augmented to you, by the mortification of observing impatience of this suspension of their usual and favorite tenor of discourse, betrayed in marks of suppressed irritation, or rather by the withdrawing of one, and another, from the company. But it was quite enough to render the moments and feelings some of the most disconsolate you had ever experienced, to have thus immediately before you a number of rational beings as in a dark prison-house, and to feel the impotence of your friendly efforts to bring them out. Their darkness of ignorance infused into your spirit the darkness of melancholy, when you perceived that the fittest words you could think of, in every change and combination in which you could dispose them, failed to impart to their understanding, in the meaning you wanted to convey, the most elementary and essential ideas of the most momentous subject.
You thought again, perhaps, and again, Surely _this_ mode of expression, or _this_, as it is in words not out of common usage, will define the thing to their apprehension. But you were forced to perceive that the common phraseology of the language, those words which make the substance of ordinary discourse on ordinary subjects, had not, for the understandings of these persons, a general applicableness. It seemed as if the mere elemental vehicle, (if we may so name it,) available indifferently for conveying all sorts of sense, except science, had become in its meaning special and exclusive for their own sort of topics. Their narrow associations had rendered it incapable of conveying sense to them on matters foreign to their habits. When used on a subject to which they were quite unaccustomed, it became like a stream which, though one and the same current, flows clear on the one side, and muddy (as we sometimes see for a space) on the other; and to them it was clear only at their own edge. And if thus even the plain popular language turned dark on their understandings when employed in explanation of religion, it is easy to imagine what had been the success of a more peculiarly theological phraseology, though it were limited to such terms as are of frequent use in the Bible.
You continued, however, the effort for a while. As desirous to show you due civility, some of the persons, perhaps the oldest, would give assent to what you said, with some sign of acknowledgment of the importance of the concern. The assent would perhaps be expressed in a form meant and believed to be equivalent to what you had said. And when it gave an intelligible idea, it might probably betray the grossest possible misconception of the first principles of Christianity. It might be a crude formation from the very same substance of which some of the worst errors of popery are constituted; and might strongly suggest to you, in a glance of thought, how easily popery might have become the religion of ignorance; how naturally ignorance and corrupt feeling mixing with a slight vague notion of Christianity, would turn it into just such a thing as popery. You tried, perhaps, with repeated modifications of your expression, and attempts at illustration, to loosen the false notion, and to place the true one contrasted with it in such a near obviousness to the apprehension, that at least the difference should be seen, and (perhaps you hoped) a little movement excited to think on the subject, and make a serious question of it. But all in vain. The hoary subject of your too late instruction, (a spectacle reminding you painfully of the words which denominate the sign of old age “crown of glory,”) either would still take it that it came all to the same thing, or, if compelled to perceive that you really were trying to make him _unthink_ his poor old notions, and learn something new and contrary, would probably retreat, in a little while, into a half sullen, half despondent silence, after observing, that he was too old, “the worse was the luck,” to be able to learn about such things, which he never had, like you, the “scholarship” and the time for.
In several of the party you perceived the signs of almost a total blank. They seemed but to be waiting for any trifling incident to take their attention, and keep their minds alive. Some one with a little more of listening curiosity, but without caring about the subject, might have to observe, that it seemed to him the same kind of thing that the methodist parson, (the term most likely to be used if any very serious and earnest Christian instructor had appeared in the neighborhood,) was lately saying in such a one’s funeral-sermon. It is too possible that one or two of the visages of the company, of the younger people especially, might wear, during a good part of the time, somewhat of a derisive smile, meaning, “What odd kind of stuff all this is;” as if they could not help thinking it ludicrously strange that any one should be talking of God, of the Saviour of mankind, the facts of the Bible, the welfare of the soul, the shortness and value of life, and a future account, when he might be talking of the neighboring fair, past or expected, or the local quarrels, or the last laughable incident or adventure of the hamlet. It is particularly observable, that grossly ignorant persons are very apt to take a ludicrous impression from high and solemn subjects; at least when introduced in any other time or way than in the ceremonial of public religious service; when brought forward as a personal concern, demanding consideration everywhere, and which may be urged by individual on individual. You have commonly enough seen this provoke the grin of stupidity and folly. And if you asked yourselves, (for it were in vain to ask _them_,) why it produced this so perverse effect, you had only to consider that, to minds abandoned through ignorance to be totally engrossed by the immediate objects of sense, the grave assumption, and emphatic enforcement, of the transcendent importance of a wholly unseen and spiritual economy, has much the appearance and effect of a great lie attempted to be passed on them. You might indeed recollect also, that the most which some of them are likely to have learnt about religion, is the circumstance, that the persons professing to make it an earnest concern are actually regarded as fit objects of derision by multitudes, not of the vulgar order only, but including many of the wealthy, the genteel, the magisterial, and the dignified in point of rank.
Individuals of the most ignorant class may stroll into a place of worship, bearing their character so conspicuously in their appearance and manner as to draw the particular notice of the preacher, while addressing the congregation. It may be, that having taken their stare round the place, they go out, just, it may happen, when he is in the midst of a marked, prominent, and even picturesque illustration, perhaps from some of the striking facts or characters of the Scripture history, which had not made the slightest ingress on their thoughts or imagination. Or they are pleased to stay through the service; during which his eye is frequently led to where several of them may be seated together. Without an appearance of addressing them personally, he shall be excited to direct a special effort toward what he surmises to be the state of their minds. He may in this effort acquire an additional force, emphasis, and pointedness of delivery; but especially his utmost mental force shall be brought into action to strike upon their faculties with vivid, rousing ideas, plainly and briefly expressed. And he fancies, perhaps, that he has at least arrested their attention; that what is going from his mind is in some manner or other taking a place in theirs; when some inexpressibly trivial occurring circumstance shows him, that the hold he has on them is not of the strength of a spider’s web. Those thoughts, those intellects, those souls, are instantly and wholly gone–from a representation of one of the awful visitations of divine judgment in the ancient world–a description of sublime angelic agency, as in some recorded fact in the Bible–an illustration of the discourse, miracles, or expiatory sorrows of the Redeemer of the world–a strong appeal to conscience on past sin–a statement, perhaps in the form of example, of an important duty in given circumstances–a cogent enforcement of some specific point as of most essential moment in respect to eternal safety;–from the attempted grasp, or supposed seizure, of any such subject, these rational spirits started away, with infinite facility, to the movements occasioned by the falling of a hat from a peg.
By the time that any semblance of attention returns, the preacher’s address may have taken the form of pointed interrogation, with very defined supposed facts, or even real ones, to give the question and its principle as it were a tangible substance. Well; just at the moment when his questions converge to a point, which was to have been a dart of conviction striking the understanding, and compelling the common sense and conscience of the auditors to answer for themselves,–at that moment, he perceives two or three of the persons he had particularly in view begin an active whispering, prolonged with the accompaniment of the appropriate vulgar smiles. They may possibly relapse at length, through sheer dulness, into tolerable decorum; and the instructor, not quite losing sight of them, tries yet again, to impel some serious ideas through the obtuseness of their mental being. But he can clearly perceive, after the animal spirits have thus been a little quieted by the necessity of sitting still awhile, the signs of a stupid vacancy, which is hardly sensible that anything is actually saying, and probably makes, in the case of some of the individuals, what is mentally but a slight transition to yawning and sleep.
Utter ignorance is a most effectual fortification to a bad state of the mind. Prejudice may perhaps, be removed; unbelief may be reasoned with; even demoniacs have been compelled to bear witness to the truth; but the stupidity of confirmed ignorance not only defeats the ultimate efficacy of the means for making men wiser and better, but stands in preliminary defiance to the very act of their application. It reminds us of an account, in one of the relations of the French Egyptian campaigns, of the attempt to reduce a garrison posted in a bulky fort of mud. Had the defences been of timber, the besiegers might have set fire to and burned them; had they been of stone, they might have shaken and ultimately breached them by the battery of their cannon; or they might have undermined and blown them up. But the huge mound of mud had nothing susceptible of fire or any other force; the missiles from the artillery were discharged but to be buried in the dull mass; and all the means of demolition were baffled.
The most melancholy of the exemplifications of the effect of ignorance, as constituting an incapacity for receiving religious instruction, have been presented to those who have visited persons thus devoid of knowledge in sickness and the approach to death. Supposing them to manifest alarm and solicitude, it is deplorable to see how powerless their understandings are, for any distinct conception of what, or why, it is that they fear, or regret, or desire. The objects of their apprehension come round them as vague forms of darkness, instead of distinctly exhibited dangers and foes, which they might steadily contemplate, and think how to escape or encounter. And how little does the benevolent instructor find it possible for him to do, when he applies his mind to the painful task of reducing this gloomy confused vision to the plain defined truth of their unhappy situation, set in order before their eyes.
