarism in this country; in representing to
himself the vernal intelligence, (as we may rightly name it,) the
information, the sense of decorum, the fitness for rational converse,
which must quite inevitably diffuse a value and grace throughout the
general youthful character under such a discipline, and then changing his
view to what may be seen all over his own country--an incalculable and
ever-increasing tribe of human creatures, growing up in a condition to
show what a wretched and offensive thing is human nature left to itself.

When neither opprobrium, nor prospective policy, nor sense of duty, can
constrain the attention of the officially and virtually ruling part of
society to an important national interest, it is sure to come on them at
last in some more alarming and imperative manifestation. The present and
very recent times have afforded significant indication of what an ignorant
populace are capable of believing, and of being successfully instigated to
perpetrate. It is not to be pretended that such ignorance, and such
liabilities to mischief, exist only in particular spots of the land, as if
the local outbreaks were merely incidental and insulated facts, standing
out of community with anything widely pervading the mass. Within but very
few years of the present date, we have had the spectacle of millions,
literally millions, of the people of England, yielding an absolute
credence to the most monstrous delusions respecting public questions and
measures, imposed on them by dishonest artifice, and what may be called
moral incendiarism; and these delusions of a nature to excite the passions
of the multitude to crime. It is difficult to believe that all this can be
seen without serious apprehension, by those who sustain the primary
responsibility for devising measures to secure the national _safety_,
(that we may take the lowest term of national welfare;) and that they can
be content to rest that security on expedients which, in keeping the
people in order, make them no wiser or better. It would truly be a
glorious change in our history, if we might at length see the national
power wielded by enlightened, virtuous, and energetic spirits, not only to
the bare effect of withstanding disorder and danger, but in a resolute,
invincible determination to redeem us from the national ignominy of
exhibiting to the world, far in the nineteenth century, a rude,
unprincipled, semi-barbarous populace.

Thus far the hopes which had flattered us with such a change, as a
consequence of a political movement so considerable as to be denominated a
revolution, have been grievously disappointed. We must wait, but with
prognostics little encouraging, to see whether a professed concern for
popular education will result in any effective scheme. That profession has
hitherto been followed up with so little appearance of earnest conviction,
or of high and comprehensive purpose, among the majority of the
influential persons who, perhaps for decorum's sake, have made it, as to
leave cause for apprehension that, if any such scheme were to be proposed,
it would be in the first instance very limited in its compass, indecisive
in its enforcement, and niggardly in its pecuniary appointments. Many of
our legislators have never thought of investigating the condition of the
people, and are unaware of their deplorable destitution of all mental
cultivation; and many have formed but a low and indistinct estimate of the
kind and measure of cultivation desirable to be imparted. Very slowly does
the conviction or the desire make its way among the favorites of fortune,
that the portion of humanity so far below them should be raised to the
highest mental condition compatible with the limitation and duties of
their subordinate allotment.

No doubt, the most genuine zeal for the object would find difficulties in
the way, of a magnitude to require a great and persevering exertion of
power, were they only those opposed by the degraded condition of the
people themselves; by the utter carelessness of one part, and the
intractableness of another. Nor is it to be denied, that the differences
of religious opinion, among the promoters of the design, must create
considerable difficulty as to the mode and extent of religious
instruction, to form a part of a comprehensive system. But we are told,
besides, of we know not what obstruction to be encountered from prejudices
of prescription, privileged and peculiar interests, the jealous pride of
venerable institutions, assumed rights of station and rank, punctilios of
precedence, the tenacity of parties who find their advantage in things as
they are, and so forth; all to be deferentially consulted.

If this mean that the old horror of a bold experimental novelty is still
to be yielded to; that nothing in this so urgent affair is to be ventured
but in a creeping inch-by-inch movement; that the reign of gross
ignorance, with all its attendant vices, is to be allowed a very leisurely
retreat, retaining its hold on a large portion of the present and
following generations of the children, and therefore the adults; that
their condition and fate shall be mainly left at the discretion of
ignorant and often worthless parents; that there shall be no considerable
positive exaction of local provision for the institution, or of attendance
of those who should be benefited by it; that, in short, there shall not be
a comprehensive application of the national power through its organ, the
government, by authoritative, and, we must say, in some degree coercive
measures, to abate as speedily as possible the national nuisance and
calamity of such a state of the juvenile faculties and habits as we see
glaring around us; and all this because homage is demanded to anticipated
prejudices, selfishness of privilege, venerable institutions, pride of
station, jealousy of the well-endowed, and the like:--if this be what is
meant, we may well ask whether these factitious prerogatives, that would
thus interfere to render feeble, partial, and slow, any projected exertion
to rescue the nation from barbarism, turpitude, and danger, be not
themselves among the most noxious things in the land, and the most
deserving to be extirpated.

How readily will the proudest descend to the plea of impotence when the
exhortation is to something which they care not for or dislike, but to
which, at the same time, it would be disreputable to avow any other than
the most favorable sentiments, to be duly expressed in the form of great
regret that the thing is impracticable. Impracticable--and does the case
come at last to be this, that from one cause and another, from the
arrogance of the high and the untowardness of the low, the obstinacy of
prejudice, and the rashness of innovation, the dissensions among friends
of a beneficent design and the discountenance of those who are no better
than enemies, a mighty state, triumphantly boasting of every _other_
kind of power, absolutely _cannot_ execute a scheme for rescuing its
people from being what a great Authority on this subject has pronounced
"the worst educated nation in Europe?" Then let it submit, with all its
pomp, pride, and grandeur, to stand in derision and proverb on the face
of the earth.

       *       *       *       *       *

With a view to a wider circulation than that which is limited by the price
of the volume published in an expensive form and style of printing, it has
been deemed advisable to publish a cheap edition of the "Essay on Popular
Ignorance." It is not in any degree an abridgment of the preceding
edition; the only omission, of the slightest consequence, being in a few
places where changes have been rendered necessary by the subsequent
conduct of our national authorities, as affecting our speculations and
prospects in relation to general education; while, on the other hand,
there are numerous little additions and corrections, in attempts to bring
out the ideas more fully, or with some little afterthought of
discrimination or exception. In some instances the connection and
dependence of the series of thoughts have been rendered more obvious, and
the sentences reduced to a somewhat more simple and compact construction;
but the principal object in this _final revised_ has been literary
correction, without any material enlargement or change.

It is hoped that this reprint in a popular form may serve the purpose of
contributing something, in co-operation with the present exertions, to
expose, and partially remedy, the lamentable and nationally disgraceful
ignorance to which the people of our country have been so long abandoned.




Contents.



Section I.

  Defect of sensibility in the view of the unhappiness of mankind.
  --Ignorance one grand cause of that unhappiness.--Ignorance prevalent
  among the ancient Jewish people.--Its injurious operation--and
  ultimately destructive consequence.--More extended consideration of
  ignorance as the cause of misery among the ancient heathens.


Section II.

  Brief review of the ignorance prevailing through the ages subsequent to
  those of ancient history.--State of the popular mind in Christendom
  during the complete reign of Popery.--Supposed reflections of a
  Protestant in one of our ancient splendid structures for ecclesiastical
  use.--Slow progress of the Reformation, in its effects on the
  understandings of the people.--Their barbarous ignorance even in the
  time of Elizabeth, notwithstanding the intellectual and literary glories
  of this country in that period.--Sunk in ignorance still in what has
  often been called our Augustan age.--Strange insensibility of the
  cultivated part of the nation with regard to the mental and moral
  condition of the rest.--Almost heathen ignorance of religion at the time
  when Whitefield and Wesley began to excite the attention of the
  multitude to that subject.--Signs and means of a change for the better
  in recent times.


Section III.

  Great ignorance and debasement still manifest in various features of the
  popular character.--Entire want, in early life, of any idea of a general
  and comprehensive purpose to be pursued--Gratification of the senses
  the chief good.--Cruelty a subsidiary resource.--Disposition to cruelty
  displayed and confirmed by common practices.--Confirmed especially by
  the manner of slaughtering animals destined for food.--Displayed in the
  abuse of the laboring animals.--General characteristic of the people an
  indistinct and faint sense of right and wrong.--Various
  exemplifications.--Dishonor to our country that the people should have
  remained in such a condition.--Effects of their ignorance as appearing
  in several parts of the economy of life; in their ordinary occupations;
  in their manner of spending their leisure time, including the Sunday; in
  the state of domestic society; consequences of this last as seen in the
  old age of parents.--The lower classes placed by their want of education
  out of amicable communication with the higher.--Unhappy and dangerous
  consequences of this.--Great decline of the respect which in former
  times the people felt toward the higher classes and the existing order
  of the community.--Progress of a contrary spirit.


Section IV.

  Objection, that a material increase of knowledge and intelligence among
  the people would render them unfit for their station, and discontented
  with it; would excite them to insubordination and arrogance toward
  their superiors; and make them the more liable to be seduced by the
  wild notions and pernicious machinations of declaimers, schemers, and
  innovators.--Observations in answer.--Special and striking absurdity
  of this objection in one important particular.--Evidence from matter of
  fact that the improvement of the popular understanding has not the
  tendency alleged.--The special regard meant to be had to _religious_
  instruction in the education desired for the lower classes, a security
  against their increased knowledge being perverted into an excitement to
  insubordination and disorder.--Absurdity of the notion that an improved
  education of the common people ought to consist of instruction
  specifically and almost solely religious.--The diminutive quantity of
  religious as well as other knowledge to which the people would be
  limited by some zealous advocates of order and subordination utterly
  inadequate to secure those objects.--But, question what is to be
  understood by order and subordination.--Increased knowledge and sense
  in the people certainly not favorable to a credulous confidence and a
  passive, unconditional submission, on their part, toward the presiding
  classes in the community.--Advantage, to a wise and upright government,
  of having intelligent subjects.--Great effect which a general
  improvement among the people would necessarily have on the manner of
  their being governed.--The people arrived, in this age, at a state
  which renders it impracticable to preserve national tranquillity
  without improving their minds and making some concession to their
  claims.--Folly and probable calamity of an obstinate resolution to
  maintain subordination in the nations of Europe in the arbitrary and
  despotic manner of former times.--Facility and certain success of a
  better system.


Section V.

  Extreme poverty of religious knowledge among the uneducated people:
  their notions respecting God, Providence, Jesus Christ, the invisible
  world.--Fatal effect of their want of mental discipline as causing an
  inaptitude to receive religious information.--Exemplifications,--in a
  supposed experiment of religious instruction in a friendly visit to a
  numerous uneducated family; in the stupidity and thoughtlessness often
  betrayed in attendance on public religious services; in the
  impossibility of imparting religious truths, with any degree of
  clearness, to ignorant persons, when alarmed into some serious concern
  by sickness; in the insensibility and invincible delusion sometimes
  retained in the near approach to death.--Rare instances of the
  admirable efficacy of religion to animate and enlarge the faculties,
  even in the old age of an ignorant man.--Excuses for the intellectual
  inaptitude and perversion of uncultivated religious
  minds.--Animadversions on religious teachers.


Section VI.

  Supposed method of verifying the preceding representation of the
  ignorance of the people.--Renewed expressions of wonder and
  mortification that this should be the true description of the English
  nation.--Prodigious exertions of this nation for the accomplishment of
  objects foreign to the improvement of the people.--Effects which might
  have resulted from far less exertion and resources applied to that
  object.--The contrast between what has been done, and what might have
  been done by the exertion of the national strength, exposed in a series
  of parallel representations.--Total unconcern, till a recent period, of
  the generality of persons in the higher classes respecting the mental
  state of the populace.--Indications of an important change in the manner
  of estimating them.--Measures attempted and projected for their
  improvement.--Some of these measures and methods insignificant in the
  esteem of projectors of merely political schemes for the amendment of
  the popular condition.--But questions to those projectors on the
  efficacy of such schemes.--Most desirable, nevertheless, that the
  political systems and the governing powers of states _could_ be
  converted to promote so grand a purpose.--But expostulations addressed
  to those who, desponding of this aid, despond therefore of the object
  itself.--Incitement to individual exertion.--Reference to the sublimest
  Example.--Imputation of extravagant hope.--Repelled; first, by a full
  acknowledgment how much the hopes of sober-minded projectors of
  improvement are limited by what they see of the disorder in the
  essential constitution of our nature; and next, by a plain statement, in
  a series of particulars, of what they nevertheless judge it rational to
  expect from a general extension of good education.--Answer to the
  question, whether it be presumed that any merely human discipline can
  reduce its subjects under the predominance of religion.--Answer to the
  inquiry, what is the extent of the knowledge of which it is desired to
  put the common people in possession.--Observations on supposed degrees
  of possible advancement of the knowledge and welfare of the community;
  with reflections of astonishment and regret at the actual state of
  ignorance, degradation, and wretchedness, after so many thousand years
  have passed away.--Congratulatory notice of those worthy individuals who
  have been rescued from the consequences of a neglected education by
  their own resolute mental exertions.





Essay on Popular Ignorance.




"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge."

_Hosea_.




Section I.



It may excite in us some sense of wonder, and perhaps of self-reproach, to
reflect with what a stillness and indifference of the mind we can hear and
repeat sentences asserting facts which are awful calamities. And this
indifference is more than the accidental and transient state, which might
prevail at seasons of peculiar heaviness or languor. The self-inspector
will often be compelled to acknowledge it as a symptom and exemplification
of the _habit_ of his mind, that ideas of extensive misery and
destruction, though expressed in the plainest, strongest language, seem to
come with but a faint glimmer on his apprehension, and die away without
awakening one emotion of that sensibility which so many comparatively
trifling causes can bring into exercise.

Will the hearers of the sentence just now repeated from the sacred book,
give a moment's attention to the effect it has on them? We might suppose
them accosted with the question, Would you find it difficult to say what
idea, or whether anything distinct enough to deserve the name of an idea,
has been impressed by the sound of words bearing so melancholy a
significance? And would you have to confess, that they excite no interest
which would not instantly give place to that of the smallest of your own
concerns, occurring to your thoughts; or would not leave free the tendency
to wander loose among casual fancies; or would not yield to feelings of
the ludicrous, at the sight of any whimsical incident? It would not
probably be unfair to suspect such faintness of apprehension, and such
unfixedness and indifference of thought, in the majority of any large
number of persons, though drawn together ostensibly to attend to matters
of gravest concern. And perhaps many of the most serious of them would
acknowledge it requires great and repeated efforts, to bring themselves to
such a contemplative realization of an important subject, that it shall
lay hold on the affections, though it should press on them, as in the
present instance, with facts and reflections of a nature the most strongly
appealing to a mournful sensibility.

That the "people are destroyed," is perceived to have the sound of a
lamentable declaration. But its import loses all force of significance in
falling on a state of feeling which, if resolvable into distinct
sentiments, would be expressed to some such effect as this:--that the
people's destruction, in whatever sense of the word, is, doubtless, a
deplorable thing, but quite a customary and ordinary matter, the
prevailing fact, indeed, in the general state of this world; that, in
truth, it would seem as if they were made but to be destroyed, for that
they have constantly been, in all imaginable ways, the subjects of
destruction; that, subjected in common with all living corporeal beings to
the doom of death, and to a fearful diversity of causes tending to inflict
it, they have also appeared, through their long sad history, consigned to
a spiritual and moral destruction, if that term be applicable to a
condition the reverse of wisdom, goodness, and happiness; that, in short,
such a sentence as that cited from the prophet, is too merely an
expression of what has been always and over the whole world self-evident,
to excite any particular attention or emotion.

Thus the destruction, in every sense of the word, of human creatures, is
so constantly obvious, as mingled and spread throughout the whole system,
that the mind has been insensibly wrought to that protective obtuseness
which (like the thickness of the natural clothing of animals in rigorous
climates) we acquire in defence of our own ease, against the aggrievance
of things which inevitably continue in our presence. An instinctive policy
to avoid feeling with respect to this prevailing destruction, has so
effectually taught us how to maintain the exemption, by all the requisite
sleights of overlooking, diverting, forgetting, and admitting deceptive
maxims of palliation, that the art or habit is become almost mechanical.
When fully matured, it appears like a wonderful adventitious faculty--a
power of evading the sight, of _not seeing_, what is obviously and
glaringly presented to view on all sides. There is, indeed, a dim general
recognition that such things are; the hearing of a bold denial of their
existence, would give an instant sense of absurdity, which would provoke a
pointed attention to them, the more perfectly to verify their reality; and
the perception how real and dreadful they are, might continue distinct as
long as we were in the spirit of contradicting and exploding that absurd
denial; but, in the ordinary state of feeling, the mind preserves an easy
dulness of apprehension toward the melancholy vision, and sees it as if it
saw it not.

This fortified insensibility may, indeed, be sometimes broken in upon with
violence, by the sudden occurrence of some particular instance of human
destruction, in either import of the word, some example of peculiar
aggravation, or happening under extraordinary and striking circumstances,
or very near us in place or interest. An emotion is excited of pity, or
terror, or horror; so strong, that if the person so affected has been
habitually thoughtless, and has no wish to be otherwise, he fears he shall
never recover his state of careless ease; or, if of a more serious
disposition, thinks it impossible he can ever cease to feel an awful and
salutary effect. This more serious person perhaps also thinks it must be
inevitable that henceforward his feelings will be more alive to the
miseries of mankind. But how obstinate is an inveterate habitual state of
the mind against any single impressions made in contravention to it! Both
the thoughtless and the more reflective man may probably find, that a
comparatively short lapse of time suffices, to relieve them from anything
more than slight momentary reminiscences of what had struck them with such
painful force, and to restore, in regard to the general view of the
acknowledged misery of the human race, nearly the accustomed tranquillity.
The course of feeling resembles a listless stream of water, which, after
being dashed into commotion, by a massive substance flung into it, or by
its precipitation at a rapid, relapses, in the progress of a few fathoms
and a few moments, into its former sluggishness of current.