He deems it necessary to speak of the most elementary principles–the perfect holiness and justice of God–the corresponding holiness and the all-comprehending extent of his law, appointed to his creatures–the absolute duty of conformity to it in every act, word, and thought–the necessary condemnation consequent on failure–the dreadful evil, therefore, of sin, both in its principle and consequences. God–perfect holiness–justice–law–universal conformity–sin–condemnation! Alas! the hapless auditor has no such sense of the force of terms, and no such analogical ideas, as to furnish the medium for conveying these representations to his understanding. He never had, at any time; and now there may be in his mind all the additional confusion, and incapacity of fixed attention, arising from pain, debility, and sleeplessness. All this therefore passes before him with a tenebrious glimmer; like lightning faintly penetrating to a man behind a thick black curtain.
The instructor attempts a personal application, endeavoring to give the disturbed conscience a rational direction, and a distinct cognizance. But he finds, as he might expect to find, that a conscience without knowledge has never taken but a very small portion of the man’s habits of life under its jurisdiction; and that it is a most hopeless thing to attempt to send it back reinforced, to reclaim and conquer, through all the past, the whole extent of its rightful but never assumed dominion. So feeble and confined in the function of judgment through which it must see and act, it is especially incapable of admitting the monitor’s estimate of the measure of guilt involved in omission, and in an irreligious state of the mind, as an exceedingly grave addition to the account of criminal action. The man is totally and honestly unable to conceive of the substantial guilt of anything of which he can ask, what injury it has done to anybody. This single point–whether positive harm has been done to any one–comprehends the whole essence and sum of the conscious accountableness of very ignorant people. Material wrong, _very_ material wrong, to their fellow mortals, they have a conscience that they should not do; a conscience, however, which they would deem it hard to be obliged to maintain entire even to this confined extent; and which therefore admits some compromise and gives some license, with respect especially to any kind of wrong which has the extenuation, as they deem it, of being commonly practised in their class; and against which there is a sort of understanding that each one must take the best care he can of himself. At this confine, so undecidedly marked, of practical, tangible wrong, these very ignorant persons lose the sense of obligation, and feel absolved from any further jurisdiction. So coarse and narrow a conscience as to what they _do_, is not likely to be refined and extended into a cognizance of what they _are_. As for a duty absolute in the nature of things, or as owing to themselves, in respect to their own nature, or as imposed by the Almighty–_that their minds should be in a certain prescribed state_–there does really require a perfectly new manner of the action of intellect to enable them to apprehend its existence. And this habitual insensibility to any jurisdiction over their internal state, now meets, in its consequences, the supposed instructor. In consideration of the vast importance of this part of a rational creature’s accountableness, and partly, too, from a desire to avoid the invidiousness of appearing as a judicial censor of the sick man’s practical conduct, he insists in an especial manner on this subject of the state within, endeavoring to expose that dark world by the light of religion to the sick man’s conscience. But to give in an hour the _understanding_ which it requires the discipline of many years to render competent! How vain the attempt! The man’s sense of guilt fixes almost exclusively on something that has been improper in his practical courses. He professes to acknowledge the evil of this; and perhaps with a certain stress of expression; intended, by an apparent respondence to the serious emphasis which the monitor is laying on another part of the accountableness and guilt, to take him off from thus endeavoring, as it appears to the ignorant sufferer, to make him more of a sinner than there is any reason, so little can he conceive that it should much signify what his thoughts, tempers, affections, motives, and so forth, may have been. By continuing to press the subject, the instructor may find himself in danger of being regarded as having taken upon him the unkind office of inquisitor and accuser in his own name, and of his own will and authority.
When inculcating the necessity of repentance, he will perceive the indistinctness of apprehension of the difference between the horror of sin merely from dread of impending consequences, and an antipathy to its essential nature. And even if this distinction, which admits of easy forms of exemplification, should thus be rendered in a degree intelligible, the man cannot make the application. The instructor observes, as one of the most striking results of a want of disciplined mental exercise, an utter inability for self-inspection. There is before his eyes, looking at him, but a stranger to himself, a man on whose mind no other mind, except One, can shed a light of self-manifestation, to save him from the most fatal mistakes.
If the monitor would turn, (rather from an impulse to relieve the gloom of the scene, than from anything he sees of a hopeful approach toward a right apprehension of the austerer truths of religion,) if he would turn his efforts, to the effect of directing on this dark spirit the benign rays of the Christian redemption, what is he to do for terms,–yes, for very terms? Mediator, sacrifice, atonement, satisfaction, faith; even the expression, believing in Christ; merit of the death of Christ, acquittal, acceptance, justification;–he knows, or soon will find, that he is talking the language of an occult science. And he is forced down to such expedients of grovelling paraphrase, and humiliating analogy, that he becomes conscious that his method of endeavoring to make a divine subject comprehensible, is to divest it of its dignity, and reduce it, in order that it may not confound, to the rank of things which have not majesty enough to impress with awe. And after this has been done, to the utmost of his ability, and to the unavoidable weariness of his suffering auditor, he is distressed to think of the proportion between the insignificance of any ideas which this man’s mind now possesses of the economy of redemption, and the magnitude of the interest in which he stands dependent on it. A symptom or assurance which should impart to the sick man a confidence of his recovery, would appear to him a far greater good than all he can comprehend as offered to him from the Physician of the soul. Some crude sentiment, as that he “hopes Jesus Christ will stand his friend;” that it was very good of the Saviour to think of us; that he wishes he knew what to do to get his help; that Jesus Christ has done him good in other things, and he hopes he will now again at the last; [Footnote: Such an expression as this would hardly have occurred but from recollection of fact, in the instance of an aged farmer, (the owner of the farm,) in his last illness. In the way of reassuring his somewhat doubtful hope that Christ would not fail him when now had recourse to, at his extreme need, he said, (to the writer,) “Jesus Christ has sent me a deal of good crops.”]–such expressions will afford little to alleviate the gloomy feelings, with which the serious visitor descends from the chamber in which, perhaps, he may hear, a few days after, that the man he conversed with lies a dead body.
But such benevolent visitors have to tell of still more melancholy exemplifications of the effects of ignorance in the close of life. They have seen the neglect of early cultivation, and the subsequent estrangement from all knowledge and thinking, except about business and folly, result in such a stupefaction of mind, that irreligious and immoral persons, expecting no more than a few days of life, and not in a state of physical lethargy, were absolutely incapable of being alarmed at the near approach of death. They might not deny, nor in the infidel sense disbelieve, what was said to them of the awfulness of that event and its consequences; but they had actually never thought enough of death to have any solemn associations with the idea. And their faculties were become so rigidly shrunk up, that they could not now admit them; no, not while the portentous spectre was unveiling his visage to them, in near and still nearer approach; not when the element of another world was beginning to penetrate through the rents of their mortal tabernacle. It appeared that literally their thoughts _could not_ go out from what they had been through life immersed in, to contemplate, with any realizing feeling, a grand change of being, expected so soon to come on them. They could not go to the fearful brink to look off. It was a stupor of the soul not to be awaked but by the actual plunge into the realities of eternity. In such a case the instinctive repugnance to death might be visible and acknowledged. But the feeling was, If it must be so, there is no help for it; and as to what may come after, we must take our chance. In this temper and manner, we recollect a sick man, of this untaught class, answering the inquiry how he felt himself, “Getting worse; I suppose I shall make a die of it.” And some pious neighbors, earnestly exhorting him to solemn concern and preparation, could not make him understand, we repeat with emphasis, _understand_ why there was occasion for any extraordinary disturbance of mind. Yet this man was not inferior to those around him in sense for the common business of life.
After a tedious length of suffering, and when death is plainly inevitable, it is not very uncommon for persons under this infatuation to express a wish for its arrival, simply as a deliverance from what they are enduring, without disturbing themselves with a thought of what may follow. “I know it will please God soon to release me,” was the expression to his religious medical attendant, of such an ignorant and insensible mortal, within an hour of his death, which was evidently and directly brought on by his vices. And he uttered it without a word, or the smallest indicated emotion, of penitence or solicitude; though he had passed his life in a neighborhood abounding with the public means of religious instruction and warning.
When earnest, persisting, and seriously menacing admonitions, of pious visitors or friends, almost literally compel such unhappy persons to some precise recognition of the subject, their answers will often be faithfully representative, and a consistent completion, of their course through mental darkness, from childhood to the mortal hour. We recollect the instance of a wicked old man, who, within that very hour, replied to the urgent admonitions by which a religious neighbor felt it a painful duty to make a last effort to alarm him, “What! do you believe that God can think of damning me because I may have been as bad as other folk? I am sure he will do no such thing: he is far too good for that.”
We cannot close this detailed illustration of so gloomy a subject, without again adverting to a phenomenon as admirable as, unhappily, it is rare; and for which the observers who cannot endure mystery in religion, or religion itself, may go, if they choose, round the whole circle of their philosophy, and begin again, to find any adequate cause, other than the most immediate agency of the Almighty Spirit. Here and there an instance occurs, to the delight of the Christian philanthropist, of a person brought up in utter ignorance and barbarian rudeness, and so continuing till late in life; and then at last, after such a length of time and habit has completed its petrifying effect, suddenly seized upon by a mysterious power, and taken, with an alarming and irresistible force, out of the dark hold in which the spirit has lain imprisoned and torpid, into the sphere of thought and feeling.
Occasion is taken this once more of adverting to such facts, not so much for the purpose of magnifying the nature, as of simply exhibiting the effect, of an influence that can breathe with such power on the obtuse intellectual faculties; which it appears, in the most signal of these instances, almost to create anew. It is exceedingly striking to observe how the contracted, rigid soul seems to soften, and grow warm, and expand, and quiver with life. With the new energy infused, it painfully struggles to work itself into freedom, from the wretched contortion in which it has so long been fixed as by the impressed spell of some infernal magic. It is seen filled with a distressed and indignant emotion at its own ignorance; actuated with a restless earnestness to be informed; acquiring an unwonted pliancy of its faculties to thought; attaining a perception, combined of intelligence and moral sensibility, to which numerous things are becoming discernible and affecting, that were as non-existent before. It is not in the very extreme strength of their import that we employ such terms of description; the malice of irreligion may easily parody them into poetical excess; but we have known instances in which the change, the intellectual change, has been so conspicuous, within a brief space of time, that even an infidel observer must have forfeited all claim to be esteemed a man of sense, if he would not acknowledge,–This that you call divine grace, whatever it may really be, is the strangest awakener of faculties after all. And to a devout man, it is a spectacle of most enchanting beauty, thus to see the immortal plant, which has been under a malignant blast while sixty or seventy years have passed over it, coming out at length in the bloom of life.
We cannot hesitate to draw the inference, that if religion is so auspicious to the intellectual faculties, the cultivation and exercise of those faculties must be of great advantage to religion.
These observations on ignorance, considered as an incapacitation for receiving religious instruction, are pointed chiefly at that portion of the people, unhappily the largest, who are little disposed to attend to that kind of instruction. But we should notice its prejudicial effect on those of them to whom religion has become a matter of serious and inquisitive concern. The preceding assertions of the efficacy of a strong religious interest to excite and enlarge the intellectual faculty will not be contradicted by observing, nevertheless, that in a dark and crude state of that facility those well-disposed persons, especially if of a warm temperament withal, are unfortunately liable to receive delusive impressions and absurd notions, blended with religious doctrine and sentiment. It would be no less than plain miracle or inspiration, a more entire and specific superseding of ordinary laws than that which we have just been denominating “an immediate agency of the Almighty Spirit,” if a mind left uncultivated all up through the earlier age, and perhaps far on in life, should not come to its new employment on a most important subject with a sadly defective capacity for judgment and discrimination. The situation reminds us of an old story of a tribe of Indians denominated “moon-eyed,” who, not being able to look at things by the light of the sun, were reduced to look at them under the glimmering of the moon, by which light it is an inevitable circumstance of human vision to receive the images of things in perverted and deceptive forms.
Even in such an extremely rare instance as that above described, an example of the superlative degree of the animating and invigorating influence of religion on the uncultivated faculties, there would be visible some of the unfortunate consequences of the inveterate rudeness; a tendency, perhaps, to magnify some one thing beyond its proportionate importance to adopt hasty conclusions; to entertain some questionable or erroneous principle because it appears to solve a difficulty, or perhaps falls in with an old prepossession; to make too much account of variable and transitory feelings; or to carry zeal beyond the limits of discretion. In examples of a lower order of the correction or reversal of the effects of ignorance by the influence of religion, the remains will be still more palpable. So that, while it is an unquestionable and gratifying fact, that among the uneducated subjects of genuine religion many are remarkably improved in the power and exercise of their reason; and while we may assume that _some_ share of this improvement reaches to all who are really under this most beneficent influence in the creation, [Footnote: _Really_ under this influence, we repeat, pointedly; for we justly put all others out of the account. It is nothing (as against this asserted influence on the intelligent faculty) that great numbers who may contribute to swell a public bustle about religion; who may run together at the call of whim, imposture, or insanity, assuming that name; who may acquire, instead of any other folly, a turn for talking, disputing, or ranting, about that subject: it is nothing, in short, that _any_ who are not in real, conscientious seriousness the disciples of religion, can be shown to be no better for it, in point of improved understanding.] it still is to be acknowledged of too many, who are in a measure, we may candidly believe, under the genuine efficacy of religion, that they have attained, through its influence, but so inferior a proportion of the improvement of intellect, that they can be well pleased with the great deal of absurdity of religious notions and language. But while we confess and regret that it is so, we should not overlook the causes and excuses that may be found for it, in unfortunate super-addition to their lack of education; partly in the natural turn of the mind, partly in extraneous circumstances. Many whose attention is in honest earnestness drawn to religion, are endowed by nature with so scanty an allotment of the thinking power, strictly so denominated, that it would have required high cultivation to raise them to the level of moderate understanding. There are some who appear to have constitutionally an invincible tendency to an uncouth, fantastic mode of forming their notions. It is in the nature of others, that whatever cultivation they might have received, it would still have been by their passions, rather than, in any due proportion, by their reason, that an important concern would have taken and retained hold of them. It may have happened to not a few, that circumstances unfavorable to the understanding were connected with the causes or occasions of their first effectual religious impressions. Some quaint cast in the exposition of the Christian faith, not essentially vitiating, but very much distorting and cramping it, or some peculiarity or narrow-mindedness of the teachers, may have conveyed their effect, to enter, as it were, at the door at the same moment that it was opened by the force of a solemn conviction, and to be retained and cherished ever after on the strength of this association. This may have tended to give an obliquity to the disciple’s understanding, or to arrest and dwarf its growth; to fix it in prejudices instead of training it to judgments; or to dispense with its exercise by merging it in a kind of quietism; so that the proper tendency of religion to excite intellectual activity was partly overruled and frustrated. It is most unfortunate that thus there may be, from things casually or constitutionally associated with a man’s piety, an influence operating to disable his understanding; as if there had been mixed with the incense of a devout service in the temple, a soporific ingredient which had the effect of closing the worshipper’s eyes in slumber.
Now suppose all these worthy persons, with so many things of a special kind against them, to be also under the one great calamity of a neglected education, and is it any wonder that they can admit religious truths in shapes very strange and faintly enlightened; that they have an uncertain and capricious test of what is genuine, and not much vigilance to challenge plausible semblances; that they should be caught by some fanciful exhibition of a truth which would be of too intellectual a substance as presented in its pure simplicity; and should be ready to receive with approbation not a little of what is a heavy disgrace to the name of religious doctrine and ministration? Where is the wonder that crudeness, incoherence, and inconsistency of notions, should not disappoint and offend minds that have not, ten times since they came into the world, been compelled to form two ideas with precision, and then compare them discriminately or combine them strictly, on any subject beyond the narrow scope of their ordinary pursuits? Where is the wonder, if many such persons take noise and fustian for a glowing zeal and a lofty elevation; if they mistake a wheedling cant for affectionate solicitude; if they defer to pompous egotism and dogmatical assertion, when it is so convenient a foundation for all their other faith to believe their teacher is an oracle? No marvel if they are delighted with whimsical conceits as strokes of discovery and surprise, and yet at the same time are pleased with common-place, and endless repetition, as an exemption from mental effort; and if they are gratified by vulgarity of diction and illustration, as bringing religion to the level where they are at home? Nay, if an artful pretender, or half-lunatic visionary, or some poor set of dupes of their own inflated self-importance, should give out that they are come into the world for the manifestation, at last, of true Christianity, which the divine revelation has failed, till their advent, to explain to any of the numberless devout and sagacious examiners of it,–what is there in the minds of the most ignorant class of persons desirous to secure the benefits of religion, that can be securely relied on to certify them, that they shall not forego the greatest blessing ever offered to them by setting at naught these pretensions?