But is it well that this should be the state of feeling, in the immediate
presence of the spectacle exhibiting the people under a process of being
destroyed? There must be a great and criminal perversion from what our
nature ought to be, in a tranquillity to which it makes no material
difference whether they be destroyed or saved; a tranquillity which would
hardly, perhaps, have been awaked to an effort of intercession at the
portentous sign of destruction revealed to the sight of Ornan; or which
might at the deluge have permitted the privileged patriarch to sink in a
soft slumber, at the moment when the ark was felt to be moving from its
ground. If the original rectitude of that nature had been retained by any
individual, he would be confounded to conceive how creatures having their
lot cast in one place, so near together, so much alike, and under such a
complication of connections and dependences, can yet really be so
insulated, as that some of them may behold, with immovable composure,
innumerable companies of the rest in such a condition, that it had been
better for them not to have existed.

To such a condition a vast multitude have been consigned by "the lack of
knowledge." And we have to appeal concerning them to whatever there is of
benevolence and conscience, in those who deem themselves happy instances
of exemption from this deplorable consignment; and are conscious that
their state of inestimable privilege is the result, under the blessing of
heaven, of the reception of information, of truth, into their minds.

If it were suggested to the well instructed in our companies to take an
account of the benefit they have received through the medium of knowledge,
they would say they do not know where to begin the long enumeration, or
how to bring into one estimate so ample a diversity of good. It might be
something like trying to specify, in brief terms, what a highly improved
portion of the ground, in a tract rude and sterile if left to itself, has
received from cultivation; an attempt which would carry back the
imagination through a progression of states and appearances, in which the
now fertile spots, and picture-like scenes, and commodious passes, and
pleasant habitations, may or must have existed in the advance from the
original rudeness. The estimate of what has ultimately been effected,
rises at each stage in this retrospect of the progress, in which so many
valuable changes and additions still require to be followed by something
more, to complete the scheme of improvement. In thus tracing backward the
condition of a now fair and productive place of human dwelling and
subsistence, it may easily be recollected, what a vast number of the
earth's inhabitants there are whose places of dwelling are in all those
states of worse cultivation and commodiousness, and what multitudes
leading a miserable and precarious life amidst the inhospitableness of the
waste, howling wilderness. Each presented circumstance of fertility or
shelter, salubrity or beauty, may be named as what is wanting to a much
greater number of the occupants of the world, than those to whom the
"lines are fallen in such pleasant places."

When, in like manner, a person richly possessed of the benefits imparted
by means of knowledge, finds, in attempting to recount them, that they
rise so fast on his view, in their variety, combinations, and gradations
from less to greater, as to overpower his computing faculty, he may be
reminded that this account of his wealth is, in truth, that of many other
men's poverty. And if, while these benefits are coming so numerously in
his sight, like an irregular crowd of loaded fruit-trees, one partially
seen behind the offered luxury of another, and others still descried,
through intervals, in the distance, he can imagine them all devastated and
swept away from him, leaving him in a scene of mental desolation,--and if
he shall then consider that nearly such is the state of the great
multitude,--he will surely feel that a deep compassion is due to so
depressed a condition of existence. And how strongly is its infelicity
shown by the very circumstance, that a being who is himself but very
imperfectly enlightened, and who is exposed to sorrow and doomed to death,
is nevertheless in a state to be able to look down upon the victims of the
"lack of knowledge" with profound commiseration. The degree of pity is the
measure of a conscious superiority.

We may say to persons so favored,--If knowledge has been made the cause
that you are, beyond all comparison, better qualified to make the short
sojourn on this earth to the greatest advantage, think what a fatal thing
that must be which condemns so many, whose lot is contemporary and in
vicinity with yours to pass through the most precious possibilities of
good unprofited, and at last to look back on life as a lost adventure. If
through knowledge you have been introduced into a new and superior world
of ideas and realities, and your intellectual being has there been brought
into exercise among the highest interests, and into communication with the
noblest objects, think of that condition of the soul to which this better
economy has no existence. If knowledge rendered efficacious has become, in
your minds, the light and joy of the Christian faith and hope, look at the
state of those, whose minds have never been cultivated to an ability to
entertain the principles of religious truth, even as mere intellectual
notions. You would not for the wealth of an empire consent to descend,
were it possible, from the comparative elevation to which you have been
raised by means of knowledge, into melancholy region of spirits abandoned
to ignorance.

But in this situation have the mass of the people been, from the time of
the prophet whose words we have cited, down to this hour.

The prophets had their exalted privilege of dwelling amidst the
illuminations of heaven effectually countervailed, as to any elation of
feeling it might have imparted, by the grief of beholding the daily
spectacle of the grossest manifestations and mischiefs of ignorance among
the people, for the very purpose of whose exemption from that ignorance it
was that they bore the sacred office. One of the most striking of the
characteristics by which their writings so forcibly seize the imagination
is, a strange continual fluctuation and strife of lustre and gloom,
produced by the intermingling and contrast of the emanations from the
Spirit of infinite wisdom, with those proceeding from the dark, debased
souls of the people. We are tempted to pronounce that nation not only the
most perverse, but the most unintelligent and stupid of all human tribes.
The revealed law of God in the midst of them; the prophets and other
organs of oracular communication; religious ordinances and emblems; facts,
made and expressly intended to embody truths, in long and various series;
the whole system of their superhuman government, constituted as a
school--all these were ineffectual to create so much just thought in their
minds, as to save them from the vainest and the vilest delusions and
superstitions.

But, indeed, this very circumstance, that knowledge shone on them from Him
who knows all things, may in part account for an intellectual perverseness
that appears so peculiar and marvellous. The nature of man is in such a
moral condition, that anything is the less acceptable for coming directly
from God; it being quite consistent, that the state of mind which is
declared to be "enmity against him," should have a dislike to his coming
so near, as to impart his communications by his immediate act, bearing on
them the fresh and sacred impression of his hand. The supplies for man's
temporal being are conveyed to him through an extended medium, through a
long process of nature and art, which seems to place the great First Cause
at a commodious distance; and those gifts are, on that account, more
welcome, on the whole, than if they were sent as the manna to the
Israelites. The manna itself might not have been so soon loathed, had it
been produced in what we call the regular course of nature. And with
respect to the intellectual communications which were given to constitute
the light of knowledge in their souls, there can, on the same principle,
be no doubt that the people would more willingly have opened their minds
to receive them and exercise the thinking faculties on them, if they could
have appeared as something originating in human wisdom, or at least as
something which, though primarily from a divine origin, had been long
surrendered by the Revealer, to maintain itself in the world by the
authority of reason only, like the doctrines worked out from mere human
speculation. But truth that was declared to them, and inculcated on them,
through a continual immediate manifestation of the Sovereign Intelligence,
had a glow of Divinity (if we may so express it) that was unspeakably
offensive to their minds, which therefore receded with instinctive recoil,
They were averse to look toward that which they could not see without
seeing God; and thus they were hardened in ignorance, through a reaction
of human depravity against the too luminous approach of the Divine
presence to give them wisdom.

But in whatever degree the case might be thus, as to the cause, the fact
is evident, that the Jewish people were not more remarkable for their
pre-eminence in privilege, than for their grossness of mental vision under
a dispensation specially and miraculously constituted and administered to
enlighten them. The sacred history of which they are the subject, exhibits
every mode in which the intelligent faculties may evade or frustrate the
truth presented to them; every way in which the decided preference for
darkness may avail to defy what might have been presumed to be
irresistible irradiations; every perversity of will which renders men as
accountable and criminal for being ignorant as for acting against
knowledge; and every form of practical mischief in which the natural
tendency of ignorance, especially wilful ignorance, is shown. A great part
of what the devout teachers of that people had to address to them,
wherever they appeared among them, was in reproach of their ignorance, and
in order, if possible, to dispel it. And were we to indulge our fancy in
picturing the forms and circumstances in which it was encountered by those
teachers, we might be sure of not erring much by figuring situations very
similar to what might occur in much later and nearer states of society. If
we should imagine one of these good and wise instructors going into a
promiscuous company of the people, and asking them, with a view at once to
see into their minds and inform them, say, ten plain questions, relative
to matters somewhat above the ordinary secular concerns of life, but
essential for them to understand, it would be a quite probable supposition
that he did not obtain from the whole company rational answers to more
than three, or two, or even one, of those questions; notwithstanding that
every one of them might be designedly so framed, as to admit of an easy
reply from the most prominent of the dictates of the "law and the
prophets," and from the right application of the memorable facts in the
national history of the Jews. In his earlier experiments he might be
supposed very reluctant to admit the fact, that so many of his countrymen,
in one spot, could have been so faithfully maintaining the ascendency of
darkness in their spirits, while surrounded by divine manifestations of
truth. He might be willing to suspect he had not been happy in the form of
words in which his queries had been conveyed. But it may be believed that
all his changes and adaptations of expression, to elicit from the contents
of his auditors' understandings something fairly answering to his
questions, might but complete the proof that the thing sought was not
there. And while he might be looking from one to another, with regret not
unmingled with indignation at an ignorance at once so unhappy and so
criminal, they probably might little care, excepting some slight feeling
of mortified pride, that they were thus proved to be nearly pagans in
knowledge within the immediate hearing of the oracles of God.

Or we may represent to ourselves this benevolent promoter of improvement
endeavoring to instruct such a company, not in the way of interrogation,
but in the ordinary manner of discourse, and _assuming_ that they actually
had in their minds those principles, those points of knowledge, which
would, on the former supposition of a course of questions, have qualified
them to make the proper replies. It may indeed be too much to imagine a
discerning man to entertain such a presumption; but supposing he did, and
proceeded upon it, you can well conceive what reception the reasonings,
advices, or reproofs, would find among the hearers, according to their
respective temperaments. Some would be content with knowing nothing at all
about the matter, which they would perhaps say, might be, for aught they
knew, something very wise; and, according to their greater or less degree
of patience and sense of decorum, would wait in quiet and perhaps sleepy
dulness for the end of the irksome lecture, or escape from it by a stolen
retreat, or a bold-faced exit. To others it would all seem ridiculous
absurdity, and they would readily laugh if any one would begin. A few,
possessed of some natural shrewdness, would set themselves to catch at
something for exception, with unadroit aim, but with good will for cavil.
While perhaps one or two, of better disposition, imperfectly descrying at
moments something true and important in what was said, and convinced of
the friendly intention of the speaker, might feel a transient regret for
what they would with honest shame call the stupidity of their own minds,
accompanied with some resentment against those to whose neglect it was
greatly attributable. The instructor also, as the signs grew evident to
him of the frustration of his efforts upon the invincible grossness of the
subjects before him, would become animated with indignation at the
incompetence or wicked neglect in the system and office of public
instruction, of which the intellectual condition of such a company of
persons might be taken as a proof and consequence. And in fact there is no
class more conspicuous in reprobation, in the solemn invectives of the
prophets, than those whose special and neglected duty it was to instruct
the Jewish people.

Now if such were the state of their intelligence, how would this friend of
truth and the people find, how would he have _expected_ to find, their
piety, their morals, and their happiness affected by such destitution of
knowledge? Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? We are
supposing them to be in ignorance of four parts out of five, or perhaps of
nine parts out of ten, of what the Supreme Wisdom was maintaining an
extraordinary dispensation to declare to them. Why to declare, but because
each particular in this divine promulgation was pointed to some
circumstance, some propensity, some temptation, in their nature and
condition, and was exactly fitted to be there applied as a rectifier and
guard? The revelations and signs from heaven were the sum of what the
Perfect Intelligence judged indispensable to be sent forth from him to his
subjects, as seen by him liable to be wrong; and could there be one
dictate or fact superfluous in such a communication? If not, consider the
case of minds in which one, and a second, and the far greater number, of
the points of information thus demonstrated to be necessary, had no place
to shine or exist; of which minds, therefore, the estimates, passions,
volitions, principles of action with the actions also, were in so many
instances abandoned to take their chance for good or evil. But _had_ they
any chance for good in such an abandonment? What principle in their nature
was to determine them to good, with an impulse that rendered needless the
rational discrimination of it by the light of truth? It were an
exceedingly probable thing truly, that some happy instinct, or some
guiding star of good fortune, should have beguiled into an unknowing
choice of what is right, that very nature which knowledge itself,
including a recognition of the will of God, is so often insufficient to
constrain to such a choice.

But further; the absence of knowledge is sure to be something more and
worse than simple ignorance. Even were that absence but a mere negation, a
vacancy of truth, (the terms truth and knowledge may be used for our
present purpose as nearly synonymous, for what is not truth is not
knowledge,) it would be by its effect as a _deficiency_, incalculably
injurious. But it could not remain a mere deficiency: the vacancy of truth
would commonly be found replenished with positive error. Not indeed
replenished, (we are speaking of uncultivated persons,) with a
comprehensive and arranged set of false notions; for there would not be
thinking enough to form opinions in any sufficient number to be distinctly
and specifically the opposites to the many truths that were absent; but a
few false notions, such as could hardly fail to take the place of absent
truth in the ignorant mind, however crude they might be, and however
deficient for constituting a full system of error, would be sure to dilate
themselves so as to have an operation at all the points where truth was
wanting. It is frightful to see what a space in an ignorant mind one false
notion can occupy, working nearly the same effect in many distinct
particulars, as if there had been so many distinct wrong principles, each
producing specifically its own bad effect. So that in that mind a few
false notions, and those the ones most likely to establish themselves
there, shall be virtually equivalent to a whole scheme of errors standing
formally in place of so many truths of which they are the reverse. And
thus the dark void of ignorance, instead of remaining a mere negation,
becomes filled with agents of perversion and destruction; as sometimes the
gloomy apartments of a deserted mansion have become a den of robbers and
murderers.

Such a friend of the people, then, as we were supposing to expend his life
and zeal on the object of rescuing them from their ignorance, would see in
that ignorance not only the privation of all direction and impulsion to
good, but a great positive force of determination toward evil.

But it may be alleged, that he would not find them _wholly_ destitute of
right information. True; but he would find that the small portion of
knowledge which an ignorant people did really possess, could be of little
avail. It is not only that, from the narrowness of its scope, knowledge so
scanty as to afford no principles directly adapted for application to a
vast number of matters of judgment and conduct, would of course be of
small use, though it _were_ efficient as far as it reached--of small use
though it _did_ produce that very limited quantity of good which ought to
be its proper share, in a due proportion to the larger amount of good to
be produced by a larger knowledge. This is not the whole of the
misfortune; it would not produce that proportionate share. For the fewer
are the points to which there is knowledge that can be applied, the less
availing is its application even to those few points. It shall be the kind
of knowledge apposite to them, and yet be nearly useless; from the obvious
cause, that a few just notions existing disconnected and confused among
the mass of vain and false ones, which will, like noxious weeds, infest
minds left in ignorance, are not _permitted_ by those bad associates to do
their duty. Weak by being few, insulated, unsupported, and dwelling among
vicious neighbors, they not only cannot perform their own due service, but
are liable to be seduced to that of the evil principles whose company they
are condemned to keep. The _conjunction_ of truths is of the utmost
importance for preserving the genuine tendency, and securing the
appropriate efficacy, of each. It is an unhappy "lack of knowledge" when
there is not enough to preserve, to what there is of it, the honest
beneficial quality of knowledge. How many of the follies, excesses, and
crimes, in the course of the world, have taken their pretended warrant
from some fragment of truth, dissevered from the connection of truths
indispensable to its right operation, and in that detached state easily
perverted into coalescence with the most pernicious principles, which
concealed and gave effect to their malignity under the falsified authority
of a truth.

There were many and melancholy exemplifications of all we have said of
ignorance, in the conduct of that ancient people at present in our view.
Doubtless a sad proportion of the iniquities which, by their necessary
tendency and by the divine vindictive appointment, brought plagues and
destruction upon them, were committed in violation of what they knew. But
also it was in no small part from blindness to the manifestation of truth
and duty incessantly confronting them, that they were betrayed into crimes
and consequent miseries. This is evident equally from the language in
which their prophets reproached their intellectual stupidity, and from the
surprise which they sometimes seem to have felt on finding themselves
involved in retributive suffering, for what they could not conceive to be
serious delinquencies. It appeared as if they had never so much as dreamed
of such a-consequence; and their monitors had to represent to them, that
it had been through their thoughtlessness of divine dictates and warnings,
if they did not _know_ that such proceedings must provoke such an
infliction.

How one portion of knowledge admitted, with the exclusion of other truths
equally indispensable to be known, may not only be unavailing, but may in
effect lend force to destructive error, is dreadfully illustrated in the
final catastrophe of that favored guilty nation. They were in possession
of the one important point of knowledge, that a Messiah was to come. They
held this assurance not slightly, but with strong conviction, and as a
matter of the utmost interest. But then, that this knowledge might have
its appropriate and happy effect, it was of essential necessity for them
to know also the character of this Messiah, and the real nature of his
great design. But this they closed up their understandings in a fatal
contentment not to know. Literally the whole people, with a diminutive
exception, had failed, or rather refused, to admit, as to that part of the
subject, the inspired declarations.

Now comes the consequence of knowing only one thing of several that
require to be inseparable in knowledge. They formed to themselves a false
idea of the Messiah, according to their own worldly imaginations; and
they extended the full assurance which they justly entertained of his
coming, to this false notion of what he was to be and to accomplish when
he should come. From this it was natural and inevitable that when the
true Messiah should come they would not recognize him, and that their
hostility would be excited against a person who, while demanding to be
acknowledged in that capacity, appeared without the characteristics
pictured in their vain imagination, and with directly opposite ones. And
thus they were placed in an incomparably worse situation for receiving
him with honor when he did appear, than if they had had no knowledge that
a Messiah was to come. For on that supposition they might have regarded
him as a most striking phenomenon, with curiosity and admiration, with
awe of his miraculous powers, and as little prejudice as it is possible
in any case for depravity and ignorance to feel toward sanctity and
wisdom. But this delusive pre-occupation of their minds formed a direct
grand cause for their rejecting Jesus Christ. And how fearful was the
final consequence of _this_ "lack of knowledge!" How truly, in all
senses, the people were destroyed! The violent extermination at length of
multitudes of them from the earth, was but as the omen and commencement
of a deeper perdition. And the terrible memorial is a perpetual
admonition what a curse it is _not to know_. For He, by the rejection of
whom these despisers devoted themselves to perish, while he looked on
their great city, and wept at the doom which he beheld impending, said,
_If_ them hadst _known_, even thou in this thy day.----

So much for that selected people:--we may cast a glance over the rest of
the ancient world, as exemplifying the pernicious effect of the want of
knowledge.

The ignorance which pervaded the heathen nations, was fully equal to the
utmost result that could have been calculated from all the causes
contributing to thicken the mental darkness. The traditional glimmering of
that knowledge which had been originally received by divine communication,
had long since become nearly extinct, having gone out in the act, as it
were, of lighting up certain fantastic inventions of doctrine, by ignition
of an element exhaled from the corruptions of the human soul. In other
words, the primary truths, imparted by the Creator to the early
inhabitants of the earth, gradually losing their clearness and purity, had
passed, by a transition through some delusive analogies, into the vanities
of fancy and notion which sprang from the inventive depravity of man;
which inventions carried somewhat of an authority stolen from the grand
truths they had superseded. And thus, if we except so much instruction as
we may conceive that the extraordinary and sometimes dreadful
interpositions of the Governor of the world might convey, unaccompanied
with declarations in language, (and it was in but an extremely limited
degree that these had actually the effect of illumination,) the human
tribes were surrendered to their own understanding for all that they were
to know and think. Melancholy predicament! The understanding, the
intellect, the reason, which had not sufficed for preserving the true
light from heaven, was to be competent to give light in its absence. Under
the disadvantage of this loss--after the setting of the sun--it was to
exercise itself on an unlimited diversity of important things, inquiring,
comparing, and deciding. All those things, if examined far, extended into
mystery. All genuine thinking was a hard repellent labor. Casual
impressions had a mighty force of perversion. The senses were not a medium
through which the intellect could receive ideas foreign to material
existence. The appetites and passions would infallibly occupy and actuate
the whole man. When by these his imagination was put in activity, its
gleams and meteors would be anything rather than lights of truth. His
interest, according to his gross apprehension of it, would in numberless
instances require, and therefore would gain, false judgments for
justification of the wrong manner of pursuing that interest. And all this
while, there was no grand standard and test to which the notions of things
could be brought. If there were some spirits of larger and purer thought,
that went out in the honest search of truth, they must have felt an
oppression of utter hopelessness in looking round on a world of doubtful
things, on no one of which they could obtain the dictate of a supreme
intelligence. There was no sovereign demonstrator in communication with
the earth, to tell benighted man what to think in any of a thousand
questions which arose to confound him. There were, instead, impostors,
magicians, vain theorists, prompted by ambition and superior native
ability to abuse the credulity of their fellow-mortals, which they did
with such success as to become their oracles, their dictators, or even
their gods. The multitude most naturally surrendered themselves to all
such delusions. If it may be conceived to have been possible that their
feeble and degraded reason, in the absence of divine light and of sound
human discipline, might by earnest exertion have attained in some small
degree to judge better that exertion was precluded by indolence, by the
immediate wants and unavoidable employments of life, by sensuality, by
love of amusement, by subjection, even of the mind, to superiors and
national institutions, and by the tendency of human individuals to fall,
if we may so express it, in dead conformity and addition to the lump.

The result of all these causes, the sum of all these effects, was, that
unnumbered millions of beings, whose value was in their intelligent and
moral nature, were, as to that nature, in a condition analogous to what
their physical existence would have been under a total and permanent
eclipse of the sun. It was perpetual night in their souls, with all the
phenomena incident to night, except the sublimity. While the material
economy, constituting the order of things which belonged to their temporal
existence, was in conspicuous manifestation around them, pressing with its
realities on their senses; while nature presented to them its open and
distinctly-featured aspect; while there was a true light shed on them
every morning from the sun; while they had constant experimental evidence
of the nature of the scene; and thus they had a clear knowledge of one
portion of the things connected with their existence--that portion which
they were soon to leave, and look back upon as a dream when one
awaketh;--all this while there was subsisting, present with them,
unapprehended except in faint and delusive glimpses, another order of
things involving their greatest interest, with no luminary to make that
apparent to them, after the race had willingly forgotten the original
instructions from their Creator.

The dreadful consequences of this "lack of knowledge," as appearing in the
religion and morals of the nations, and through these affecting their
welfare, equalled and even surpassed all that might by theory have been
presaged from the cause.

This ignorance could not annihilate the _principle_ of religion in the
spirit of man; but in taking away the awful repression of the idea of one
exclusive sovereign Divinity, it left that spirit to fabricate its
religion in its own manner. And as the creating of gods might be the most
appropriate way of celebrating the deliverance from the most imposing idea
of one Supreme Being, depraved and insane invention took this direction
with ardor. [Footnote: Those who have read Goethe's Memoirs of Himself,
may recollect the part where that late idolized "patriarch" of German
literature tells of the lively interest he had at one time felt in shaping
out of his imagination and philosophy a theology, beginning with the
fabrication of a god (or gods,) and amplified into a system of principles,
existences, and relations.] The mind threw a fictitious divinity into its
own phantasms, and into the objects in the visible world. It is amazing to
observe how, when one solemn principle was taken away, the promiscuous
numberless crowd of almost all shapes of fancy and of matter became, as it
were, instinct with ambition, and mounted into gods. They were alternately
the toys and the tyrants of their miserable creator. They appalled him
often, and often he could make sport with them. For overawing him by their
supposed power, they made him a compensation by descending to a fellowship
with his follies and vices. But indeed this was a condition of their
creation; they _must_ own their mortal progenitor by sharing his
depravity, even amidst the lordly domination assigned to them over him and
the universe. We may safely affirm, that the mighty artificer of
deifications, the corrupt soul of man, never once, in its almost infinite
diversification of device in their production, struck out a form of
absolute goodness. No, if there were ten thousand deities, there should
not be one that should be authorized by perfect rectitude in itself to
punish _him_; not one by which it should be possible for him to be rebuked
without having a right to recriminate.

Such a pernicious creation of active delusions it was that took the place
of religion in the absence of knowledge. And to this intellectual
obscuration, and this legion of pestilent fallacies, swarming like the
locusts from the smoke of the bottomless pit in the vision of St. John,
the fatal effect on morals and happiness corresponded. Indeed the mischief
done there, perhaps even exceeded the proportion of the ignorance and the
false theology; conformably to the rule, that anything wrong in the mind
will be the _most_ wrong where it comes the nearest to its ultimate
practical effect--except when in this operation outward it is met and
checked by some foreign counteraction.

The people of those nations (and the same description is applicable to
modern heathens) did not know the essential nature of perfect goodness, or
virtue. How should they know it? A depraved mind would not find in itself
any native conception to give the bright form of it. There were no living
examples of it. The men who held the pre-eminence in the community were
generally, in the most important points, its reverse. It was for the
_Divine_ nature to have presented, in a manifestation of itself, the
archetype of perfect rectitude, whence might have been derived the
modified exemplar for human virtue. And so _would_ the idea of perfect
moral excellence have come to dwell and shine in the understanding, if it
had been the True Divinity that men beheld in their contemplations of a
superior existence. But when the gods of their heaven were little better
than their own evil qualities, exalted to the sky to be thence reflected
back upon them invested with Olympian charms and splendors, their ideas of
deity would evidently combine with the causes which made it impossible for
them to conceive a perfect model for human excellence. See the mighty
labor of human depravity to confirm its dominion! It would translate
itself to heaven, and usurp divinity, in order to come down thence with a
sanction for man to be wicked,--in order, by a falsification of the
qualities of the Supreme Nature, to preclude his forming the true idea of
what would be perfect rectitude in his own.

A system which could thus associate all the modes of turpitude with the
most lofty and illustrious forms of existence, would go far toward
vitiating essentially the entire theory of moral good and evil. And it
would in a great measure defraud of their practical efficacy any just
principles that might, after all, maintain their place in the convictions
of the understanding, and assert at times their claim with a voice which
not even all this ruination could silence.

But, how small was the number of pure moral principles, (if indeed any,)
that among the people of the heathen nations _did_ maintain themselves in
the convictions of the understanding. The privation of divine light gave
full freedom, if there was any disposition to take such license, for every
perverse speculation which could operate toward abolishing those
principles in the natural reason of the species. What disposition there
would be to take it may be imagined, when the abolishing of those
principles was evidently to be also the destruction of all intrinsic
authority in the practical rules founded on them, which destruction would
confer an exemption infinitely desirable. The freedom for such thinking
would infallibly be taken, in its utmost extent; and in fact the
speculation was stimulated by so mighty a force of the depraved passions,
that it went beyond the primary intention: it not only annulled the right
principles and rules, but, not stopping at such negation, presumed to set
forth opposite ones, so that the name and repute of virtues was given to
iniquities without number. It is deplorable to consider how large a
proportion of all the vices and crimes of which mankind were ever guilty,
have actually constituted, in some or other of their tribes and ages, a
part of the approved moral and religious system. It is questionable
whether we could select from the worst forms of turpitude any one which
has not been at least admitted among the authorized customs, if not even
appointed among the institutes of the religion, of some portion of the
human race. And depravities thus become licensed or sacred would have a
fatal facility of communicating somewhat of their quality to all the other
parts of the moral system. For this sanction both would reinforce their
own power of infection, and would so beguile away all repugnance and
counteraction, that the rest of the customs and institutes would readily
admit the contamination, and become assimilated in evil; as the Mohamedans
have no care to avoid contact with their neighbors who are ill of the
plague, since the plague has the warrant of heaven. Wherever, therefore,
in the imperfect notices afforded us of ancient nations, we find any one
virulent iniquity holding an authorized place in custom or religion, we
may confidently make a very large inference, though record were silent, as
to the corresponding quality that would pervade the remainder of the moral
system of those nations. Indeed the inference is equally justified whether
we regard such a sanction and establishment of a flagrant iniquity as a
cause, or as an effect. Suppose this sanction of some one enormity to
_precede_ the general and equal corruption of morals,--how powerfully
would it tend to bear them all down to a conformity in depravation.
Suppose it to be (the more natural order) the result and completion of
that corruption--how vicious must have been the previous state which could
go easily and consistently to such a consummation.

Everything that, under the advantage given by this destitution of
knowledge, operated to the destruction of the true morality, both in
theory and practice, must have had a fatal augmentation of its power in
that part especially of this ignorance which respected hereafter. The
doctrine of a future existence and retribution did not, in any rational
and salutary form, interfere in the adjustment of the economy of life. The
shadowy notion of a future state which hovered about the minds of the
pagans, a vague apparition which alternately came and vanished, was at
once too fantastic and too little of a serious belief to be of any avail
to preserve the rectitude, or to maintain the authority, of the
distinction between right and wrong. It was not denned enough, or noble
enough, or convincing enough, or of judicial application enough, either to
assist the efficacy of such moral principles as might be supposed to be
innate in a rational creature, and competent for prescribing to it some
virtues useful and necessary to it even if its present brief existence
were all; or to enjoin effectually those higher virtues to which there can
be no adequate inducement but in the expectation of a future life.

Imagine, if you can, the withdrawment of this doctrine from the faith of
those who have a solemn persuasion of it as a part of revealed truth.
Suppose the grand idea either wholly obliterated, or faded into a dubious
trace of what it had been, or transmuted into a poetic dream of classic or
barbarian mythology,--and how many moral principles will be found to have
vanished with it. How many things, before rendered imperative by this
great article of faith, would have ceased to be duties, or would continue
such only on the strength, and to the extent of the requirement, of some
very minor consideration which might remain to enforce them, and that
probably in a most deteriorated practical form. The sense of obligation,
if continuing to recognize the nature of duty in things which could then
no longer retain any such quality, otherwise than as looking to the most
immediate and tangible benefit or harm, the lowest of moral calculations,
would be reduced to a vulgar and reptile principle. The best of its
strength, and all its dignity, would be departed from it when it could
refer no more to eternity, an invisible world, and a judgment to come. It
would therefore have none of that emphasis of impression which can
sometimes dismay and quell the most violent passions, as by the mysterious
awe of the presence of a spirit. It would be deprived of that which forms
the chief power of conscience. And it would be impotent in any attempt--if
so absurd an attempt could be dreamed of--to uphold, in the more dignified
character of _principle_, that care of what is right which would be
constantly degenerating into mere policy, and rationally justifying itself
in doing so.

The withdrawment, we said, of the grand truth in question, from a man's
faith, (together with everything of taste and _habit_ which that faith
might have created,) would necessarily break up the government over his
conscience. How evident then is it, that among the people of the heathen
lands, under a disastrous ignorance of this and all the other sublime
truths, that are the most fit to rule an immortal being during his sojourn
on earth, no man could feel any peremptory obligation to be universally
virtuous, or adequate motives to excite an endeavor to approach that high
attainment, even were there not a perfect inability to form the true
conception of it. And then how much of course it was that the general mass
would be dreadfully depraved. Though a momentary surprise may at times
have seized us on the occurrence, in their history, of some monstrous form
of flagitiousness, we do not wonder at beholding a state of the people
such in its general character as the sacred writers exhibit, in
descriptions to which the other records of antiquity add their confirming
testimony and ample illustrations. For while the immense aggregate is
displayed to the mental view, as pervaded, agitated, and stimulated, by
the restless forces of appetites and passions, and those forces operating
with an impulse no less perverted than strong, let it be asked what kinds
and measure of restraint there could be upon such a world of creatures so
actuated, to keep them from rushing in all ways into evil. Conceive, if
you can, the fiction of such a multitude, so actuated, having been placed
under an adjustment of restraints competent to withhold them. And then
take off, in your imagination, one after another of these, to see what
will follow. Take off, at last, all the coercion that can be applied
through the belief of a judgment to come, and a future state of
retribution;--by doing which you would also empower the race to defy, if
any recognition of him remained, the Supreme Governor, whose possible
inflictions, being confined to the present life, might at any time be
escaped by shortening it. All these sacred bonds being thus dissolved,
behold this countless multitude abandoned to be carried or driven the
whole length to which the impulses of their appetites and passions would
go,--or could go before they were arrested by some obstruction opposed to
them from a quarter foreign to conscience. And the main and final thing in
reserve to limit their career, after all the worthier restraints were
annihilated, would be only this,--the resistance which men's self-interest
opposes to one another's bad inclinations. A gloomy and humiliating
spectacle truly it is, to be offered by a world of rational and moral
agents, if we see that, instead of a repression of the propensity to
wickedness by reverence of the Sovereign Judge, and the anticipation of a
future life, there is merely a restraint put on its external activity, and
that by the force of men's fears of one another. But nearly to this it
was, as the only strong restraint, that those heathens were left by their
ignorance, or a notion so slight as to be little better, of a future
existence and judgment.

Not but that it has been, in all nations and times, of infinite practical
service that there is involved in the constitution of the world a law by
which a coarse self-interest thus interposes to obstruct in a degree the
violent propensity to evil; for it has prevented, under Providence, more
actual mischief, beyond comparison more, than all other causes together.
The man inclined to perpetrate an iniquity, of the nature of a wrong to
his fellow-mortals, is apprized that he shall provoke a reaction, to
resist or punish him; that he shall incur as great an evil as that he is
disposed to do, or greater; that either a revenge regardless of all
formalities of justice will strike him, or a process instituted in
organized society will vindictively reach his property, liberty, or life.
This defensive array, of all men against all men, compels to remain shut
up within the mind an immensity of wickedness which is there burning to
come out into action. But for this, Noah's flood had been rendered
needless. But for this, our planet might have been accomplishing its
circles round the sun for thousands of years past without a human
inhabitant. Through the effect of this essential law, in the social
economy, it was possible for the race to subsist, notwithstanding all that
ignorance of the Divine Being, of heavenly truth, and of uncorrupt
morality, in which we are contemplating the heathen nations as benighted.
But while thus it prevented utter destruction, it had no corrective
operation on the depravity of the heart. It was not through a judgment of
things being essentially evil that they were forborne; it was not by the
power of conscience that wicked propensity was kept under restraint. It
was only by a hold on the meaner principles of his nature, that the
offender in will was arrested in prevention of the deed. And so the race
were such virtually, as they would have hastened to become actually, could
they have ceased to be afraid of one another's strength and retaliation.'
[Footnote: It is not very uncommon to hear credit given to human nature
apparently in sober simplicity, for the whole amount of the negation of
bad actions _thus_ prevented, as just so much genuine virtue, by some
dealers in moral and theological speculation.] But even this restraint
imposed by mutual apprehension, important as its operation was in the
absence of nobler influences, was yet of miserably partial efficacy. Men
were continually breaking through this protective provision, and committed
against one another a stupendous amount of crimes. And no wonder, when we
consider that the evil passions, endowed as they seem to be with a
portentous excess of vigor by the very circumstance of _being_ evil, (as
the demoniacs were the strongest of men,) are exasperated the more by a
certain degree of awe impressed on them by the defensive attitude of their
objects. When strength so great might thus be irritated to greater, and
when there were no "powers of the world to come," to invade the dreadful
cavern of iniquity in the mind, and there combat and subdue it, there
would often be no want of the audacity to send it forth into action at all
hazards, and in defiance and contempt of the restraining force which
operated through mutual fear of vindictive reaction.