It is grievous to think there should be an active extensive currency of a language conveying crudities, extravagances, arrogant dictates of ignorance, pompous nothings, vulgarities, catches of idle fantasy, and impertinences of the speaker’s vanity, as religious instruction to assemblages of ignorant people. But then for the means of depreciating that currency, so as to drive it at last out of circulation? The thing to be wished is, that it were possible to put some strong coercion on the _minds_ (we deprecate all other restraint) of the teachers; a compulsion to feel the necessity of information, sound sense, disciplined thinking, the correct use of words, and an honest, careful purpose to make the people wiser. There are signs of amendment, certainly; but while the passion of human beings for notoriety lasts, (which will be yet some time,) there will not fail to be men, in any number required, ready to exhibit in religion, in any manner in which the people are willing to be pleased with them. Let us, then, try the inverted order, and endeavor to secure that those who assemble to be taught, shall already have learnt so much, _by other means_, that no professed teacher shall feel at liberty to treat them as an unknowing herd. But by what other means, except the discipline of the best education possible to be given to them, and the subsequent voluntary self-improvement to which it may be hoped that such an education would often lead?
We cannot dismiss this topic, of the unhappy effect of extreme ignorance on persons religiously disposed, in rendering them both liable and inclined to receive their ideas of the highest subject in a disorderly, perverted, and debased form, mixed largely with other men’s folly and their own, without noticing with pleasure an additional testimony to the connection between genuine religion and intelligence. It arises from the fact, apparent to any discriminating observer, that as a _general_ rule the most truly pious of the illiterate disciples of religion, those who have the most of its devotional feeling and its humility, do certainly manifest more of the operation of judgment in their religion than is evinced by those of less solemn and devout sentiment. The former will unquestionably be found, when on the same level as to the measure of natural faculty and the want of previous cultivation, to show more discernment, to be less captivated by noise and extravagance, and more intent on obtaining a clear comprehension of that faith, which they feel it is but a reasonable obligation that they should endeavor to understand, if they are to repose on it their most important hopes.
Section VI.
Thus it has been attempted, we fear with too much prolixity and repetition, to describe the evils attendant on a neglected state of the minds of the people. The representation does not comprehend all those even of magnitude and prominence; but it displays that portion of them which is the most serious and calamitous, as being the effect which the people’s ignorance has on their moral and religious interests. And we think no one who has attentively surveyed the state and character of the lower orders of the community, in this country, will impute exaggeration to the picture. It is rather to be feared that the reality is of still darker shade; and that a more strikingly gloomy exhibition might be formed, by such a process as the following:–That a certain number of the most observant of the philanthropic persons, who have had most intercourse with the classes in question, for the purposes of instruction, charitable aid, or perhaps of furnishing employment, should relate the most characteristic circumstances and anecdotes within their own experience, illustrative of this mental and moral condition; and that these should be arranged, without any comment, under the respective heads of the preceding sketch, or of a more comprehensive enumeration. Each of them might repeat, in so many words, the most notable things he has heard uttered as disclosing the notions entertained of the Deity, or any part of religion; or those which have been formed of the ground and extent of duty and accountableness; or the imaginations respecting the termination of life, and a future retribution. They might relate the judgments they have heard pronounced on characters and particular modes of conduct; on important events in the world; on anything, in short, which may afford a test of the quality and compass of uncultivated thought. Let the recital include both the expressions of individual conception, and those of the most current maxims and common-places; and let them be the sayings of persons in health, and of those languishing and dying. Then let there be produced a numerous assortment of characteristic samples of practical conduct; conduct not simply proceeding, in a general way, from wrong disposition, but bearing the special marks of the cast and direction which that disposition takes through extreme ignorance: samples of action that is wrong because the actor cannot think right, or does not think at all. The assemblage of things thus recounted, when the actual circumstances were also added of the wretchedness corresponding and inseparable, would constitute such an exhibition of fact, as any description of those evils in general terms would incur the charge of rhetorical excesses in attempting to rival. We can well imagine that some of these persons, of large experience, may have accompanied us through the foregoing series of illustrations, with a feeling that they could have displayed the subject with a far more striking prominence.
And now again the mortifying reflection comes on us, that all this is the description of too probably the major part of the people of our own nation. Of this nation, the theme of so many lofty strains of panegyric; of this nation, stretching forth its powers in ambitious enterprise, with infinite pride and cost, to all parts of the globe;–just as if a family were seen eagerly intent on making some new appropriation, or going out to maintain some competition or feud with its neighbors, or mixing perhaps in the strife of athletic games, or drunken frays, at the very time that several of its members are lying dead in the house. So that the fame of the nation resounded, and its power made itself felt, in every clime, it was not worth a consideration that a vast proportion of its people were systematically consigned, through ignorance and the irreligion and depravity inseparable from it, to a wretchedness on which that fame was the bitterest satire. It is matter for never-ending amazement, that during one generation after another, the presiding wisdom in this chief of Christian and Protestant States, should have thrown out the living strength of that state into almost every mode of agency under heaven, rather than that of promoting the state itself to the condition of a happy community of cultivated beings. What stupendous infatuation, what disastrous ascendency of the Power of Darkness, that this energy should have been sent forth to pervade all parts of the world in quest of objects, to inspirit and accomplish innumerable projects, political and military, and to lavish itself, even to exhaustion and fainting at its vital source, on every alien interest; while here at home, so large a part of the social body was in a moral and intellectual sense dying and putrefying over the land. And it was thus perishing for want of the vivifying principle of knowledge, which one-fifth part of this mighty amount of exertion would have been sufficient to diffuse into every corner and cottage in the island. Within its circuit, a countless multitude were seen passing away their mortal existence little better, in any view, than mere sentient shapes of matter, and by their depravity immeasurably worse; and yet this hideous fact had not the weight of the very dust of the balance, in the deliberation whether a grand exertion of the national vigor and resource could have any object so worthy, (with God for the Judge,) as some scheme of foreign aggrandizement, some interference in remote quarrels, an avengement by anticipation of wrongs pretended to be foreseen, or the obstinate prosecution of some fatal career, begun in the very levity of pride, by a decision in which some perverse individual or party in ascendency had the influence to obtain a corrupt, deluded, or forced concurrence.
The national _honor_, perhaps, would be alleged, in a certain matter of punctilio, for the necessity of undertakings of incalculable consumption, by men who could see no national _disgrace_ in the circumstance that several millions of the persons composing the nation could not read the ten commandments. Or the national _safety_ has been pleaded to a similar purpose, with a rant or a gravity of patriotic phrases, upon the appearance of some slight threatening symptoms; and the wise men so pleading, would have scouted as the very madness of fanaticism any dissuasion that should have advised,–“Do you, instead, apply your best efforts, and the nation’s means, to raise the barbarous population from their ignorance and debasement, and you really may venture some little trust in Divine Providence for the nation’s safety meanwhile.”
If a contemplative and religious man, looking back through little more than a century, were enabled to take, with an adequate comprehension of intellect, the sum and value of so much of the astonishing course of the national exertions of this country as the Supreme Judge has put to the criminal account of pride and ambition; and if he could then place in contrast to the transactions on which that mighty amount has been expended, a sober estimate of what so much exerted vigor _might_ have accomplished for the intellectual and moral exaltation of the people, it could not be without an emotion of horror that he would say, Who is to be accountable, who _has been_ accountable, for this difference? He would no longer wonder at any plagues and judgments which may have been inflicted on such a state. And he would solemnly adjure all those, especially, who profess in a peculiar manner to feel the power of the Christian Religion, to beware how they implicate themselves, by avowed or even implied approbation, in what must be a matter of fearful account before the highest tribunal. If some such persons, of great merit and influence, honored performers of valuable public services in certain departments, have habitually given, in a public capacity, this approbation, he would urge it on their consciences, in the evening of life, to consider whether, in the prospect of that tribunal, they have not one duty yet to perform,–to throw off from their minds the servility to party associations, to estimate as Christians, about to retire from the scene, the actual effects on this nation of a policy which might have been nearly the same if Christianity had been extinct; and then to record a solemn, recanting, final protest against a system to which they have concurred in the profane policy of degrading that religion itself into a party.
Any reference made to such a prospect implies, that there is attributed to those who can feel its seriousness a state of mind perfectly unknown to the generality of what are called public men. For it is notorious that, to the mere working politician, there is nothing on earth that sounds so idly or so ludicrously as a reference to a judgment elsewhere and hereafter, to which the policy and transactions of statesmen are to be carried. If the Divine jurisdiction would yield to contract its comprehension, and retire from all the ground over which a practical infidelity heedlessly disregards or deliberately rejects it, how large a province it would leave free! If it be assumed that the province of national affairs _is_ so left free, on the pretence that they _cannot_ be transacted in faithful conformity to the Christian standard, that plea is reserved to be tried in the great account, when the responsibility for them shall be charged. For assuredly there will be persons found, to be summoned forth as accountable for that conduct of states which we are contemplating. Such a moral agency could not throw off its responsibility into the air, to be dissipated and lost, like the black smoke of forges or volcanoes. This one grand thing (the improvement of the people) left undone, while a thousand arduous things have been done or strenuously endeavored, cannot be less than an awful charge _somewhere_. And where?–but on all who have voluntarily concurred and co-operated in systems and schemes, which could deliberately put _such_ a thing last? Last! nay, not even that; for they have, till recently, as we have seen, thrown it almost wholly out of consideration. A long succession of men invested with ample power are gone to this audit. How many of those who come after them will choose to proceed on the same principles, and meet the same award?