But it may be said, perhaps, that in thus representing the people who were
destitute of divine knowledge, as left with hardly any other control on
their bad dispositions than one of a quality little more dignified than
fetters literally binding the limbs, we are underrating what there still
was among them to take effect in the way of _instruction_. Even this
coarse principle of control itself, it may be alleged, this prudence of
reciprocal fear became refined into something worthier of moral agents.
For it passed, by a compromise among the species, from the form of
individual self-defence and revenge into that of institutions of _law_;
and legislation, it will be said, is a teacher of morals. Retaining,
indeed, the rough expedient of physical force, in readiness to coerce or
punish where it cannot deter by warning, it yet strongly endeavors the
repression of evil emotions by means of right _principles_, marked out,
explained, and inculcated. It _teaches_ these principles as dictates of
reason and justice, while it embodies them in the menacing authority of
enactments. There was therefore, it may be pleaded, as much _instruction_
among the ancient heathen as there was legislation.

In answering this, we may forego any rigorous examination of the quality
of principles and precepts enunciated by legislators who themselves, in
common with the people, looked on human existence and duty through a worse
than twilight medium; who had no divine oracles to impart wisdom, and
were, some of them, reduced to begin their operations with the lie that
pretended they had such oracles; from all which it was inevitable that
some of their maxims and injunctions would even in their efficacy be
noxious, as being at variance with eternal rectitude. It is enough to
observe, on the claims of legislation to the character of a moral
preceptor, that it retained so palpably, after all, the nature of the
gross element from which it was a refinement or transfusion, that even
what it might teach right, as to the matter, it was unable to teach with
the right moral impression. With all its gravity, and phrases of wisdom,
and show of homage to virtue, it was, and was plainly descried to be, that
very same _Noli me tangere,_ in a disguised form; a less provoking and
hostile manner only of keeping up the state of preparation for defensive
war. Every one knew right well that the pure approbation and love of
goodness were not the source of law; but that it was an arrangement
originating and deriving all its force from self-interest; a contrivance
by which each man was glad to make the collective strength of society his
guarantee against his neighbor's interest and wish to do him wrong. While
pleased that others were under this restraint, he was often vexed at being
under it also himself; but on the whole deemed this security worth the
cost of suffering the interdict on his own inclinations,--perhaps as
believing other men's to be still worse than his, or seeing their strength
to be greater. We repeat that a preceptive system thus estimated could
not, even had the principles to which it gave expression in the mandates
of law been no other than those of the soundest morality, have impressed
them with the weight of sanctity on the conscience. And all this but tends
to show the necessity that the rules and sanctions of morality, to come
with simplicity and power on the human mind, should primarily emanate, and
be acknowledged as emanating, from a Being exalted above all implication
and competition of interest with man.

Thus we see, that the pagan ignorance precluded one grand requisite for
crushing the dominion of iniquity; for there was nothing to insinuate or
to force its way into the recesses of the soul, to apply _there_ a
repressive power to the depraved ardor which glowed in the passions. That
was left, inaccessible and inextinguishable, as the subterranean fires in
a volcanic region. And in the mighty impulse to evil with which it was
continually operating as an energy of feeling, it compelled the
subservience of the intellect; and thus combined the passions with a
faculty skilful to guide their direction, to diversify their objects, to
invent expedients, and to seize and create occasions. What was it that
this intelligent depravity would stop short of accomplishing? Reflect on
the extent of human genius, in its powers of invention, combination, and
adaptation; and then think of all this faculty, in an immense number of
minds, through many ages, and in every imaginable variety of situation,
exerted with unremitting activity in aid of the wrong propensities.
Reflect how many ideas, apt and opportune for this service, would spring
up casually, or be suggested by circumstances, or be attained by the
earnest study of beings goaded in pursuit of change and novelty. The
simple modes of iniquity were put under an active ministry of art, to
combine, innovate, and augment. And so indefatigable was its exercise,
that almost all conceivable forms of immorality were brought to
imagination, most of them into experiment; and the greater number into
prevailing practice, in those nations: insomuch that the sated monarch
would have imposed as difficult a task on ingenuity in calling for the
invention of a new vice, as of a new pleasure. They would perhaps have
been nearly identical demands when he was the person to be pleased.

Such are some of the most obvious illustrations that the absence of
knowledge was a cause, and added in an unknown measure to the strength of
all other causes, of the excessive corruption in the heathen nations. And
if this depravity of a world of moral agents did not, contemplated simply
as a destruction of their _rectitude_, appear equivalent to the gravest
import of the terms "the people are destroyed," the _misery_ inseparable
from the depravity instantly comes in our view to complete their
verification.

We are aware that the wickedness and misery of the ancient world, as
asserted in illustration of the natural effect of estrangement from divine
truth, are apt to be regarded as of the order of topics which have
dwindled into insignificance, worn out by being repeated just because they
have often been repeated before; a sort of exhausted quarries and dried-up
wells. There is a certain class of vain and sneering mortals, in whose
conceit nothing is such proof of superior sense as discarding the
greatest number of topics and arguments as obsolete or impertinent. It is
to be reckoned on that some of these, on hearing again the old maxims,
that a people without divine instruction must be a vicious one, and that a
vicious people must be an unhappy one,--and those maxims accompanied with
a description of the old pagan world as illustrative evidence,--will be
prompt to let forth their comments in some such strain as the
following:--"The state of the ancient heathens, thus brought upon us in
one cheap declamation more, is now a matter of trivial import, just fit to
give some show and exaggeration to the stale common-place, that ignorance
is likely to produce depravity, and that depravity and misery are likely
enough to go together. The pagans might be wretched enough; and perhaps
also the matter has been extravagantly magnified for the service of a
favorite theme, or to make a rhetorical show. At any rate, it is not now
worth while to go so far back to concern ourselves about it. The ancient
heathens had their day and their destiny, and it is of little importance
to us what they were or suffered."

It is fortunate, we may reply, to be "wiser than the ancients," without
the trouble of _learning_ anything by means of them. It is fortunate,
also, to have ascertained how much of all that ever existed can teach us
nothing. We have a signal improvement in the fashion of wisdom, when that
high endowment may be possessed as a thing distinct from compass of
thought, from study of causes and effects as illustrated on the great
scale, from aptitude to be instructed by the past, and from contemplation
of the divine government as carried over a wide extent of time. But indeed
this is not a privilege peculiar to this later day. In any former age
there were men in sufficient number who were wise enough to be indifferent
to all but immediate passing events, as knowing no lessons that persons
like them had to learn from remoter views, looking either into the past or
the future; who could even have before them the very monuments of awful
events that were gone by, without perceiving inscribed on them any
characters for contemplation to read. It is not impossible there might be
persons who could plan their schemes, and debate their questions, and even
follow their amusements, quite exempt from solemn reflections, within view
of the ruins of Jerusalem, after the Roman legions had left it and its
myriads of dead to silence. Any reference to that dreadful spectacle, as
an example of the consequences of the ignorance and wickedness of a
people, might have been heard with unconcern, and lightly passed over as
foreign to the matters requiring their attention: it was all over with the
people dead, and the people alive had their own concerns to mind. But
would not exactly such as these have been the men most likely to fall into
the vices and impieties which would provoke the next avenging visitation,
and to perish in it? In all times, the triflers with the great
exemplifications of the connection of depravity with misery and ruin, who
thought it but an impertinent moralizing that attempted to recall such
funereal spectacles for admonition, were fools, whatever self-complacency
they might feel in a habit of thinking more fitted, they would perhaps
say, for making our best advantage of the world as we find it. And we of
the present time are convicted of exceeding stupidity, if we think it not
worth while to go a number of ages back to contemplate the mass of
mankind, the wide world of beings such as ourselves, sunk in darkness and
wretchedness, and to consider what it is that is taught by so melancholy
an exhibition. What is to give fulness of evidence to an instruction, if a
world be too narrow; what is to give it weight, if a world be too light?

It is to be acknowledged, that the mental darkness which we are
representing as so greatly the cause of the wickedness and unhappiness of
those nations of old, had the effect of protecting them, in a measure,
from some kinds of suffering. They had not, as we have been observing,
illumination enough, to have conscience enough, for inflicting the
severest pains of remorse; and for oppressing them with a distinct
alarming apprehension of a future account. But that they were unhappy,
was practically acknowledged in the very quality of what they ardently
and universally sought as the highest felicities of existence. Those
delights were violent and tumultuous, in all possible ways and degrees
estranged from reflection, and adverse to it. The whole souls of great
and small, in the most barbarous and in the more polished state, were
passionately set on revelry, on expedients for inflaming licentiousness
to madness; or concourses of multitudes for pomps, celebrations, shows,
games, combats; on the riots of exultation and revenge after victories.
The ruder nations had, in their way, however pitiable on the score of
magnificence, their grand festive, triumphal, and demoniac confluxes and
revellings. To these joys of tumult, the people of the savage and the
more cultivated nations sacrificed everything belonging to the peaceful
economy of life, with a desperate, frantic fury. All this was the
confession that there was little felicity in the heart or in the home.
Nor was it found in these resources; if the wild elation might be
mistaken for happiness while it lasted, it was brief in each instance,
and it subsided in an aggravated dreariness of the soul.

The fact of their being unhappy had a still more gloomy attestation in the
mutual enmity which seems to have been of the very essence of life so
vital a principle, that it could not be spared for an hour. No, they could
not live without this luxury drawn from the fountains of death! What is
the most conspicuous material of ancient history, what is it that glares
out the most hideously from that darkness and oblivion in which the old
world is veiling its aspect, but the incessant furies of miserable mortals
against their fellow-mortals, "hateful and hating one another?" We cannot
look that way but we see the whole field covered with inflicters and
sufferers, not seldom interchanging those characters. If that field widens
to our view, it is still, to the utmost line to which the shade clears
away, a scene of cruelty, oppression, and slavery; of the strong trampling
on the weak, and the weak often attempting to bite at the feet of the
strong; of rancorous animosities and murderous competitions of persons
raised above the mass of the community; of treacheries and massacres; and
of war between hordes, and cities, and nations, and empires; war _never_,
in spirit, intermitted, and suspended sometimes in act only to acquire
renewed force for destruction, or to find another assemblage of hated
creatures to cut in pieces. Powerful as "the spirit of the first-born
Cain" has continued, down to our age, and in the most improved divisions
of mankind, there was, nevertheless, in the ancient pagan race, (as there
is in some portions of the modern,) a more complete, uncontrolled
actuation of the all-killing, all-devouring fury, a more absolute
possession of Moloch.

Now it is _as misery_ that we are exhibiting all this depravity. To be
thus, _was suffering_. The disease and the pain are inseparable in the
description, and they were so in the reality. And both together,
inevitably seizing on beings who had rejected or lost divine knowledge,
maintained a hold as fatal and invincible as that of the intervolved
serpents of Laocoon.

It is true, that a comprehensive estimate of the state of the people we
are contemplating, would bring in view several minor circumstances which,
though not availing to change materially the effect of the picture, are
themselves of less gloomy color. But at the same time such an estimate
would include other forms also of infelicity, besides those which were at
once the result and punishment of depravity, the stings with which sin
rewarded the infatuation that loved it. If the design had been to exhibit
anything like a general view, we must have taken account of such
particulars as these: the unhappiness of being without an assurance of an
all-comprehending and merciful Providence, and of wanting therefore the
best support in sorrow and calamity; the insuppressible impatience, or the
deep melancholy, with which the more thoughtful persons must have seen
departing from life, leaving them hopeless of ever meeting again in a life
elsewhere, the relations or associates who were dear to them in spite of
the prevailing effect of paganism to destroy philanthropy; and the gloomy
sentiment with which they must have thought of their own continual
approach toward death; a sentiment not always unaccompanied with certain
intimidating hints and hauntings of possibilities in the darkness beyond
that confine. But the more limited intention in the preceding description
has been to illustrate their unhappiness as inflicted by their depravity,
necessarily consequent on their ignorance. And what words so true, so
irresistibly prompted at the view of such a scene, as those pronounced of
a nation that at once despised the pagans and imitated them,--"The people
are destroyed for lack of knowledge."

       *       *       *       *       *

Let us not be suspected of having lost sight of the fact, that vice and
misery have, in our nature, a deeper source than ignorance; or of being so
absurd as to imagine that if the inestimable truths unknown to the heathen
world had been, on the contrary, in all men's knowledge, but a slight
portion of the depravity and wretchedness we have described could then
have had an existence. To say, that under long absence of the sun any
tract of terrestrial nature _must infallibly_ be reduced to desolation, is
not to say or imply, that under the benignant influence of that luminary
the same region must, as necessarily and unconditionally, be a scene of
beauty; but the only hope, for the only possibility, is for the field
visited by much of that sweet influence. And it were an absurdity no less
gross in the opposite extreme to the one just mentioned, to assert the
uselessness, for rectifying the moral world, of a diffusion of the
knowledge which shall compel men to see what is wrong; to deny that the
impulses of the corrupt passions and will must suffer some abatement of
their force and daring when encountered, like Balaam meeting the angel, by
a clear manifestation of their bad and ruinous tendency, by a convinced
judgment, a protesting conscience, and the aspect of the Almighty
Judge,--instead of their being under the tolerance of a judgment not
instructed to condemn them, or, (as ignorance is sure to quicken into
error,) perverted to abet them.




Section II.



From this view of the prevalence and malignant effects of ignorance among
the people of the ancient world, both Jews and Gentiles, we may come
down, with a few brief notices in passing over the long subsequent
periods, towards our own times. For any attempt to prosecute the object
through the ages and regions of later heathenism, (with the infatuated
Judaism still more destructive to its subjects,) would be to lose
ourselves in a boundless scene of desolation, an immense amplitude of
darkness, frightfully alive throughout with the activity of all noxious
and hideous things.

But by this time we are become aware how continually we are driven upon
what will be in hazard of appearing an exaggerated phraseology; insomuch
that we are almost afraid of accepting the epithets of description and
aggravation which offer themselves as most appropriate to the subject.
There are some self-complacent persons whose minds are so unapt to
recognize the magnitude of a subject, or so averse perhaps to the
contemplation of it if it be of tragical aspect, that strong terms
accumulated to exhibit even what surpasses in its plain reality all the
powers of language, offend them as declamatory exaggeration. Let it then
be just observed, without one ambitious epithet, that since that period
when ancient history, strictly so named, left off describing the state of
mankind, more than a myriad of millions of our race have been on earth,
and quitted it without one ray of the knowledge the most important to
spirits sojourning here, and going hence.

But while any attempt to carry the representation of the fatal effects of
ignorance over the extent of so dreary a scene is declined, let it not be
forgotten that they have been an awful reality; that they have actually
existed, in time, and place, and number of victims; that there actually
_were_ the men, and so many men, who exemplified, and in so many ways, the
truth we are illustrating. And a truth which has its demonstration in
facts ought to come with the weight of all the facts that we believe ever
_did_ demonstrate it. When they are not presented in breadth and detail
prominently in our view, we are apt to lose the due effect of our knowing
them to have existed.

It will be enough to advert very briefly to the Mohammedan imposture,
though that is perhaps the most signal instance within all time, of a
malignant delusion maintained directly and immediately by ignorance, by an
absolute determination and even a fanatic zeal not to receive one new
idea. Tenets involving the most palpable impossibilities, and asserted in
self-contradictory terms, must stand inviolable to all question or
controversy; literature must be scouted as a profane folly; not a
principle of true philosophy is to be admitted; hardly is an application
of the plainest mechanics to improve a machine or implement to be
tolerated; or an infidel is to be only _pardoned_, through contempt, for a
successful obtrusion of science to render the most important service,--to
save, for instance, a Mussulman ship-with its proud, besotted commander
and crew from destruction, [Footnote: There is a very curious example of
this related in Dr Clarke's Travels.] lest an acknowledgment made to
science should allow one momentary surmise of imperfection to insult the
all-sufficiency and sanctity of the unalterable creed and institutes; lest
any diminutive crevice should be made on any side of the temple of the
vile superstition, for the passage of one glimpse of true light to annoy
the foul fiend that dwells there, invested "in the dunnest smoke of hell."
Not, however, that this is the policy of doubt and apprehension, the
evading and repelling caution of men who suspect themselves to be wrong
and dread being forced to meet the proof. For the subjects of this
execrable usurpation on the human understanding have, in general, the
firmest assurance that all things in the system are right: it has itself
secured them against _knowing_ anything that could discompose their sense
of certainty. No fell savage, or serpent, or monster, ever had a more
perfect instinct to avail itself of an impervious obscurity for its
lurking-place, than this imposture has shown to keep out all mental light
from its realm. The delusion is so strong and absolute in ignorance, is so
identified with it, and so systematically repels at all points the
approach of knowledge, that it is difficult to conceive a mode of its
extermination that shall not involve some fearful destruction, in the most
literal sense, of the people whom it possesses. And such a catastrophe it
is probable the great body of them, in the temper of mind prevailing among
them at this hour, would choose to incur by preference, we do not say to a
serious, patient consideration of the true religion, but even to the
admission among them of a system merely favoring knowledge in general, an
order of measures which should urge upon the adults, and peremptorily
enforce for the children, a discipline of intellectual improvement. There
would be little national hesitation of choice, (at least in the central
regions of the dominion of this hateful imposture,) between the
introduction of any general system of expedients for driving them from
their stupefaction into something like thinking and learning, and a
general plague, to rage as long as any remained for victims. [Footnote: In
the interval since this was written, some change has taken place in favor
of the admission of the elements of knowledge, in the capital, and in the
second city of the Mohammedan regions; but with very slight alterative
influence on the mass; and with respect to the faith, probably none at
all. Within this interval, also, the central power has been hastening
rapidly to its catastrophe.]