We were supposing a thoughtful man to draw out to his view a parallel and contrast, exhibiting, on the one side, the series of objects on which, during several ages, an enormous exertion of the national energy has been directed; and on the other, those improvements of the people which might have been effected by so much of that exertion as he deems to have been worse than wasted. In this process, he might often be inclined to single out particular parts in the actual series, to be put in special contrast over against the possibilities on the opposite line. For example; there may occur to his view some inconsiderable island, the haunt of fatal diseases, and rendered productive by means involving the most flagrant iniquity; an iniquity which it avenges by opening a premature grave for many of his countrymen, and by being a moral corrupter of the rest. Such an infested spot, nevertheless, may have been one of the most material objects of a widely destructive war, which has in effect sunk incalculable treasure in the sea, and in the sands, ditches, and fields of plague-infested shores; with a dreadful sacrifice of blood, life, and all the best moral feelings and habits. Its possession, perhaps, was the chief prize and triumph of all the grand exertion, the equivalent for all the cost, misery, and crime.
Or there may occur to him the name of some fortress, in a less remote region, where the Christian nations seem to have vied with one another which of them should deposit the greatest number of victims, securely kept in the charge of death, to rise and testify for them, at the last day, how much they have been governed by the peaceful spirit of their professed religion. He reads that his countrymen, conjoined with others, have battled round this fortress, wasting the vicinity, but richly manuring the soil with blood. They have co-operated in hurling upon the abodes of thousands of inhabitants within its walls, a thunder and lightning incomparably more destructive than those of nature; and have put fire and earthquake under the fortifications; shouting, “to make the welkin ring,” at sight of the consequent ruin and chasm, which have opened an entrance for hostile rage, or compelled an immediate submission, if, indeed, it would then be accepted to disappoint that rage of its horrible consummation. They have taken the place,–and they have surrendered it. The next year perhaps they have taken it again; to be again at last given up, on compulsion or in compromise, to the very same party to which it had belonged previously to all this destructive commotion. The operations in this local and very narrow portion of the grand affray of monarchies, he may calculate to have cost his country as much as the amount earned by the toils of half the life of all the inhabitants of one of its populous towns; setting aside from his view the more portentous part of the account,–the carnage, the crimes, and the devastation perpetrated on the foreign tract, the place of abode of people who had little interest in the contest, and no power to prevent it. And why was all this? He may not be able to divest himself of the principles that should rule the judgment of a moralist and a Christian, in order to think like a statesman; and therefore may find no better reason than that, when despots would quarrel, Britain must fancy itself called upon to take the occasion to prove itself a great power, by bearing a high hand amidst their rivalries; or must seize the opportunity of revenging some trivial offence of one of them; though this should be at the expense of having the scene at home chequered between children learning little more than how to curse, and old persons dying without knowing how to put words together to pray.
The question may have been, in one part of the world or another, which of two wicked individuals of the same family, competitors for sovereign authority, should be actually invested with it, they being equal in the qualifications and dispositions to make the worst use of it. And the decision of such a question was worthy that England should expend what remained of her depressed strength from previous exertions of it in some equally meritorious cause.
Or the supposed reviewer of our national history may find, somewhere in his retrospect, that a certain brook or swamp in a wilderness, or a stripe of waste, or the settlement of boundaries in respect to some insignificant traffic, was difficult of adjustment between jealous, irritated, and mutually incursive neighbors; and therefore, national honor and interest equally required that war should be lighted up by land and sea, through several quarters of the globe. Or a dissension may have arisen upon the matter of some petty tax on an article of commerce: an absolute will had been rashly signified on the claim; pride had committed itself, and was peremptory for persisting; and the resolution was to be prosecuted through a wide tempest of destruction, protracted perhaps many years; and only ending in the forced abandonment by the leading power concerned, of infinitely more than war had been made in the determination not to forego; and after an absolutely fathomless amount of every kind of cost, financial and moral, in this progress to final frustration.–But there would be no end of recounting facts of this order.
Now the comparative estimator has to set against the extended rank of such enormities the forms of imagined good, which might, during the ages of this retrospect, have been realized by an incomparably less exhausting series of exertion, an exertion, indeed, continually renovating its own resources. Imagined good, we said;–alas! the evil stands in long and awful display on the ground of history; the hypothetical good presents itself as a dream; with this circumstance only of difference from a dream, that there is resting on the conscience of beings somewhere still existing, a fearful accountableness for its not having been a reality.
For such an _island_, as we have supposed our comparer to read of, he can look, in imagination, on a space of proportional extent in any part of his native country, taking a district as a detached section of a general national picture. And he can figure to himself the result, resplendent upon this tract, of so much energy, there beneficently expended, as that island had cost: an energy, we mean _equivalent in measure_, while put forth in the infinitely different _mode_ of an exertion, by all appropriate means, to improve the reason, manners, morals, and with them the physical condition of the people. What a prevalence of intelligence, what a delightful civility of deportment, what repression of the more gross and obtrusive forms of vice, what domestic decorum, attentive education of the children, appropriateness of manner, and readiness of apprehension in attendance on public offices of religion, sense and good order in assemblages for the assertion and exercise of civil and political rights! All this he can imagine as the possible result.
We were supposing his attention fixed a while on the recorded operations against some strongly fortified place, in a region marked through every part with the traces and memorials of the often-renewed conflicts of the Christian states. And we suppose him to make a collective estimate of all kinds of human ability exerted around and against that particular devoted place; an estimate which divides this off as a portion of the whole immense quantity of exertion, expended by his country in all that region in the campaigns of a war, or of a century’s wars. He may then again endeavor, by a rule of equivalence, to conceive the same amount of exertion in quite another way; to imagine human forces equal in _quantity_ to all that putting forth of strength, physical, mental, and financial, for annoyance and destruction, expended instead, in the operation of effecting the utmost improvement which they _could_ effect, in the mental cultivation and the morals of the inhabitants of one large town in his own country.
In figuring to himself the channels and instrumentality, through which this great stream of energy might have passed into this operation, on a detached spot of his country, he will soon have many specific means presented to his view: schools of the most perfect appointment, in every section and corner of the town; a system of friendly but cogent dealing with all the people of inferior condition, relatively to the necessity of their practical accordance to the plans of education;[Footnote: It is here confidently presumed, that any man who looks, in a right state of his senses, at the manner in which the children are still brought up, in many parts of the land, will hear with contempt any hypocritical protest against so much interference with the discretion, the liberty of parents;–the discretion, the liberty, forsooth, of bringing up their children a nuisance on the face of the earth.] an exceedingly copious supply, for individual possession, of the best books of elementary knowledge; accompanied, as we need not say, by the sacred volume; a number of assortments of useful and pleasing books for circulation, established under strict order, and with appointments of honorary and other rewards to those who gave evidence of having made the best use of them; a number of places of resort where various branches of the most generally useful and attainable knowledge and arts should be explained and applied, by every expedient of familiar, practical, and entertaining illustration, admitting a degree of co-operation by those who attended to see and hear; and an abundance of commodious places for religious instruction on the Sabbath, where there should be wise and zealous men to impart it. Our speculator has a right to suppose a high degree of these qualifications in his public teachers of religion, when he is to imagine a parallel in this department to the skill and ardor displayed in the supposed military operations. He may add as subsidiary to such an apparatus, everything of magistracy and municipal regulation; a police, vigilant and peremptory against every cognizable neglect and transgression of good order; a resolute breaking up of all haunts and rendezvous of intemperance, dishonesty and other vice; and the best devised and administered institutions for correcting and reclaiming those whom education had failed to preserve from such depravity; and besides all this, there would be a great variety of undefinable and optional activity of benevolent and intelligent men of local influence.
Under so auspicious a combination of discipline, he will not indeed fancy, in his transient vision, that he beholds Athens revived, with its bright intelligence all converted to minister to morality, religion, and happiness; but he will, in sober consistency, we think, with what is known of the relation of cause and effect, imagine a place far surpassing any actual town or city on earth. And let it be distinctly kept in view, that to reduce the ideal exhibition to reality, he is not dreaming of means and resources out of all human reach, of preternatural powers, discovered gold-mines, grand feats of genius. He is just supposing to have been expended, on the population of the town, a measure of exertion and means equal, (as far as agencies in so different a form and direction can be brought to any rule of comparative estimate) to what has been expended by his country in investing, battering, undermining, burning, taking, and perhaps retaking, one particular foreign town, in one or several campaigns.