       *       *       *       *       *

But let us now look, for a moment, at the intellectual state of the people
denominated Christian, during the ages preceding the Reformation. The best
of all the acquisitions by earth from heaven, Christianity, might have
seemed to bring with it an inevitable necessity of a great and permanent
difference soon to be effected, in regard to the competence of men's
knowledge to prevent their destruction. It was as if, in the physical
system, some one production, far more salutary to life than all the other
things furnished from the elements, had been reserved by the Creator to
spring up in a later age, after many generations of men had been
languishing through life, and prematurely dying, from the deficient virtue
of their sustenance and remedies. The image of the inestimable plant had
been shown to the prophets in their visions, but the reality was now given
to the world; it was of "wholly a right seed," "had the seed in itself,"
and claimed to be cultivated by the people, who in every land were
suffering the maladies which it had the properties to heal. But, while by
the greater part of mankind it was not accounted worth admission to a
place on their blasted, desolated soil, the manner in which its virtue was
frustrated among those who pretended to esteem it, as it was, the best
gift of the divine beneficence, is recorded in eternal reproach of the
Christian nations.

As the hostility of heathenism, in the direct endeavors to extirpate the
Christian religion, became evidently hopeless, in the nations within the
Roman empire, there was a grand change of the policy of evil; and all
manner of reprobate things, heathenism itself among them, rushed as by
general conspiracy into treacherous conjunction with Christianity,
retaining their own quality under the sanction of its name, and by a rapid
process reducing it to surrender almost everything distinctive of it but
that dishonored name: and all this under protection of the "gross darkness
covering the people." There were indeed in existence the inspired oracles,
and these could not be essentially falsified. But there was no lack of
expedients and pre-texts for keeping them in a great measure secreted. It
might be done under a pretence that reverence for their sanctity required
they should be secluded as within the recesses of a temple, nor be there
consulted but by consecrated personages; a pretence excellently contrived,
since it was its own security against exposure, the people being thus kept
unaware that the sacred writings themselves expressly invited popular
inspection, by declaring themselves addressed to mankind at large. The
deceivers were not worse off for the other facilities. In the progress of
translation, the holy Scriptures could be intercepted and stopped short in
a language but little less unintelligible than the original ones to the
bulk of the people, in order that this "profane vulgar" might never hear
the very words of God, but only such report as it should please certain
men, at their discretion, to give of what he had said; men, however, of
whom the majority were themselves too ignorant to cite it in even a
falsified import. But though the people had understood the language, in
the usage of social converse, there was a grand security against them in
keeping them so destitute of the knowledge of letters, that the Bible, if
such a rare thing ever could happen to fall into any of their hands, would
be no more to them than a scroll of hieroglyphics. When to this was added,
the great cost of a copy of so large a book before the invention of
printing, it remained perhaps just worth while, (and it would be a matter
of no difficulty or daring,) to make it, in the maturity of the system, an
offence, and sacrilegious invasion of sacerdotal privilege, to look into a
Bible. If it might seem hard thus to constitute a new sin, in addition to
the long list already denounced by the divine law, amends were made by
indulgently rescinding some articles in that list, and qualifying the
principles of obligation with respect to them all.

In this latency of the sacred authorities, withdrawn from all
communication with the human understanding, there were retained still many
of the terms and names belonging to religion. They remained, but they
remained only such as they could be when the departing spirit of that
religion was leaving them void of their import and solemnity, and so
rendered applicable to purposes of deception and mischief. They were as
holy vessels, in which the original contents might, as they were escaping,
be clandestinely replaced by the most malignant preparations. And as
crafty and wicked men had a direct interest in this substitution, the
pernicious operation went on incessantly; and with an ability, and to an
extent to evince that the utmost barbarism of the times cannot extinguish
genius, when it is iniquity that sets it on fire. How prolific was the
invention of the falsehoods and absurdities of notion, and of the vanities
and corruptions of practice, which it was devised to make the terms and
names of religion designate and sanction! while it was also managed, with
no less sedulity and success, that the inventors and propagators should be
held in submissive reverence by the community, as the oracular
depositaries of truth. That community had not knowledge enough of any
other kind, to create a resisting and defensive power against this
imposition in the concern of religion. A sound exercise of reason on
subjects out of that province, a moderate degree of instruction in
literature and science rightly so called, might have produced, in the
persons of superior native capacity, somewhat of a competency and a
disposition to question, to examine, to call for evidence, and to detect
some of the fallacies imposed for Christian faith. But in such
completeness of ignorance, the general mind was on all sides pressed and
borne down to its fate. All reaction ceased; and the people were reduced
to exist in one huge, unintelligent, monotonous substance, united by the
interfusion of a vile superstition, which permitted just enough mental
life in the mass to leave it capable of being actuated to all the purposes
of cheats, and tyrants,--a proper subject for the dominion of "our Lord
God the Pope," as he was sometimes denominated; and might have been
denominated without exciting indignation, in the hearing of millions of
beings bearing the form of men and the name of Christians.

Reflect that all this took place under the nominal ascendency of the best
and brightest economy of instruction from heaven. Reflect that it was in
nations where even the sovereign authority professed homage to the
religion of Christ, and adopted and enforced it as a grand national
institution, that the popular mass was thus reduced to a material fit for
all the bad uses to which priestcraft could wish to put the souls and
bodies of its slaves. And then consider what _should_ have been the
condition of this great aggregate, wherever Christianity was acknowledged
by all as the true religion. The people _should_ have consisted of so many
beings having each, in some degree, the independent, beneficial use of his
_mind_; all of them trained with a reference to the necessity of their
being apprized of their responsibility to their Creator, for the exercise
of their reason on the matters of belief and choice; all of them
capacitated for improvement by being furnished with the rudiments and
instrumental means of knowledge; and all having within their reach, in
their own language, the Scriptures of divine truth, some by immediate
possession, the rest by means of faithful readers, while the book existed
only in manuscript; all of them after it came to be printed.

Can any doubt arise, whether there were in the Christian states resources
competent, if so applied, to secure to all the people an elementary
instruction, and the possession of the printed Bible? Resources competent!
All nations, sufficiently raised above barbarism to exist as states, have
consumed, in uses the most foreign and pernicious to their welfare, an
infinitely greater amount of means than would have sufficed, after due
provision for comfortable physical subsistence, to afford a moderate share
of instruction to all the people. And in those popish ages, that
expenditure alone which went to ecclesiastical use would have been far
more than adequate to this beneficent purpose. Think of the boundless cost
for supporting the magnificence and satiating the rapacity of the
hierarchy, from its triple-crowned head, down through all the orders
branded with a consecration under that head to maintain the delusion and
share the spoil. Recollect the immense system of policy for jurisdiction
and intrigue, every agent of which was a devourer. Recollect the pomps and
pageants, for which the general resources were to be taxed: while the
general industry was injured by the interruption of useful employment, and
the diversion of the people to such dissipation as their condition
qualified and permitted them to indulge in. Think also of the incalculable
cost of ecclesiastical structures, the temples of idolatry as in truth
they were. One of the most striking situations for a religious and
reflective Protestant is, that of passing some solitary hour under the
lofty vault, among the superb arches and columns, of any one of the most
splendid of these edifices remaining at this day in our own country. If he
has sensibility and taste, the magnificence, the graceful union of so many
diverse inventions of art, the whole mighty creation of genius that
quitted the world without leaving even a name, will come with magical
impression on his mind, while it is contemplatively darkening into the awe
of antiquity. But he will be recalled--the sculptures, the inscriptions,
the sanctuaries enclosed off for the special benefit, after death, of
persons who had very different concerns during life from that of the care
of their salvation, and various other insignia of the original character
of the place, will help to recall him--to the thought, that these proud
piles were in fact raised to celebrate the conquest, and prolong the
dominion, of the Power of Darkness over the souls of the people. They were
as triumphal arches, erected in memorial of the extermination of that
truth which was given to be the life of men.

As he looks round, and looks upwards, on the prodigy of design, and skill,
and perseverance, and tributary wealth, he may image to himself the
multitudes that, during successive ages, frequented this fane in the
assured belief, that the idle ceremonies and impious superstitions, which
they there performed or witnessed, were a service acceptable to heaven,
and to be repaid in blessings to the offerers.

He may say to himself, Here, on this very floor, under that elevated and
decorated vault, in a "dim religious light" like this, but with the
darkness of the shadow of death in their souls, they prostrated themselves
to their saints, or their "queen of heaven;" nay, to painted images and
toys of wood or wax, to some ounce or two of bread and wine, to fragments
of old bones, and rags of cast-off vestments. Hither they came, when
conscience, in looking back or pointing forward, dismayed them, to
purchase remission with money or atoning penances, or to acquire the
privilege of sinning with impunity in a certain manner, or for a certain
time; and they went out at yonder door in the perfect confidence that the
priest had secured, in the one case the suspension, in the other the
satisfaction, of the divine law. Here they solemnly believed, as they were
taught, that, by donatives to the church, they delivered the souls of
their departed sinful relations from their state of punishment; and they
went out of that door resolved, such as had possessions, to bequeath some
portion of them, to operate in the same manner for themselves another day,
in the highly probable case of similar need. Here they were convened to
listen in reverence to some representative emissary from the Man of Sin,
with new dictates of blasphemy or iniquity promulgated in the name of the
Almighty: or to witness the trickery of some farce, devised to cheat or
frighten them out of whatever remainder the former impositions might have
left them of sense, conscience, or property. Here, in fine, there was
never presented to their understanding, from their childhood to their
death, a comprehensive, honest declaration of the laws of duty, and the
pure doctrines of salvation. To think! that they should have mistaken for
the house of God, and the very gate of heaven, a place where the Regent of
the nether world had so short a way to come from his dominions, and his
agents and purchased slaves so short a way to go thither. If we could
imagine a momentary visit from Him who once entered a fabric of sacred
denomination with a scourge, because it was made the resort of a common
traffic, with what aspect and voice, with what infliction but the "rebuke
with flames of fire," would he have entered this mart of iniquity,
assuming the name of his sanctuary, where the traffic was in delusions,
crimes, and the souls of men? It was even as if, to use the prophet's
language, the very "stone cried out of the wall, and the beam out of the
timber answered it," in denunciation; for a portion of the means of
building, in the case of some of these edifices, was obtained as the price
of dispensations and pardons. [Footnote: That most superb Salisbury
Cathedral, for example.]

In such a hideous light would the earlier history of one of these mighty
structures, pretendedly consecrated to Christianity, be presented to the
reflecting Protestant; and then would recur the idea of its cost, as
relative to what that expenditure might really have done for Christianity
and the people. It absorbed in the construction, sums sufficient to have
supplied, costly as they would have been, even manuscript Bibles, in the
people's own language, (as a priesthood of truly apostolic character would
have taken care the Scriptures should speak,) to all the families of a
province; and in the revenues appropriated to its ministration of
superstition, enough to have provided men to teach all those families to
read those Bibles.

In all this, and in the whole constitution of the Grand Apostasy,
involving innumerable forms of abuse and abomination, to which our object
does not require any allusion, how sad a spectacle is held forth of the
people destroyed for lack of knowledge. If, as one of their plagues, an
inferior one in itself, they were plundered as we have seen, of their
worldly goods, it was that the spoil might subserve to a still greater
wrong. What was lost to the accommodation of the body, was to be made to
contribute to the depravation of the spirit. It supplied means for
multiplying the powers of the grand ecclesiastical machinery, and
confirming the intellectual despotism of the usurpers of spiritual
authority. Those authorities enforced on the people, on pain of perdition,
an acquiescence in notions and ordinances which, in effect, precluded
their direct access to the Almighty, and the Saviour of the world;
interposing between them and the Divine Majesty a very extensive,
complicated, and heathenish mediation, which in a great measure
substituted itself for the real and exclusive mediation of Christ,
obscured by its vast creation of intercepting vanities the glory of the
Eternal Being, and thus almost extinguished the true worship. But how
calamitous was such a condition!--to be thus intercepted from direct
intercourse with the Supreme Spirit, and to have the solemn and elevating
sentiment of devotion flung downward, on objects to some of which even the
most superstitious could hardly pay homage without a sense of degradation.

It was, again, a disastrous thing to be under a directory of practical
life framed for the convenience of a corrupt system; a rule which enjoined
many things wrong, allowed a dispensation from nearly everything that was
right, and abrogated the essential principle and ground-work of true
morality. Still again, it was an unhappy thing, that the consolations in
sorrow and the view of death should either be too feeble to animate, or
should animate only by deluding. And it was the consummation of evil in
the state of the people of those dark ages, it was, emphatically to be
"destroyed," that the great doctrines of redemption should have been
essentially vitiated or formally supplanted, so that multitudes of people
were betrayed to rest their final hopes on a ground unauthorized by the
Judge of the world. In this most important matter, the spiritual
authorities might themselves be subjects of the fatal delusion in which
they held the community; and well they deserved to be so, in judicial
retribution of their wickedness in imposing on the people, deliberately
and on system, innumerable things which they knew to be false.

We have often mused, and felt a gloom and dreariness spreading over the
mind while musing, on descriptions of the aspect of a country after a
pestilence has left it in desolation, or of a region where the people are
perishing by famine. It has seemed a mournful thing to behold, in
contemplation, the multitude of lifeless? forms, occupying in silence the
same abodes in which they had lived, or scattered upon the gardens,
fields, and roads; and then to see the countenances of the beings yet
languishing in life, looking despair, and impressed with the signs of
approaching death. We have even sometimes had the vivid and horrid picture
offered to our imagination, of a number of human creatures shut up by
their fellow mortals in some strong hold, under an entire privation of
sustenance; and presenting each day their imploring, or infuriated, or
grimly sullen, or more calmly woful countenances, at the iron and
impregnable gates; each succeeding day more haggard, more perfect in the
image of despair; and after awhile appearing each day one fewer, till at
last all have sunk. Now shall we feel it as a _relief_ to turn in thought,
as to a sight of less portentous evil, from the inhabitants of a country,
or from those of such an accursed prison-house, thus pining away, to
behold the different spectacle of national tribes, or any more limited
portion of mankind, on whose _minds_ are displayed the full effects of
knowledge denied; who are under the process of whatever destruction it is,
that spirits can suffer from want of the vital aliment to the intelligent
nature, especially from "a famine of the words of the Lord?"

To bring the two to a close comparison, suppose the case, that some of the
persons thus doomed to perish in the tower were in the possession of the
genuine light and consolations of Christianity, perhaps even had actually
been adjudged to this fate, (no extravagant supposition,) for zealously
and persistingly endeavoring the restoration of the purity of that
religion to the deluded community. Let it be supposed that numbers of that
community, having conspired to obtain this ad-judgment, frequented the
precincts of the fortress, to see their victims gradually perishing. It
would be quite in the spirit of the popish superstition, that they should
believe themselves to have done God service, and be accordingly pleased at
the sight of the more and more deathlike aspect of the emaciated
countenances. The while, they might be themselves in the enjoyment of
"fulness of bread," We can imagine them making convivial appointments
within sight of the prison gates, and going from the spectacle to meet at
the banquet. Or they might delay the festivity, in order to have the
additional luxury of knowing that the tragedy was consummated; as Bishop
Gardiner would not dine till the martyrs were burnt.--Look at these two
contemporary situations, that of the persons with truth and immortal hope
in their spirits, enduring this slow and painful reduction of their bodies
to dissolution,--and that of those who, while their bodies fared
sumptuously, were thus miserably perishing in soul, through its being
surrendered to the curse of a delusion which envenomed it with such a
deadly malignity: and say which was the more calamitous predicament.

If we have no hesitation in pronouncing, let us consider whether we have
ever been grateful enough to God for the dashing in pieces so long since
in this land, of a system which maintains, to this hour, much of its
stability over the greater part of Christendom. If we regret that certain
fragments of it are still held in veneration here, and that so tedious a
length of ages should be required, to work out a complete mental rescue
from the infatuation which possessed our ancestors, let us at the same
time look at the various states of Europe, small and great, where this
superstition continues to hold the minds of the people in its odious
grasp; and verify to ourselves what we have to be thankful for, by
thinking what reception _our_ minds would give to an offer of subsistence
on their mummeries, masses, absolutions, legends, relics, mediation of
saints, and corruptions, even to complete reversal of the evangelic
doctrines.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was, however, but very slowly that the people of our land realized the
benefits of the Reformation, glorious as that event was, regarded as to
its progressive and its ultimate consequences. Indeed, the thickness of
the preceding darkness was strikingly manifested by the deep shade which
still continued stretched over the nation, in spite of the newly risen
luminary, whose beams lost their brightness in pervading it to reach the
popular mind, and came with the faintness of an obscured and tedious dawn.