If he should perchance be sarcastically questioned, how he can allow himself in so strange a conceit as that of supposing such a quantity of forces concentrated to act in one exclusive spot, while the rest of the country remained under the old course of things; or in such an absurdity as that of fancying that _any_ quantity of those forces could effectually raise one local section of the people eminently aloft, while continuing surrounded and unavoidably in constant intercourse with the general mass, remaining still sunk in degradation–he has to reply, that he is fancying no such thing. For while he is thus converting, in imagination, the military exertions against one foreign town, into intellectual and moral operations on one town at home, why may he not, in similar imagination, make a whole country correspond to a whole country? He may conceive the incalculable amount of exertion made by his country, in martial operations over all that wide foreign territory of which he has selected a particular spot, to have been, on the contrary, expended in the supposed beneficent process on the great scale of this whole nation. Then would the hypothetical improvement in the one particular town, so far from being a strange insulated phenomenon, absurd to be conceived as existing in exception and total contrast to the general state of the people, be but a specimen of that state.
He may proceed along the series of such confronted spectacles as far as bitter mortification will let him. But he will soon be sick of this process of comparison. And how sick will he thenceforward be, to perpetual loathing, of the vain raptures with which an immortal and anti-Christian patriotism can review a long history of what it will call national glory, acquired by national energy ambitiously consuming itself in a continual succession and unlimited extent of extraneous operations, of that kind which has been the grand curse of the human race ever since the time of Cain; while the one thing needful of national welfare, the very _summum bonum_ of a state, has been regarded with contemptuous indifference.
These observations are not made on an assumption, that England could in all cases have kept clear of implication in foreign interests, and remote and sanguinary contests. But they are made on the assumption of what is admitted and deplored by every thoughtful religious man, whose understanding and moral sense are not wretchedly prostrated in homage to a prevailing system, and chained down by a superstition that dares not question the wisdom and probity of high national authorities and counsels. What is so admitted and deplored by the true and Christian patriots is, that this nation has gone to an awfully criminal extent beyond the line of necessity; that it has been extremely prompt to find or make occasions for appearing again, and still again, in array for the old work of waste and death; and that the advantage possessed by the preponderating classes in this protestant country, for being instructed (if they had cared for such instruction) to look at these transactions in the light of religion, has reflected a peculiar aggravation on the guilt of a policy persevered in from age to age, in disregard of the laws of Christianity, and the warning of accountableness to the Sovereign Judge.
These observations assume, also, that there _cannot_ be such a thing as a nation so doomed to a necessity and duty of expending its vigor and means in foreign enterprise, as to be habitually absolved from the duty of raising its people from brutish ignorance. _This_ concern is a duty at all events and to an entire certainty; is a duty imperative and absolute; and any pretended necessity for such a direction of the national exertion as would be, through a long succession of time, incompatible with a paramount attention to this, would be a virtual denial of the superintendence of Providence. It would be the same thing as to assert of an individual, that his duties of other kinds are so many and great, as to render it impossible for him to give a competent attention to his highest interests, and that therefore he stands exempted from the obligations of religion.
Such as we have described has been, for ages, the degraded state of the multitude. And such has been the indifference to it, manifested by the superior, the refined, the ascendant portion of the community; who, generally speaking, could see these sharers with them of the dishonored human nature, in endless numbers around them, in the city and the field, without its ever flashing on conscience that on them was lying a solemn responsibility, destined to press one day with all its weight, for that ill arrangement of the social order which abandoned these beings to an exclusion from the sphere of rational existence. It never occurred to many of them as a question of the smallest moment, in what manner the mind might be living in all these bodies, if only it were there in competence to make them efficient as machines and implements. Contented to be gazed at, to be envied, or to be regarded as too high even for envy, and to have the rough business of the world performed by these inhalers of the vital air, they perhaps thought, if they reflected at all on the subject, that the best and most privileged state of such creatures was to be in the least possible degree morally accountable: and that therefore it would be but doing them an injury to enlarge their knowledge. And might not the thought be suggested at some moment, (see how many things may be envied in their turns!) how happy _they_ should be, if, with the vast superiority of their advantages, they could still be just as little accountable? But if even in this way, of envy, they received an unwelcome admonition of their own high responsibility, not even then was it suggested to them, that they should ever be arraigned on a charge to which they would vainly wish to be permitted to plead, “Were we our brothers’ keepers?” And if an office designated in those terms had been named to them, as a part of their duty, by some unearthly voice of imperious accent, their thoughts might have traversed hither and thither, in various conjectures and protracted perplexity, before the objects of that office had been presented explicitly to their apprehension as no other than the reason, principles, consciences, and the whole moral condition of the vulgar mass. They would understand that its condition was, _in some way or other_, a concern lying at their door, but probably not in this.–We speak generally, and not universally.
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But we would believe there are signs of a revolution beginning; a more important one, by its higher principle and its expansive impulse toward a wide and remote beneficence, than the ordinary events of that name. What have commonly been the matter and circumstance of revolutions? The last deciding blow in a deadly competition of equally selfish parties; actions and reactions of ambition and revenge; the fiat of a conqueror; a burst of blind fury, suddenly sweeping away an old order of things, but overwhelming to all attempts to substitute a better institution; plots, massacres, battles, dethronements, restorations: all actuated by a fermentation of the ordinary or the basest elements of humanity. How little of the sublime of moral agency has there been, with one or two partial exceptions, in these mighty commotions; how little wisdom or virtue, or reference to the Supreme Patron of national interests; how little nobleness or even distinctness of purpose, or consolidated advantage of success! But here is, as we trust, the approach of a revolution with different phenomena. It displays the nature of its principle and its ambition in a conviction, far more serious and extensive than heretofore, of the necessity of education to the mass of the population, with earnest discussions of its scope and methods by both speculative and practical men; in schemes, more speedily animated into operation than good designs were wont to be, for spreading useful knowledge over tracts of the dead waste where there was none; in exciting tens of thousands of young persons to a benevolent and patient activity in the instruction of the children of the poor; in an extended and extending system of means and exertions for the universal diffusion of the sacred scriptures; in multiplying endeavors, in all regular and all uncanonical ways, to render it next to impossible for the people to avoid hearing some sounds at least of the voice of religion; in the formation of useful local institutions too various to come under one denomination; in enterprises to attempt an opening of the vast prison-houses of human spirits in dark distant regions; in bringing to the test of principles many notions and practices which have stood on the authority of prejudice, custom, and prescription: and all this taking advantage of the new and powerful spirit which has come on the world to drive its affairs into commotion and acceleration; as bold adventurers have sometimes availed themselves of a formidable torrent to be conveyed whither the stream in its ordinary state would never have carried them; or as we have heard of heroic assailants seizing the moment of a tempest to break through the enemy’s lines.–Such are some of the insignia by which it stands distinguished out and far off from the rank of ordinary revolutions.
We are not unaware that, with certain speculators on this same subject of meliorating the state and character of the people, some of the things here specified will be of small account, either as signs of a great change, or as means of promoting it. The widely spreading activity of a humble class of laborers, who seek no fame for their toils and sacrifices, is but a creeping process, almost invisible in the survey. The multiplied, voluntary, and extraordinary efforts to diffuse some religious knowledge and sentiment among the vulgar, appear to them, if not even of doubtful tendency, at least of such impotence for corrective operation, that any confidence founded on them is simple fanaticism; that the calculation is, to use a commercial term, mere moonshine. We remember when a publication of great note and influence flung contempt on the sanguine expectations entertained from the rapid circulation of Bibles among the inferior population. At the hopeful mention of expedients of the religious kind especially, the class of speculators in question might perhaps be reminded of Glendower’s grave and believing talk of calling up spirits to perform his will; or (should they ever have happened to read the Bible) of the people who seized, in honest credulous delight, the mockery of a proposal of pulling a city, to the last stone, into the river with ropes, as a prime stroke of generalship.