A long time there lingered enough of night for the evil spirit of popery
to be at large and in power, not abashed, as Milton represents the Evil
Angel on his being surprised by the guardians of paradise. Rather the case
was that the vindicator itself of truth and holiness, the true Lucifer,
shrunk at the rencounter and defiance of the old possessor of the gloomy
dominion. The Reformation was not empowered to speak with a voice like
that which said, "Let there be light--and there was light." Consider what,
on its avowed national adoption in our land, were its provisions for
acting on the community, and how slow and partial must have been their
efficacy, for either the dissipation of ignorance in general, or the
riddance of that worst part of it which had thickened round the Romish
delusion, as malignant a pestilence as ever walked in darkness. There was
an alteration of formularies, a curtailment of rites, a declaration of
renouncing, in the name of the church and state, the most palpable of the
absurdities; and a change, in some instances of the persons, but in very
many others of the professions merely, of the hierarchy. Such were the
appointments and instrumentality, for carrying an innovation of opinions
and practices through a nation in which the profoundest ignorance and the
most inveterate superstition fortified each other. And we may well imagine
how fast and how far they would be effective, to convey information and
conviction among a people whose reason had been just so much the worse,
with respect to religion at least, as it had not been totally dormant; and
who were too illiterate to be ever the wiser for the volume of inspiration
itself, had it been in their native language, in every house, instead of
being scarcely in one house in five thousand.

Doubtless some advantage was gained through this change of institutions,
by the abolition of so much of the authority of the spiritual despotism as
it possessed in virtue of being the imperative national establishment. And
if, under this relaxation of its grasp, a number of persons declined and
escaped into the new faith, they hardly knew how or why, it was happy to
make the transition on _any_ terms, with however little of the exercise of
reason, with however little competence to exercise it. Well was it to be
on the right ground, though a man had come thither like one conveyed while
partly asleep. To have grown to a state of mind in which he ceased and
refused to worship relics and wafers, to rest his confidence on penance
and priestly absolution, and to regard the Virgin and saints as in effect
the supreme regency of heaven, was a valuable alteration _though_ he could
not read, and _though_ he could not assign, and had not clearly
apprehended, the arguments which justified the change. Yes, this would be
an important thing gained; but not even thus much _was_ gained to the
passive slaves of popery but in an exceedingly limited extent, during a
long course of time after it was supplanted as a national institution. It
continued to maintain in the faith, feelings, and more private habits of
the people, a dominion little enfeebled by the necessity of dissimulation
in public observances. As far as to secure this exterior show of
submission and conformity, it was an excellent argument that the state had
decreed, and would resolutely enforce, a change in religion,--that is to
say, till it should be the sovereign pleasure of the next monarch, readily
seconded by a majority of the ecclesiastics, just to turn the whole affair
round to its former position.

But the argument would expend nearly its whole strength on this policy of
saving appearances. For what was there conveyed in it that could strike
inward to act upon the fixed tenets of the mind, to destroy there the
effect of the earliest and ten thousand subsequent impressions, of
inveterate habit and of ancient establishment? Was it to convince and
persuade by authority of the maxim, that the government in church and
state is wiser than the people, and therefore the best judge in every
matter? This, as asserted generally, was what the people firmly believed:
it has always, till lately, been the popular faith. But then, was the
benefit of this obsequious faith to go exclusively to the government of
just that particular time,--a government which, by its innovations and
demolitions, was exhibiting a contemptuous dissent from all past
government remembered in the land? Were the people not to hesitate a
moment to take this innovating government's word for it that all their
forefathers, up through a long series of ages, had been fools and dupes in
reverencing, in their time, the wisdom and authority of _their_ governors?
The most unthinking and submissive would feel that this was too much:
especially after they had proof that the government demanding so
prodigious a concession might, on the substitution of just one individual
for another at its head, revoke its own ordinances, and punish those who
should contumaciously continue to be ruled by them. You summon us, they
might have said to their governors, at your arbitrary dictate to renounce,
as what you are pleased to call idolatries and abominations, the faith and
rites held sacred by twenty generations of our ancestors and yours. We are
to do this on peril of your highest displeasure, and that of God, by whose
will you are professing to act; now who will ensure us that there may not
be, some time hence, a vindictive inquisition, to find who among us have
been the most ready of obedience to offer wicked insult to the Holy
Catholic Apostolic Church?

This deficiency of the moral power of the government, to promote the
progress of conviction in the mind of the nation, would be slenderly
supplied by the authority of the class next to the government in the claim
to deference, and even holding the precedence in actual influence,--that
is, the families of rank and consequence throughout the country. For the
people well knew, in their respective neighborhoods, that many of these
had never in reality forsaken the ancient religion, consulting only the
policy of a time-serving conformity; and that some of them hardly
attempted or wished to conceal from their inferiors that they preserved
their fidelity. And then the substituted religion, while it came with a
great diminution of the pomp which is always the delight of the ignorant,
acknowledged,--proclaimed as one of its chief merits,--a still more fatal
defect for attracting converts from among beings whose ignorance had never
been suffered to doubt, till then, that men in ecclesiastical garb could
modify, or suspend, or defeat for them the justice of God; it proclaimed
itself unable to give any exemptions or commutations in matters of
conscience.

When such were the recommendations which the new mode of religion _not_,
and when the recommendation which it _had_ was simply, (the royal
authority set out of the question,) an offer of evidence to the
understanding _that it was true_, no wonder that many of a generation so
insensate through ignorance should never become its proselytes. But even
as to those who did, while it was a happy deliverance, as we have said, to
escape almost any way from the utter grossness of popery, still they would
carry into their better faith much of the unhappy effect of that previous
mental debasement. How should a man in the rudeness of an intellect left
completely ignorant of truth in general, have a luminous apprehension of
its most important division? There could not be in men's minds a
phenomenon similar to what we image to ourselves of Goshen in the
preternatural night of Egypt, a space of perfect light, defined out by a
precise limit amidst the general darkness.

Only consider, that the new ideas admitted into the proselyte's
understanding as the true faith, were to take their situation there in
nearly those very same encompassing circumstances of internal barbarism
which had been so perfectly commodious to the superstition recently
dwelling there; and that which had been favorable and adapted in the
utmost degree, that which had afforded much of the sustenance of life, to
the false notions, could not but be most adverse to the development of the
true ones. These latter, so environed, would be in a condition too like
that of a candle in the mephitic air of a vault. The newly adopted
religion, therefore, of the uncultivated converts from popery, would be
far from exhibiting, as compared with the renounced superstition, a
magnitude of change, and force of contrast, duly corresponding to the
difference between the lying vanities of priestcraft and a communication
from the living God. The reign of ignorance combined with imposture had
fixed upon the common people of the age of the Reformation, and of several
generations downward, the doom of being incapable of admitting genuine
Christianity but with an excessively inadequate apprehension of its
attributes;--as in the patriarchal ages a man might have received with
only the honors appropriate to a saint or prophet, the visitant in whom he
was entertaining an angel unawares. Happy for both that ancient
entertainer of such a visitant, and the ignorant but honest adopter of the
reformed religion, when that which they entertained rewarded them
according to its own celestial quality, rather than in proportion to their
inadequate reception. We may believe that the Divine Being, in special
compassion to that ignorance to which barbarism and superstition had
condemned inevitably the greater number of the early converts to the
reformed religion, did render that faith beneficial to them beyond the
proportion of their narrow and still half superstitious conception of it.
And this is, in truth, the consideration the most consolatory in looking
back to that tenebrious period in which popery was slowly retiring, with a
protracted exertion of all the craft and strength of an able and veteran
tyrant contending to the last for prolonged dominion.

It is, however, no consideration of a portion of the people sincere,
inquiring, and emerging, though dimly enlightened, from the gloom of so
dreary a scene, that is most apt to occur to our thoughts in extenuation
of that gloom. Our unreflecting attention allows itself to be so engrossed
by far different circumstances of that period of our history, that we are
imposed upon by a spectacle the very opposite of mournful. For what is it
but a splendid and animating exhibition that we behold in looking back to
the age of Elizabeth?

And _was_ not that, it may be asked, an age of the highest glory to our
nation? Why repress our delight in contemplating it? How can we refuse to
indulge an inspiring sympathy with the energy of those times, an elation
of spirit at beholding the unparalleled allotment of her reign, of
statesmen, heroes, and literary geniuses, but for whom, indeed, "that
bright occidental star" would have left no such brilliant track of fame
behind her?

Permit us to answer by inquiring, What should the intellectual condition
of the _people_, properly so denominated, have been in order to correspond
in a due proportion to the magnificence of these their representative
chiefs, and complete the grand spectacle as that of a _nation_? Determine
that; and then inquire what actually _was_ the state of the people all
this while. There is evidence that it was, what the fatal blight and blast
of popery might be expected to have left it, generally and most wretchedly
degraded. What it was is shown by the facts, that it was found impossible,
even under the inspiring auspices of the learned Elizabeth, with her
constellation of geniuses, orators, scholars, to supply the churches
generally with officiating persons capable of going with decency through
the task of the public service, made ready, as every part of it was, to
their hands; and that to be able to read, was the very marked distinction
of here and there an individual. It requires little effort but that of
going low enough, to complete the general estimate in conformity to these
and similar facts.

And here we cannot help remarking what a deception we suffer to pass on us
from history. It celebrates some period in a nation's career, as
pre-eminently illustrious, for magnanimity, lofty enterprise, literature,
and original genius. There was, perhaps, a learned and vigorous monarch,
and there were Cecils and Walsinghams, and Shakspeares and Spensers, and
Sidneys and Raleighs, with many other powerful thinkers and actors, to
render it the proudest age of our national glory. And we thoughtlessly
admit on our imagination this splendid exhibition as in some manner
involving or implying the collective state of the people in that age! The
ethereal summits of a tract of the moral world are conspicuous and fair in
the lustre of heaven, and we take no thought of the immensely greater
proportion of it which is sunk in gloom and covered with fogs. The general
mass of the population, whose physical vigor, indeed, and courage, and
fidelity to the interests of the country, were of such admirable avail to
the purposes, and under the direction, of the mighty spirits that wielded
their rough agency,--this great assemblage was sunk in such mental
barbarism, as to be placed at about the same distance from their
illustrious intellectual chiefs, as the hordes of Scythia from the finest
spirits of Athens. It was nothing to this debased, countless multitude
spread over the country, existing in the coarsest habits, destitute, in
the proportion of thousands to one, of cultivation, and still in a great
degree enslaved by the popish superstition,--it was nothing to them, in
the way of direct influence to draw forth their minds into free exercise
and acquirement, that there were, within the circuit of the island, a
profound scholarship, a most disciplined and vigorous reason, a masculine
eloquence, and genius breathing enchantment. Both the actual possessors of
this mental opulence, and the part of society forming, around them, the
sphere immediately pervaded by the delight and instruction imparted by
them, might as well, for anything they diffused of this luxury and benefit
among the general multitude, have been a Brahminical caste, dissociated by
an imagined essential distinction of nature. While they were exulting in
this elevation and free excursiveness of mental existence, the prostrate
crowd were grovelling through a life on a level with the soil where they
were at last to find their graves. But this crowd it was that constituted
the substance of the _nation_; to which, nation, in the mass, the
historian applies the superb epithets, which a small proportion of the men
of that age claimed by a striking _exception_ to the general state of the
community. History too much consults our love of effect and pomp, to let
us see in a close and distinct manner anything

  "On the low level of th' inglorious throng;"

and our attention is borne away to the intellectual splendor exhibited
among the most favored aspirants of the seats of learning, or in councils,
courts, and camps, in heroic and romantic enterprises, and in some
immortal works of genius. And thus we are gazing with delight at a fine
public bonfire, while, in all the cottages round, the people are shivering
for want of fuel.

Our history becomes very bright again with the intellectual and literary
riches of a much later period, often denominated a golden age,--that which
was illustrated by the talents of Addison, Pope, Swift, and their numerous
secondaries in fame; and could also boast its philosophers, statesmen, and
heroes. And in the lapse of four or five ages, according to the average
term of human life, since the earlier grand display of mind, what had been
effected toward such an advancement of intelligence in the community, that
when this next tribe of highly endowed spirits should appear, they would
stand in much loss opprobrious contrast to the main body of the nation,
and find a much larger portion of it qualified to receive their
intellectual effusions. By this time, the class of persons who sought
knowledge on a wider scale than what sufficed for the ordinary affairs of
life, who took an interest in literature, and constituted the _Authors'
Public_, had indeed extended a little, extremely little, beyond the people
of condition, the persons educated in learned institutions, and those
whose professions involved some necessity, and might create some taste for
reading. Still they _were a class_, and that with a limitation marked and
palpable, to a degree very difficult for us now to conceive. They were in
contact, on the one side, with the great thinkers, moralists, poets, and
wits, but very slightly in communication with the generality of the people
on the other. They received the emanations from the assemblage of talent
and knowledge, but did not serve as conductors to convey them down
indefinitely into the community. The national body, regarded in its
intellectual character, had an inspirited and vigorous superior part, as
constituted of these men of eminent talents and attainments, and this
small class of persons in a measure assimilated to them in thinking and
taste; but it was in a condition resembling that of a human frame in
which, (through an injury in the spinal marrow,) some of the most
important functions of vitality have terminated at some precise limit
downward, leaving the inferior extremities devoid of sensation and the
power of action.

It is on record, that works admirably adapted to find readers and to make
them, had but an extremely confined and slowly widening circulation,
according to _our_ standard of the popular success of the productions of
distinguished talents. Nor did the writers _reckon_ on any such popular
success. In the calculations of their literary ambition, it was a thing of
course that the people went for nothing. It is apparent in allusions to
the people occurring in these very works, that "the lower sort," "the
vulgar herd," "the canaille," "the mob," "the many-headed beast," "the
million," (and even these designations generally meant something short of
the lowest classes of all,) were no more thought of in any relation to a
state of cultivated intelligence than Turks or Tartars. The readers are
habitually recognized as a kind of select community, conversed with on
topics and in a language with which the vulgar have nothing at all to
do,--a converse the more gratifying on that account. And any casual
allusions to the bulk of the people are expressed in phrases unaffectedly
implying, that they are a herd of beings existing on quite other terms and
for essentially other ends, than we, fine writers, and you, our admiring
readers. It is evident in our literature of that age, (a feature still
more prominent in that of France, at the same and down to a much later
period,) that the main national population, accounted as creatures to
which souls and senses were given just to render their limbs mechanically
serviceable, were regarded by the intellectual aristocracy with hardly so
active a sentiment as contempt; they were not worth that; it was the easy
indifference toward what was seldom thought of as in existence.

Wickedly wrong as such a feeling was, there is no doubt that the actual
state of the people was quite such as would naturally cause it, in men
whose large and richly cultivated minds did not contain philanthropy or
Christian charity enough to regret and pity the popular debasement as a
calamity. For while they were indulging their pride in the elevation, and
their taste in all the luxuries and varieties, of that ampler higher range
of existence enjoyed by such men, in what light must they view the bulk of
a nation, that knew nothing of their wit, genius, or philosophy, could not
even read their writings, but as a coarse mass of living material, the
mere earthy substratum of humanity, not to be accounted of in any
comparison or even relation to what man is in his higher style? While they
of that higher style were revelling in their mental affluence, the vast
majority of the inhabitants of the island were subsisting, and had always
subsisted, on the most beggarly pittance on which mind could be barely
kept alive. Probably they had at that time still fewer ideas than the
people of the former age which we have been describing. For many of those
with which popery had occupied the faith and fancy of that earlier
generation, had now vanished from the popular mind, without being replaced
in equal number by better ideas, or by ideas of any kind. And then their
vices had the whole grossness of vice, and their favorite amusements were
at best rude and boisterous, and a large proportion of them savage and
cruel. So that when we look at the shining wits, poets, and philosophers,
of that age, they appear like gaudy flowers growing in a putrid marsh.

And to a much later period this deplorable ignorance, with all its
appropriate consequences, continued to be the dishonor and the plague of
the intellectual and moral condition of the inhabitants of England. Of
England! which had through many centuries made so great a figure in
Christendom; which has been so splendid in arms, liberty, legislation,
science, and all manner of literature: which has boasted its universities,
of ancient foundation and proudest fame, munificently endowed, and
possessing, in their accumulations of literary treasure, nearly the whole
results of all the strongest thinking there had been in the world: and
which has had also, through the charity of individuals, such a number of
minor institutions for education, that the persons intrusted to see them
administered have, in very numerous instances, not scrupled to divert
their resources to total different purposes, lest, perchance, the cause of
damage to the people should change from a lack of knowledge to a repletion
of it. Of England! so long after the Reformation, and all the while under
the superintendence and tuition of an ecclesiastical establishment for
both instruction and jurisdiction, co-extended with the entire nation, and
furnished for its ministry with men from the discipline of institutions
where everything the most important to be known was professed to be
taught. Thus endowed had England been, thus was she endowed at the period
under our review, (the former part of the last century,) with the
facilities, the provisions, the great intellectual apparatus, to be
wielded in any mode her wisdom might devise, and with whatever strength of
hand she chose to apply, for promoting her several millions of rational,
accountable, immortal beings, somewhat beyond a state of mere physical
existence. When therefore, notwithstanding all this, an awful proportion
of them were under the continual process of destruction for want of
knowledge, what a tremendous responsibility was borne by whatever part of
the community it was that stood, either by office and express vocation, or
by the general obligation inseparable from ability, in the relation of
guardianship to the rest.

But here the voice of that sort of patriotism which is in vogue as well in
England as in China, may perhaps interpose to protest against malicious
and exaggerated invective. As if it were a question of what might
beforehand be reasonably expected, instead of an account of what actually
exists, it may be alleged that surely it is a representation too much
against antecedent probability to be true, that a civilized, Christian,
magnanimous, and wealthy state like that of England, can have been so
careless and wicked as to tolerate, during the lapse of centuries, a
hideously gross and degraded condition of the people.