When we see such expedients rated so low in the process for raising the populace from their degradation, we ask what means these speculators themselves would reckon on for the purpose. And it would appear that their scheme would calculate mainly on some supposed dispositions of a political and economical nature. Let the people be put in possession of all their rights as citizens, and thus advanced in the scale of society. Let all invidious distinctions which are artificial, arbitrary, and not inevitable, be abolished; together with all laws and regulations injuriously affecting their temporal well-being. Give them thus a sense of being _something_ in the great social order, a direct palpable interest in the honor and prosperity of the community. There will then be a dignified sense of independence; the generous, liberalizing, ennobling sentiments of freedom; the self-respect and conscious responsibility of men in the full exercise of their rights; the manly disdain of what is base; the innate perception of what is worthy and honorable, developing itself spontaneously on the removal of the ungenial circumstances in the constitution of society, which have been as a long winter on the intellectual and moral nature of its inferior portions. All this will conduce to the practicability and efficacy of education. It will be an education _to fit them for an education_ to be introduced with the progress of that fitness; intellectual culture finding a felicitous adaptation of the soil. We may then adopt with some confidence a public system, or stimulate and assist all independent local exertions for the instruction of the people in the rudiments of literature and general knowledge; and religion too, if you will.
But, to say nothing of the vain fancies of the virtues ready to disclose themselves in a corrupt mass, under the auspices of improved political institutions, it is unfortunate for any such speculation that what it insists on as the primary condition cannot as yet, but very imperfectly, be had. The higher and commanding portion of the community have, very naturally, the utmost aversion to concede to the people what are claimed as theoretically their rights. They have, indeed, latterly been constrained to make considerable concessions in name and semblance. But their great and various power will be strenuously exerted, for probably a long while yet, to render the acquisitions made by the people as nearly as possible profitless in their hands. And unhappily these predominant classes have to allege the mental and moral rudeness of the lower, in vindication of this determined policy of repression and frustration; thus turning the consequences of their own criminal neglect into a defence of their injustice. They will say, If the subordinate millions had grown up into a rational existence; if they had been rendered capable of thinking, judging, distinguishing, if they were in possession of a moderate share of useful information, and withal a strong sense of duty; then might this and the other privilege, or call it right, in the social constitution be yielded to them. But as long as they continue in their present mental grossness they are unfit for the possession, because unqualified for the exercise, of any such privileges as would take them from under our authoritative control.
Since they can and will, for the present, maintain this controlling power, to the extent of nearly invalidating any political advancement attained, or likely to be soon attained, by the lower grades, a speculation that should place on that advancement, as a pre-requisite, our hope of a great change in the mental condition of the people, would be, to adopt a humble figure, setting us to climb to an upper platform without a ladder, or rather telling us not to climb at all. And while this supposed pre-requisite will be refused, on the allegation that the uncultivated condition of the people renders them unfit for a liberal political arrangement, the parties so refusing will be little desirous to have the obstacle removed; foreseeing, as the inevitable consequence of a highly improved cultivation, a more resolute demand of the advantages withheld, a constantly augmenting force of popular opinion, and therefore a diminution of their own predominant power. They will deem it much more commodious for themselves, that the people should not be so enlightened and raised as to come into any such competition. And since they, with these dispositions, have the preponderance in what we denominate the State, we fear we are not to look with much hope to the State for a liberal and effective system of national education.
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What then is to be done?–We earnestly wish it might please the Sovereign Ruler to do one more new thing in the earth, compelling the dominant powers in the nations to an order of institutions and administrations that _would_ apply the energy of the state to so noble a purpose. Nor can we imagine any test of their merits so fair as the question whether, and in what degree, they do this; nor any test by which they may more naturally decline to have those merits tried. But since, to the shame of our nature, there is no use to which we are so prone to turn our condemnation of evil in one form, as that of purchasing a license for it in another, the persons who are justly arraigning the powers at the head of nations should be warned that they do not take from the guilty omissions of states a sanction for individuals to do nothing. Let them not suffer an imposition on their minds in the notion entertained of a state, as a thing to be no otherwise accounted of than in a collective capacity, acting by a government; as if the collective power and agency of a nation became, in being exerted through that political organ, an affair altogether foreign to the will, the action, the duty, the responsibility, of the persons of whom the nation is composed. Let them not put out of sight that whatever is the duty of the national body in that collective capacity, acting through its government, is such only because it is the duty of the individuals composing that body, as far as it is in the power of each; and that it would be their duty individually not the less, though the government, as the depositary of the national power, neglect it. But more than this; to speak generally, and with certain degrees of possible exception, we may affirm that a government _cannot_ be lastingly neglectful of a great duty but because the individuals constituting the community are so. An assertion, that a government has been utterly and criminally neglectful of the moral condition of the inferior population, age after age, and through every change of its administrators; but that, nevertheless, the generality of the individuals of intelligence, wealth, and influence, have all the while been of a quite opposite spirit, zealously intent on remedying the flagrant evil, would be instantly rejected as a contradiction. Such an enlightened and philanthropic spirit prevailing widely among the individuals of the nation would carry its impulse into the government in one manner or another. It would either constrain the administrators of the state to act in conformity, or ultimately displace them in favor of better men. Even if, short of such a _general_ activity of the respectable and locally influential members of society, a large proportion of them had vigorously prosecuted such a purpose, it would have compelled the administrators of the state to consider, even for their own sake, whether they should be content to see so important a process going on independently of them, and in contrast with their own disgraceful neglect.
But at the worst, and on the supposition that they were obstinately inaccessible to all moral and philanthropic considerations, still a grand improvement would have been accomplished, if many thousands of the responsible members of the community had attempted it with zealous and persevering exertion. The neglect, therefore, of the improvement of the people, so glaring in the review of our conduct as a nation, has been, to a very great extent, the insensibility of individuals to obligations lying on them as such, independently of the institutions and administration of the state.
And are individuals _now_ absolved from all such responsibility; and the more so, that the conviction of the importance of the object is come upon them with such a new and cogent force? When they say, reproachfully, that the nation, as a body politic, concentrating its powers in its government, disowns or neglects a most important duty, is it to be understood that this accusatory testimony is _their_ share, or something equivalent in substitution for their share, of that very duty? Does a collective duty of such very solid substance, vanish into nothing under any attempted process of resolving it into fractions and portions for individuals? And do they themselves, as some of the individuals to whom this duty might thus be distributively assigned,–do they themselves, in spite of self-love, self-estimation, and all the sentiments which they will at other times indulge in homage of their own importance,–do they, when this assignment is attempted to be made to them, instantly and willingly surrender to a feeling of crumbling down from this proud individuality into an undistinguishable existence in the mass; and, profaning the language of religion, say to the State, “In thee we live, move, and have a being?” Or, will they, (in assimilation to eastern pagans, who hold that a divinity so pervades them as to be their wills and do their actions, leaving the mere human vehicle without power, duty, or accountableness,) will they account themselves but as passive matter, moved or fixed, and in all things necessitated, by a sovereign mythological something denominated the state?
No, not in all things. It is not so that they feel with respect to those other interests and projects, which they are really in earnest to promote, though those concerns may lie in no greater proportion than the one in question does within the scope of their individual ability. The incubus has then vanished; and they find themselves in possession of a free agency, and a degree of power, which they will not patiently hear estimated in any such contemptuous terms. What is there then that should reduce them, as individual agents, to such utter and willing insignificance in the affair of which we are speaking? Besides, they may form themselves, in indefinite number, into combination. And is there no power in any collective form in which they can be associated, save just that one in which the aggregation is constituted under the political shape and authority denominated a state? Or is it at last that some alarm of superstitious loyalty comes over them; that they grow uneasy in conscience at the high-toned censure they have been stimulated and betrayed to pronounce on the state; that they relapse into the obsequiousness of hesitating, whether they should presume to do good of a kind which the “Power ordained of God” has not seen fit to do; that they must wait for the sanction of its great example; that till the “shout of kings is among them” it were better not to march against the vandalism and the paganism which are, the while, quite at their ease, destroying the people?
But if such had always been the way in which private individuals, single or associated, had accounted of themselves and their possible exertions, in regard to great general improvements, but very few would ever have been accomplished. For the case has commonly been, that the schemes of such improvements have originated with persons not invested with political power; have been urged on by the accession and co-operation of such individuals; and at length slowly and reluctantly acceded to by the holders of dominion over the community, always, through some malignant fatality, the last to admit what had long appeared to the majority of thinking men no less than demonstrative evidence of the propriety and advantage of the reformation.
In all probability, the improvement of mankind is destined, under Providence, to advance nearly in proportion as good men feel the responsibility for it resting on themselves as individuals, and are actuated by a bold sentiment of independence, (humble at the same time, in reference to the necessity of Divine intervention,) in the prosecution of it. Each person who is standing still to look, with grief or indignation, at the evils which are overrunning the world, would do well to recollect what he may have read of some gallant partisan, who, perceiving where a prompt movement, with the comparatively slender force at his own command, would make an impression infallibly tending to the success of the warfare, could not endure to lose the time till some great sultan should find it convenient to come in slow march, and the pomp of state, to take on him the direction of the campaign.