But besides that the fact is plainly so, it were vain to presume, in
confidence on any supposed consistency of character, that it _must_ be
otherwise. There is no saying _what_ a civilized and Christian nation, (so
called,) may not tolerate. Recollect the Slave Trade, which, with the
magnitude of a national concern, continued its abominations while one
generation after another of Englishmen passed away; their intelligence,
conscience, humanity, and refinement, as quietly accommodated to it, as if
one portion of the race had possessed an express warrant from Heaven to
capture, buy, sell, and drive another. This is but one of many mortifying
illustrations how much the constitution of our moral sentiments resembles
a Manichæan creation, how much of them is formed in passive submission to
the evil principle, acting through prevailing custom; which determines
that it shall but very partially depend on the real and most manifest
qualities of things present to us, whether we shall have any right
perception of their characters of good and evil. The agency which works
this malformation in our sentiments needs no greater triumph, than that
the true nature of things should be disguised to us by the very effect of
their being constantly kept in our sight. Could any malignant enchanter
wish for more than this,--to make us insensible to the odious quality of
things not only _though_ they stand constantly and directly in our view,
but _because_ they do so? And while they do so, there may also stand as
obviously in our view, and close by them, the truths which _expose_ their
real nature, and might be expected to make us instantly revolt from them;
and these truths shall be no other than some of the plainest principles of
reason and religion. It shall be as if men of wicked designs could be
compelled to wear labels on their breasts wherever they go, to announce
their character in conspicuous letters; or nightly assassins could be
forced to carry torches before them, to reveal the murder in their
visages; or, as if, according to a vulgar superstition, evil spirits could
not help betraying their dangerous presence by a tinge of brimstone in the
flame of the lamps. Thus evident, by the light of reason and religion,
shall have been the true nature of certain important facts in the policy
of a Christian nation; and nevertheless, even the cultivated part of that
nation, during a series of generations, having directly before their sight
an enormous nuisance and iniquity, shall yet never be struck with its
quality, never be made restless by its annoyance, never seriously think of
it. And so its odiousness shall never be decidedly apprehended till some
individual or two, as by the acquisition of a new moral sense, receive a
sudden intuition of its nature, a disclosure of its whole essence and
malignity,--the essence and malignity of that very thing which has been
exposing its quality, without the least reserve, by the most flagrant
signs, to millions of observers.

Thus it has been with respect to the barbarous ignorance under which
nine-tenths of the population of our country have continued, through a
number of ages subsequent to the Reformation, surrendered to everything
low, vicious, and wretched. This state of national debasement and dishonor
lay spread out, a wide scene of moral desolation, in the sight of
statesmen, of dignified and subordinate ecclesiastics, of magistrates, of
the philosophic speculators on human nature, and of all those whose rank
and opulence brought them hourly proofs what great influence they might
have, in any way in which, they should choose to exert it, on the people
below them. And still it was all right that the multitudes, constituting
the grand living agency through the realm, should remain in such a
condition that, when they died, the country should lose nothing but so
much animated body, with the quantum of vice which helped to keep it in
action. When at length some were beginning to apprehend and proclaim that
all this was wrong, these classes were exceedingly slow in their assent to
the reformed doctrine. A large proportion of them even declared, on
system, against the speculations and projects for giving the people, at
last, the use and value of their souls as well as their hands. The earnest
and sanguine philanthropists might be pardoned the simplicity of not
foreseeing such an opposition, though they ought, perhaps, to have known
better than to be surprised at the phenomenon. They were to be made wiser
by force, with respect to men's governing prejudices and motives. And from
credulity mortified is a short transit to suspicion. So ungracious a
manner of having the insight into motives sharpened, does not tend to make
its subsequent exercise indulgent, when it comes to inspect the altered
appearances assumed by persons and classes who have previously been in
decided opposition. What arguments have prevailed with you, (the question
might be,) since you have never frankly retracted your former contempt of
those which convinced _us_? May any sinister thought have occurred, that
you might defeat our ends by a certain way of managing the means? Or do
you hope to deter mine and limit to some subordinate purposes, what we
wish to prosecute for the most general good? Or would you rather impose on
yourselves the grievance of promoting an object which you dislike, than
that we should have the chief credit of promoting it? Do you sometimes
accompany your working in the vineyard with maledictions on those who have
reduced you to such a necessity? Would you have been glad to be saved the
unwelcome service by _their_ letting it alone?

Those friends of man and their country who were the earliest to combine
in schemes for enlightening the people, and who continue to prosecute the
object on the most liberal and comprehensive principle, have to
acknowledge surmises like these. Nevertheless, they are willing to forego
any shrewd investigation into the causes of the later silence and
apparent acquiescence of former opposers; and into the motives which have
induced some of them, though in no very amicable mood, to take a part in
measures tending in their general effect to the same end. Whatever were
their suspicion of those motives, they would be reminded of an example,
not altogether foreign to the nature of their business, and quite in
point to their duty,--that of the magnanimous principle through which the
great Apostle disappointed his adversaries, by finding his own triumph in
that of his cause, while he saw that cause availing itself of these foes
after the manner of some consummate general, who has had the art to make
those who have come into the field as but treacherous auxiliaries,
co-operate effectually in the battle which they never intended he should
gain. Some preached Christ of envy, and strife, and contention, supposing
to add affliction to his bonds; but, says he, What then? notwithstanding
every way, whether in pretence or truth, Christ is preached--_the thing
itself is done_--and I therein rejoice, yea, and will rejoice. When
animated by this high principle, this ambition absolutely _for the cause
itself_, its servant is a gainer, because _it_ is a gainer, by all things
convertible into tribute, whatever may be the temper or intention of the
officers, either as towards the cause or towards himself. He may say to
them, I am more pleased by what you are actually doing, be the motive
what it will, in advancement of the object to which I am devoted, than it
is possible for you to aggrieve me by letting me see that you would not
be sorry for the frustration of _my_ schemes and exertions for its
service; or even by betraying, though I should lament such a state of
your minds, that you would be content to sacrifice _it_ if that might be
the way to defeat _me_.

We revert but for a moment to the review of past times.--We said that long
after the brilliant show of talent, and the creation of literary supplies
for the national use, in the early part of the last century, the
deplorable mental condition of the people remained in no very great degree
altered. To pass from beholding that bright and sumptuous display, in
order to see what there was corresponding to it in the subsequent state of
the popular cultivation, is like going out from some magnificent apartment
with its lustres, music, refections, and assemblage of elegant personages,
to be beset by beggars in the gloom and cold of a winter night.

Take a few hours' indulgence in the literary luxuries of Addison, Pope,
and their secondaries, and then turn to some authentic plain
representation of the attainments and habits of the mass of the people, at
the time when Whitefield and Wesley commenced their invasion of the
barbarous community. But the benevolent reader, (or let him be a
patriotically proud one,) is quite reluctant to recognize his country, his
celebrated Christian nation, "the most enlightened in the world," (as song
and oratory have it,) in a populace for the far greater part as perfectly
estranged from the page of knowledge, as if printing, or even letters, had
never been invented; the younger part finding their supreme delight in
rough frolic and savage sports, the old sinking down into impenetrable
stupefaction with the decline of the vital principle.

If he would eagerly seek to fix on something as a counterbalance to this,
and endeavor to modify the estimate and relieve the feeling, by citing
perhaps the courage, and a certain rudimental capacity of good sense, in
which the people are deemed to have surpassed the neighboring nations, he
will be compelled to see how these native endowments were overrun and
befooled by a farrago of contemptible superstitions;--contemptible not
only for their stupid absurdity, but also as having in general nothing of
that pensive, solemn, and poetical character which superstition is capable
of assuming.--It is an exception to be made with respect to the
northernmost part of the island, that superstition did there partake of
this higher character. It seems to have had somewhat of the tone imitated,
but in a softer mode, in the poetry, denominated of Ossian.

As to religion, there is no hazard in saying, that several millions had
little further notion of it than that it was an occasional, or, in the
opinion of perhaps one in twenty, a regular appearance at church, hardly
taking into the account that they were to be taught anything there. And
what _were_ they taught--those of them who gave their attendance and
attention? What kind of notions it was that had settled in their minds
under such ministration, would be, so to speak, brought out, it would be
made apparent what they were or were not taught, when so strong and
general a sensation was produced by the irruption among them of the two
reformers just named, proclaiming, as they both did, (notwithstanding very
considerable differences of secondary order,) the principles which had
been authoritatively declared to be of the essence of Christianity, in
that model of doctrine which had been appointed to prescribe and conserve
the national faith. If such doctrine _had_ been imparted to a portion of
the popular mind, even though with somewhat less positive statement, less
copiousness of illustration, and less cogency of enforcement than it
ought; if it had been but in crude _substance_ fixed in the people's
understanding, by the ministry of the many thousand authorized
instructors, who were by their institute solemnly enjoined and pledged not
to teach a different sort of doctrine, and not to fail of teaching this;
if, we repeat, this faith, so conspicuously declared in the articles,
liturgy, and homilies, had been in any degree in possession of the people,
they would have recognized its main principles, or at least a similarity
of principles, in the addresses of these two new preachers. They would
have done so, notwithstanding a peculiarity of phraseology which
Whitefield and Wesley carried to excess; and notwithstanding certain
specialities which the latter did not, even supposing them to be truths,
keep duly subordinate in exhibiting the prominent essentials of
Christianity. The preaching, therefore, of these men was a test of what
the people had been previously taught or allowed to repose in as Christian
truth, under the tuition of their great religious guardian, the national
church. What it was or was not would be found, in their having a sense of
something like what they had been taught before, or something opposite to
it, or some thing altogether foreign and unknown, when they were hearing
those loud proclaimers of the old doctrines of the Reformation. Now then,
as carrying with them this quality of a test, how were those men received
in the community? Why, they were generally received, on account of the
import of what they said, still more than from their zealous manner of
saying it, with as strong an impression of novelty, strangeness, and
contrariety to everything hitherto heard of, as any of our voyagers and
travellers of discovery have been by the barbarous tribes who had never
before seen civilized man, or as the Spaniards on their arrival in Mexico
or Peru. They might, as the voyagers have clone, experience every local
difference of moral temperament, from that which hailed them with
acclamations, to that which often exploded in a volley of mud and stones;
but through all these varieties of greetings, there was a strong sense of
something then brought before them for the first time. "Thou bringest
certain strange things to our ears," was an expression not more
unaffectedly uttered by any hearer of an apostle, preaching in a heathen
city. And to many of the auditors, it was a matter of nearly as much
difficulty as it would to an inquisitive heathen, and required as new a
posture of the mind, to attain an understanding of the evangelical
doctrines, though they were the very same which had been held forth by the
fathers and martyrs of the English Church.

We have alluded to the violence, which sometimes encountered the endeavor
to restore these doctrines to the knowledge and faith of the people. And
if any one should have thought that, in the descriptions we have been
giving, too frequent and willing use has been made of the epithet
"barbarous," or similar words, as if we could have a perverse pleasure in
degrading our nation, we would request him to select for himself the
appropriate terms for characterizing that state of the people, in point of
sense and civilization, to say nothing of religion, which could admit such
a fact as this to stand in their history--namely, that, in a vast number
of instances and places, where some person unexceptionable in character as
far as known, and sometimes well known as a worthy man, has attempted to
address a number of the inhabitants, under a roof or under the sky, on
what it imported them beyond all things in the world to know and consider,
a multitude have rushed together, shouting and howling, raving and
cursing, and accompanying, in many of the instances, their furious cries
and yells with loathsome or dangerous missiles; dragging or driving the
preacher from his humble stand, forcing him, and the few that wished to
encourage and hear him, to flee for their lives, sometimes not without
serious injury before they could escape. And that such a history of the
people may show how deservedly their superiors were denominated their
"betters," it has to add, that these savage tumults were generally
instigated or abetted, sometimes under a little concealment, but often
avowedly, by persons of higher condition, and even by those consecrated to
the office of religious instruction; and this advantage of their station
was lent to defend the perpetrators against shame, or remorse, or just
punishment, for the outrage.

There would be no hazard in affirming, that since Wesley and Whitefield
began the conflict with the heathenism of the country, there have been in
it hundreds of occurrences answering in substance to this description.
From any one, therefore, who should be inclined to accuse us of harsh
language, we may well repeat the demand in what terms _he_ would think he
gave the true character of a mental and moral condition, manifested in
such uproars of savage violence as the Christian missionaries among
eastern idolaters never had the slightest cause to apprehend. These
outrages were so far from uncommon, or confined to any one part of the
country, some time before, and for a very long while after, the middle of
the last century, that they might be fairly taken as indicating the depth
at which the greatest part of the nation lay sunk in ignorance and
barbarism. Yet the good and zealous men whose lot it was to be thus set
upon by a depraved, infuriate rabble, the foremost of them active in
direct assault, and the rest venting their ferocious delight in a hideous
blending of ribaldry and execration, of joking and cursing, were taxed
with a canting hypocrisy, or a fanatical madness, for speaking of the
prevailing ignorance and barbarism in terms equivalent to our sentence
from the Prophet, "The people are destroyed for lack of knowledge," and
for deploring the hopelessness of any revolution in this empire of
darkness by means of the existing institutions, which seemed indeed to
have become themselves its strong-holds.

But they whom serious danger could not deter from renewing and
indefinitely repeating such attempts at all hazards, were little likely to
be appalled by these contumelies of speech. To the persons so abusing them
they might coolly reply, "Now really you are inconsiderately wasting your
labor. Don't you know, that on the account of this same business we have
sustained the battery of stones, brickbats, and the contents of the ditch?
And can you believe we can much care for mere _words_ of insult, after
that? Albeit the opprobrious phrases _have_ the fetid coarseness befitting
the bluster of property without education, or the more highly inspirited
tone of railing learnt in a college, they are quite another kind of thing
to be the mark for, than such assailments as have come from the brawny
arms of some of your peasants, set on probably by broad hints or plain
expressions how much you would be pleased with such exploits."--It is
gratifying to see thus exemplified, in the endurance of evil for a good
cause, that provision in our nature for economizing the expense of
feeling, through which the encountering of the greater creates a hardihood
which can despise the less.

       *       *       *       *       *

That our descriptive observations do not exaggerate the popular
ignorance, with its natural concomitants, as prevailing at the middle of
the last century and far downward, many of the elderly persons among us
can readily confirm, from what they remember of the testimony of their
immediate ancestors. It will be recollected what pictures they gave of
the moral scene spread over the country when they were young. They could
convey lively images of the situations in which the vulgar notions and
manners had their free display, by representing the assemblages, and the
fashion of discourse and manners, at fairs, revels, and other rendezvous
of amusement; or in the field of rural employment, or on the village
green, or in front of the mechanic's workshop. They could recount various
anecdotes characteristic of the times; and repeat short dialogues, or
single sayings, which expressed the very essence of what was to the
population of the township or province instead of law and prophets, or
sages or apostles. They could describe how free from all sense of shame
whole families would seem to be, from grand-sires down to the third rude
reckless generation, for not being able to read; and how well content,
when there was some one individual in the neighborhood who could read an
advertisement, or ballad, or last dying speech of a malefactor, for the
benefit of the rest. They could describe the desolation of the land, with
respect to any enlightening and impressive religious instruction in the
places of worship; in the generality of which, indeed, the whole spirit
and manner of the service tended to what we just now described as the
fact--that religion, in its proper sense, was absolutely _a thing not
recognized at all_. To most of the persons there the forms attended to
were _representative_ of literally nothing--they were _themselves_ the
all. [Footnote: None of the anecdotes, that have come down in traditions
now fading away, are more illustrative of those times, than those which
show both people and priest satisfied with the observances at church as
_constituting_ religion, never thinking of them as but the means to
_teach_ and _inspire_ it. Such anecdotes must have been heard by every
one who has conversed much with such aged persons as remember the most of
former times. Some traditions of this kind may be recalled to mind,
through similarity of character, by hearing such an instance as the
following. A friend of the writer mentions, that he heard his father,
whose veracity was above all question, relate as one of the recollections
of the time when he was a young man, that in the parish church where he
attended, the service was one Sunday morning performed with a somewhat
unusual despatch, and every abbreviation that depended on the discretion
of the minister; who at the conclusion explained the circumstance
publicly, by saying, that as neighbor such-a-one (mentioning the name)
was going to bait his bull in the afternoon, he had been as short as
possible that the congregation might have good time for the sport.--It is
on the same principle that the Catholics on the continent, having
attended mass in the morning, never think of doubting their license for
every frivolity the rest of the day.] And as to those who really did in
the course of their attendance acquire something assignable as their
creed, our supposed reporters could tell what wretched and delusive
notions of religion, or rather instead of religion, they were permitted
and authorized, by their appointed spiritual guides, to carry with them
to their last hour. At which hour, some ceremonial form was to be a
passport to heaven: a little bread and wine, converted into a mysterious
object of superstition, by receiving an ecclesiastical name of unknown
import, accompanied with some sentences regarded much in the nature of an
incantation--and all was safe! The sinner expiring believed so, and the
sinners surviving were left to go on in their thoughtless way of life, on
a calculation of the same final resource.

Thus the past age has left an image of its character in the minds of the
generation now themselves grown old, received by immediate tradition from
persons who lived in it. Here and there, indeed, there still lingers, so
long after the departure of the great company to which he belonged, an
ancient who retains a trace of this image immediately from the reality, as
having become of an age to look at the world, and take a share in its
activities, about the middle of the last century. [Footnote: They are here
supposed to be looking back from about the year 1820.] And it might be an
employment of considerable though rather melancholy interest, for a person
visiting many parts of the land, to put in requisition, in each place, for
a day or two, the most faithful of the memories of the most narrative of
the oldest people, for materials toward forming an estimate of the mental
and moral state of the main body of the inhabitants, of town or country,
in the period of which they themselves saw the latter part, and remember
it in combination with what their progenitors related of the former. After
these few retainers of the original picture from the life shall have left
the world, it will be comparatively a faint conception that can be formed
of that age from written memorials, which exist but in a very imperfect
and scattered state.

But supposing the scene could be brought back to the mental eye, in full
verity and distinctness, as in a vision supernaturally imparted, are we
sure we should not have the mortification of perceiving that the change,
from the condition of the people then to their condition now, has been in
but poor proportion to the amount of the advantages, which we are apt to
be elated in recounting as the boast and happiness of later times? To
assume that we should _not_, is to impute to that former age still more
ignorance and debasement than appear in the above description. For what
could, what must that condition have been, if it was worse than the
present by anything near the difference made by what would be a tolerably
fair improvement of the additional means latterly afforded? An estimate
being made of the measure of intelligence and worth found among the
descendants, let so much be taken out as we would wish to attribute to the
effect of the additional means, and what will that remainder be which is
to represent the state of the ancestors, formed under a system of means
wanting all those which we are allowing ourselves to think important
enough to warrant the frequent expression, "This new era?"

The means wanting to the former generation, and that have sprung into
existence for the latter, may be briefly noted; and those of a religious
nature may be named first. It is the most obvious of public expedients,
that good men who wish to make others _so should preach_ to them. And
there has been a wonderful extension of this practice since the zealous
exertions of Whitefield, Wesley, and their co-operators awakened other
good men to a sense of their capacity and duty. The spirit actuating the
associated followers of the latter of those two great agitators, has
impelled forth their whole disposable force (to use a military phrase) to
this service; and they have sent preachers into many parts of the land
where preaching itself, in any fair sense of the term, was wholly a
novelty; and where there was roused as earnest a zeal to crush this
alarming innovation, as the people of Iceland are described to feel on the
occasion of the approach of a white bear to invade their folds or poorly
stocked pastures. [Footnote: The writer had just been reading that
description.] To a confederacy of Christians so well aware of their own
strength and progress, it may seem a superfluous testimony that they are
doing incalculable good among our population, more good probably than any
other religious sect. This tribute is paid not the less freely for a
material difference in theological opinion; nor for a wish, a quite
friendly one, that they may admit some little modification of a spirit
perhaps rather too sectarian in religion, and rather less than independent
in politics.

An immense augmentation has been brought to the sum of public instruction,
by the continually enlarging numbers of dissenters of other denominations.
Whatever may be thought of some of the consequences of the great extension
of dissent, it will hardly be considered as a circumstance tending to
prolong the reign of _ignorance_ that thus, within the last fifty years,
there have been put in activity to impart religious ideas to the people
not fewer (exclusively of the Wesleyans) than several thousand minds that
would, under a continuance of the former state of the nation, have been
doing no such service; that is to say, the service would not have been
done at all. Let it be considered, too, that the doctrines inculcated as
of the first importance, in the preaching of far the greatest number of
them, were exactly those which the Established Church avowed in its
formularies and disowned in its ministry,--one of the circumstances which
contributed the most to _make_ dissenters of the more seriously disposed
among the people.--It is to be added, that so much public activity in
religious instruction could not be unaccompanied by an increase of
exertion in the more private methods of imparting it.

It is another important accession to the enlarged system of operations
against religious ignorance, that a proportion of the Established Church
itself has been recovered to the spirit of its venerable founders, by the
progressive formation in it of a zealous evangelical ministry; dissenters
within their own community, if we may believe the constant loud
declarations of the bulk of that community, and especially of the most
dignified, learned, and powerful classes in it. But in spite of whatever
discredit they may suffer from being thus disowned, these worthy and
useful men have still, in their character of clergymen, a material
advantage above other faithful teachers, for influence on many of the
people, by being invested with the credentials of the ancient institution,
from which the popular mind has been slow and reluctant in withdrawing its
veneration; and for which that sentiment, when not quite extinct, is ready
to revive at any manifestation in it of the quickening spirit of the
Gospel. We say, if the sentiment be not quite extinct; for we are aware
what a very large proportion of the people are gone beyond the possibility
of feeling it any more. But still the number is great of those who
experience, at this new appearance, a reanimation of their affection for
the Church; and so fondly identify the partial change with the whole
institution, that they feel as if a parent, who had for a long while
neglected or deserted them, but for whom they could never cease to cherish
a filial regard, were beginning to be restored to them, with a renewal of
the benignant qualities and cares of the parental character.

       *       *       *       *       *

Thus far the account of the means which England was not to furnish for its
people till the latter part of the eighteenth century, relates to their
better instruction in religion. This will not be thought beside the
purpose of an enumeration of expedients for lessening their _ignorance_,
by any one who can allow that religion, regarded as a subject of the
understanding, is the most important part of knowledge, and who has
observed the fact that religion, when it begins to _interest_ uncultivated
minds, works surprisingly in favor of the intellectual faculties; an
effect exactly the reverse of that of superstition, and produced by the
contrary operation; for while superstition represses, and even curses any
free action of the intellect, genuine religion both requires and excites
it. Though it is too true that the great Christian principles, when
embraced with conviction and seriousness by a very uneducated man, must
greatly partake, by contractedness of apprehension, the ill fortune which
has confined his mental growth, yet they will often do more than any other
thing within the same space of time to avenge him of it.

In addition to the great extension of instruction in a form specifically
religious, there have been various causes and means contributing to the
increase of knowledge among the people. After it had been seen for
centuries in what manner the children of the poor were suffered to spend
the Sunday, it struck one observer at last, that they might on that day
be taught to read!--a possibility which had never been suspected; a
disclosure as of some hitherto hidden power of nature. And then the
schools which taught the children to read made some of the parents so
much better pleased with their children for their first steps in so new
an attainment, that they could not be indifferent to the opening of other
schools of a humble order to continue that instruction through the week.
It was within the same period that there was a large circulation of
tracts, by some of which many who might be little desirous of
instruction, were beguiled into it by the amusing vehicle ingeniously
contrived to convey it; and the most popular of which will remain a
monument of the talent, knowledge, and benevolence, of that distinguished
benefactor of her country and age, Mrs. H. More, perhaps even pre-eminent
above her many excellent works in a higher strain. Later and continual
issues of this class of papers, of every diversity of composition, and
diffused by the activity of numberless hands, have solicited perhaps a
fourth part of the thoughtless beings in the nation to make at least one
short effort to think.

The enormous flight of periodical miscellanies, and of newspapers, must be
taken as both the indication and the cause that hundreds of thousands of
persons were giving some attention to the matters of general information,
where their grandfathers had been, during the intervals of time allowed by
their employments, prating, brawling, sleeping, or drinking their hours
away. [Footnote: Since this was written there has been a prodigious
augmentation of all such means of general excitement; and happily a
diversified multiplication of a class of them calculated to benefit the
inferior people, at once by giving them a new and enlarged range of ideas,
and by bringing them on some tracts of common ground with the liberally
educated; thus abating the former almost total incapacity, on the part of
those inferiors, for intelligent intercommunication.]

It is perhaps an item of some small value in the account, that a new class
of ideas was furnished by the many wonderful effects of science, in the
application of the elements and mechanical powers. The people saw human
intelligence so effectually inspiriting inanimate matter, as to create a
new and mighty order of agency, appearing in a certain degree independent
of man himself, and in its power immensely surpassing any simple immediate
exertion of _his_ power. They saw wood and iron, fire, water, and air,
actuated to the production of effects which might vie with what their rude
ancestors had been accustomed to believe, (those of them who had heard of
such beings,) of giants, magicians, alchymists, and monsters; effects, the
dream of which, if any one could so have dreamed, would have been scoffed
at by even the more intelligent of the former race.

It is true that very ignorant persons can wonder at such things without
deriving much instruction from them; and that much sooner than the more
cultivated ones they become so familiarized with them as not to think of
them. All _effects_, however astonishing, are apt, if they are but regular
in their recurrence, to become soon insignificant to those who have never
learnt to inquire into _causes_. But still, it would be some little
advantage to the people's understanding to see what prodigious effects
could be produced without any preternatural interference. Though not
comprehending the science employed, they could comprehend that what they
saw _was_ purely a matter of science, and that the cause and the effect
were natural and definite; unlike the present race of Egyptians, who not
long since regarded the very mechanics of an European as an operation of
magic; and were capable of suspecting that a machine constructed by a man
from England, for raising water from the Nile, should inundate the country
in an hour. These wonders of science and art must therefore have
contributed somewhat to rid our people of the impression of being at every
turn beset by occult powers, under the name perhaps of witchcraft, and to
expel the notions of a vague and capricious agency interfering and
sporting with events throughout the system around them. Their rationality
thus obtained an improvement, which may be set against the injury
undoubtedly done them through that diminished exercise of the
understanding which accompanied the progressive division of labor; an
alteration rendered inevitable, and in other respects so advantageous.

When we come down to a comparatively recent time, we see the Bible "going
up on the breadth of the land." In passing by any given number of houses
of the inferior class, we may presume there are in them four or five times
as many copies of that sacred book as there were in the same number thirty
or forty years since. And when we consider how many more persons in those
houses can read, and that in some of them the book may be _more_ read for
having come there as a novelty, than it is in many others where it has
been an old article of the furniture, we may fairly presume that the
increased reading is in a greater proportion than the increased number of
Bibles.--This late period has also brought into action a new expedient,
worthy to stand, in the province of education, parallel and rival to the
most useful modern inventions in the mechanical departments; an
organization for schools, by which, instead of one or two overlabored
agents upon a mass of reluctant subjects, that whole mass itself shall be
animated into a system of reciprocal agency. It has all the merit of a
contrivance which associates with mental labor a pleasure never known to
young learners before.

One more distinction of our times has been, that effect which missionary
and other philanthropic societies have had, to render familiar to common
knowledge, by means of their meetings and publications, a great number of
such interesting and important facts, in the state of other countries and
our own, as were formerly quite beyond the sphere of ordinary information.

In aid of all these means at work in the trial to raise the people from
the condition in which they had been so many ages sunk and immovable,
there has been of late years the unpretending but important ministration
of an incessant multifarious inventiveness in making almost every sort of
information offer itself in brief, familiar, and attractive forms, adapted
to youth or to adult ignorance; so that knowledge, which was formerly a
thing to be searched and dug for "as for hid treasures," has seemed at
last beginning to effloresce through the surface of the ground on all
sides of us.

The statement of what recent times have produced for effecting an
alteration among the people, must include the prodigious excitement in the
political world. It were absurd, it is true, to name this in the simple
character of a _cause_, when we speak of the rousing of the popular mind
from a long stagnation; it being itself a proof and result of some
preceding cause beginning to pervade and disturb that stagnation. But
whatever may be assigned as the true and sufficient explanation of its
origin, we have to look on the mighty operation of its progress, forcing a
restlessness, instability, and tendency to change, into almost every part
of the social economy. In the whole compass of time there has been no
train of events, that has within so short a period stirred to the very
bottom the mind of so vast a portion of the race. And the power of this
great commotion has less consisted in what may be termed its physical
energy, evinced in grand exploits and catastrophes, than in its being an
intense activity of _principles_. It was as different from other
convulsions in the moral world, as would be a tempest attributed to the
direct intervention of a mighty spirit, whether believed celestial or
infernal, from one raised in the elements by mere natural causes. The
people were not, as in other instances of battles, revolutions, and
striking alternations of fortune, gazing a at mere show of wonderful
events, but regarded these events as the course of a great practical
debate of questions affecting their own interests.

And now, when we have put all these things together, we may well pause to
indulge again our wonder what _could_ have been the mental situation of a
majority of the inhabitants of this country, antecedently to this creation
and conjunction of so many means and influences for awaking them to
something of an intelligent existence.




Section III.



The review of the past may here be terminated. And how welcome a change
it would be if we might here completely emerge from the gloom which has
overspread it. How happy were it if in proceeding to an estimate of the
people of the present times, we found so rich a practical result of the
means for forming a more enlightened race, that we should have no further
recollection of that sentence from the Prophet, which has hitherto
suggested itself again at every step in prosecution of the survey. But we
are compelled to see how slow is the progress of mankind toward thus
rendering obsolete any of the darker lines of the sacred record. So
completely, so desperately, had the whole popular body and being been
pervaded by the stupifying power of the long reign of ignorance, with
such heavy reluctance, at the best, does the human mind open its eyes to
admit light,--and so incommensurate as yet, even on the supposition of
its having much less of this reluctance, has been in quantity the whole
new supply of means for a happy change,--that a most melancholy spectacle
still abides before us. Time, in sweeping away successive generations,
has preserved, in substance, the sad inheritance to that which is as yet
the latest.

Even that portion of beneficial effect which actually has resulted from
this co-operation of new forces, has served to make a more obvious
exposure of the unhappiness and offensiveness of what is still the
condition of the far greater part of our population; as a dreary waste is
made, to give a more sensible impression how dreary it is, by the little
inroads of cultivation and beauty in its hollows, and the faint advances
of an unwonted green upon its borders. The degradation of the main body of
the lower classes is exposed by a comparison with the small reclaimed
portion within those classes themselves. It is not with the philosophers,
literati, and most accomplished persons in higher life, that we should
think of placing in immediate comparison the untutored rustics and workmen
in stones and timber, for the purpose of showing how much is wanting to
them. These extreme orders of society would seem less related in virtue of
their common nature, than separated by the wide disparity of its
cultivation. They would appear so immeasurably asunder, such antipodes in
the sphere of human existence, that the state of the one could afford no
standard for judging of the defects or wants of the other. It was not in a
speculation which amused itself, as with a curious fact, in seeing that
the same material can be made into scholars, legislators, sages, and
models of elegance--and also into helots; and then went into a fanciful
question of how near they might possibly be brought together: it was in a
speculation which, instead of dwelling on the view of what was impossible
to the common people in a comparative reference to the highest classes of
their fellow-men, considered what was left practicable to them within
their own narrow allotment, that the schemes originated which have
actually imparted to a proportion of them an invaluable share of the
benefits of knowledge. There has thus been formed a small improved order
of people amidst the multitude; and it is the contrast between these and
the general state of that multitude that most directly exposes the popular
debasement. It certainly were ridiculous enough to fix on a laboring man
and his family, and affect to deplore that he is doomed not to behold the
depths and heights of science, not to expatiate over the wide field of
history, not to luxuriate among the delights, refinements, and infinite
diversities of literature; and that his family are not growing up in a
training to every high accomplishment, after the pattern of some family in
the neighborhood, favored by fortune, and high ability and cultivation in
those at their head. But it is a quite different thing to take this man
and his family, hardly able, perhaps, even to read, and therefore sunk in
all the grossness of ignorance,--and compare them with another man and
family in the same sphere of life, but who have received the utmost
improvement within the reach of that situation, and are sensible of its
value; who often employ the leisure hour in reading, (sometimes socially
and with intermingled converse,) some easy work of instruction or innocent
entertainment; are detached, in the greatest degree that depends on their
choice, from society with the absolute vulgar; have learnt much decorum of
manners; can take an intelligent interest in the great events of the
world; and are prevented, by what they read and hear, from forgetting that
there is another world. It is, we repeat, after thus seeing what may, and
in particular instances does exist, in a humble condition, that we are
compelled to regard as really a dreadful spectacle the still prevailing
state of our national population.

We shall endeavor to exhibit, though on a small scale, and perhaps not
with a very strict regularity of proportion and arrangement, a faithful
representation of the most serious of the evils conspicuous in an
uneducated state of the people. Much of the description and reflections
must be equally applicable to other countries; for spite of all their
mutual antipathies and hostilities, and numberless contrarieties of
customs and fashions, they have been wonderfully content to resemble one
another in the worst national feature, a deformed condition of their
people. But it is here at home that this condition is the most painfully
forced on our attention; and here also of all the world it is, that such a
wretched exhibition is the severest reproach to the nation for having
suffered its existence.

The subject is to the last degree unattractive, except to a misanthropic
disposition; or to that, perhaps, of a stern theological polemic, when
tempted to be pleased with every superfluity of evidence for overwhelming
the opposers of the doctrine which asserts the radical corruption of our
nature. As spread over a coarse and repulsive moral and physical scenery,
it is a subject in the extreme of contrast with that susceptibility of
magnificent display, on account of which some of the most cruel evils that
have preyed on mankind have ever been favorite themes with writers
ambitious to shine in description. Nor does it present a wild and varying
spectacle, where a crowd of fantastic shapes (as in a view of the pagan
superstitions,) may stimulate and beguile the imagination though we know
we are looking on a great evil. It is a gloomy monotony; Death without his
dance. Moreover, the representation which exhibits one large class
degraded and unhappy, reflects ungraciously, and therefore repulsively, by
an imputation of neglect of duty, on the other classes who are called upon
to look at the spectacle. There is, besides, but little power of arresting
the attention in a description of familiar matter of fact, plain to every
one's observation. Yet ought it not to be so much the better, when we are
pleading for a certain mode of benevolent exertion, that every one can
see, and that no one can deny, the sad reality of all that forms the
object, and imposes the duty, of that exertion?

Look, then, at the neglected ignorant class in their childhood and youth.
One of the most obvious circumstances is the _perfect non-existence in
their minds of any notion or question what their life is for, taken as a
whole._ Among a crowd of trifling and corrupting ideas that soon find a
place in them, there is never the reflective thought,--For what purpose am
I alive? What is it that I should be, more than the animal that I am? Does
it signify _what_ I may be?--But surely, it is with ill omen that the
human creature advances into life without such a thought. He should in the
opening of his faculties receive intimations, that something more belongs
to his existence than what he is about to-day, and what he may be about
to-morrow. He should be made aware that the course of activity he is
beginning ought to have a leading principle o

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