In laying this emphasis of incitement and hope on the exertions of good men as individuals, we cannot be understood to mean that the government of states, if ever they did come to be intent on rendering the condition of society better and happier, could not contribute beyond all calculation to the force and efficacy of _every_ project and measure for that grand purpose. How far from it! it is melancholy to consider what they might do and do not. But it is because their history, thus far, affords such feeble prognostics of their becoming, till some better age, actuated by such a spirit,–it is because the Divine Governor has hitherto put upon them so little of the honor of being the instruments of his beneficence,–that the anticipations of good, and the exhortations to attempt it, are so peculiarly directed to its promoters in an individual capacity.
Happily, the accusatory part of such exhortations is becoming, we trust we may say fast becoming, less extensively applicable; and we return with pleasure to the animating idea of that revolution of which we were noting the introductory signs. It is a revolution in the manner of estimating the souls of the people, and consequently in the judgment of what should be done for both their present and future welfare. Through many ages, that immense multitude had been but obscurely presented to view in any such character as that of rational, improvable creatures. They were recognized no otherwise than as one large mass of rude moral substance, but faintly distinguishable into individuals; existing, and to be left to exist, in their own manner; and that manner hardly worth concern or inquiry. Little consideration could there be of how much spiritual immortal essence must be going to waste, absorbed in the very earth, all over the wide field where the inferior portion of humanity was seen only through the gross medium of an economical estimate, by the more favored part of the race. But now it is as if a mist were rising and dispersing from that field, and leaving the multitude of possessors of uncultivated and degraded mind exhibited in a light in which they were never seen before, except by the faithful promoters of Christianity, and a few philanthropists of a less special order.
It is true, this manifestation forms so tragic a vision, that if we had only to behold it _as a spectacle_, we might well desire that the misty obscurity should descend on it again, to shroud it from sight; while we should be left to indulge and elate our imaginations by dwelling on the pomps and splendors of the terrestrial scene,–the mighty empires, the heroes, the victories, the triumphs; the refinements and enjoyments of the most highly cultivated of the race; the brilliant performances of genius, and the astonishing reach of science. So the tempter would have beguiled our Lord into a complacent contemplation of the kingdoms and glories of the world. But he was come to look on a different aspect of it! Nor could he be withdrawn from the gloomy view of its degradation and misery. And a good reason why. For the sole object for which he had appeared in the only world where temptation could even in form approach him was to begin in operation, and finish in virtue, a design for changing that state of degradation and misery. In the prosecution of such a design, and in the spirit of that divine benevolence in which it sprung, he could endure to fix on the melancholy and odious character of the scene, the contemplation which was vainly attempted to be diverted to any other of its aspects. What, indeed, could sublunary pomps and glories be to him in any case; but emphatically what, when his object was to redeem the people from darkness and destruction?
Those who, actuated by a spirit in some humble resemblance to his, have entered deeply into the state of the people, such as it is found in our own nation, have often been appalled at the spectacle disclosed to them. They have been astonished to think, what _can_ have been the direction, while successive ages have passed away, of so many thousands of acute and vigilant mental eyes, that so dreadful a sight should scarcely have been descried. They have been aware that in describing it as they actually saw it, they would be regarded by some as gloomy fanatics, tinctured with insanity by the influence of some austere creed; and that others, of kinder nature, but whose sensibility has more of self-indulging refinement than tendency to active benevolence, would almost wish that so revolting an exhibition had never been made, though the fact be actually so. There may have been moments when they themselves have experienced a temporary recoil of their benevolent zeal, under the impression at once of the immensity of the evil, so defying the feebleness of their remedial means and efforts, and of its noisome quality. At times, the rudeness of the subjects, and perhaps the ungracious reception and thankless requital of their disinterested labors, aggravating the general feeling of the miserableness (so to express it) of seeing so much misery, have lent seduction to the temptations to ease and self-indulgence. Why should they, just _they_ of all men, condemn themselves to dwell so much in the most dreary climate of the moral world, when they could perhaps have taken their almost constant abode in a little elysium of elegant knowledge, taste, and refined society? Then was the time to revert to the example of Him “who, though he was rich, for our sakes became poor.”
Or, again, they may have been betrayed to indulge too long in the bitter mood of thinking, how entirely the higher and more amply furnished powers leave such generous designs to proceed as they can, in the mere strength of private individual exertion. And they may have yielded to depressive feelings after the fervor of indignant ones; for such indignation, unless qualified by the purest principle–unless it be the “anger that sins not”–is very apt, when it cools, to settle into misanthropic despondency. It is as if (they have said) armies and giants would stand aloof to amuse themselves, while we are to be committed and abandoned in the ceaseless, unavailable toil of a conflict, which these armies and giants have no business even to exist as such but for the very purpose of waging. We are, if we will,–and if we will we may let it alone–to try to effect in diminutive pieces, and detached local efforts, a little share of that, to the accomplishment of which the greatest human force on earth might be applied on system, and to the widest compass. So they have said, perhaps, and been tempted to leave their object to its destiny.
But really it is now too late for this resentful and desponding abandonment. They cannot now retire in the tragic dignity of despair. It must be some more forlorn predicament that would allow them any grace of rhetoric in saying, as in parody of Cato, “Witness heaven and earth, that we have done our duty, but the stars and fate are against us; and here it becomes us to terminate a strife, which would degenerate into the ridiculous, if prosecuted against impossibilities.” On the contrary, the zeal which could begin so onerous a work, and prosecute it thus far, could not now remit without convicting its past ardor of cowardice lurking under its temporary semblance of bravery. Is it for the projectors of a noble edifice of public utility, to abandon the undertaking when it has risen from its foundation to be seen above the ground; or is just come to be level with the surface of the waters, in defiance of which it has been commenced, and the violence of which it was designed to control, or the unfordable depths and streams of which it was to bear people over? Let the promoters of education and Christian knowledge among the inferior classes, reflect what has already been accomplished; though regarding it as quite the incipient stage. It is most truly as yet “the day of small things;” and shall they despise it, from an idea of what it might have been if the great powers had been directed to its advancement? They have found that in the good cause thus unaided they have not wholly labored in vain; that it _can_ be brought in contact with a considerable portion of what would otherwise be so much human existence abandoned; and that already, as from the garments of the Divine Healer of diseases, a sanative virtue goes out of it. Let them recount the individuals they have seen, and not despond as to many more, rescued from what had all the signs of a destination to the lowest debasement, and utter ruin; some of whom are returning animated thanks, and will do so in the hour of death, for what these, their best human friends, have been the means of imparting to them. Let them recollect of how many families they have seen the domestic condition pleasingly, and in some instances eminently and delightfully amended. And let them reflect how they have trampled down prejudices, nearly silenced a heathenish clamor, and provoked the imitative and rival efforts of many who would, but for them, have been willing enough for all such schemes to lie in abeyance to the end of time. Let them think of all this, and faithfully persist in the trial what it may please God that they shall accomplish, whether the possessors of national power will acknowledge his demand for such an application of it or not; whether, when the infinite importance of the concern is represented to them, they will hear, or whether they will forbear.
But let them not doubt that the time will come, when the rulers and the ascendant classes in states will comprehend it to be their best policy to promote all possible improvement of the people. It will be given to them to understand, that the highest glory of those at the head of great communities, must consist in the eminence attained by those communities generally, in whatever it is that constitutes the worth, the honor, the happiness, of individuals; a glory with which would be combined the advantage that the office of presiding over such a nation could be administered in a liberal spirit. They will one day have learned to esteem it a far nobler form of power to lead and direct an immense society of intelligent minds, than to delude, coerce, and drive a vast semi-barbarous herd. Providence surely will one day, in the progress of society, confer on it such wise and virtuous rulers as can feel, that it is better for them to have a people who can understand and rationally approve, when deserving of approbation, their system and measures, than one bent in stupid submission, even if ignorance could henceforward suffice (which it cannot) to retain the people in that posture; better, therefore, by a still stronger reason, than to have a people fermenting in ignorant disaffection, constantly believing the governors to be in the wrong, and without the sense to comprehend any arguments in justification, excepting such as might be addressed in the shape of bribes to corruption. And a time will come when it will not be left to the philanthropic or censorial speculatists alone, to make the comparative estimate between what has been effected by the enormously expensive apparatus of coercive and penal administration–the prisons, prosecutions, transportations, and a large military police, (things quite necessary in our past and present national condition,)–and what _might_ have been effected by one half of that expenditure devoted to popular reformation, to be accomplished by means of schools, and every practicable variety of methods for placing men’s judgment and conscience as the “lion in the way,” when they are inclined and tempted to go wrong.–All this will come to pass at length. And if the promoters of the best designs see cause to fear that the time is remote, this should but enforce upon them the more strongly the admonition that no time is _theirs_, but the present.
It was not possible to pursue the long course of these observations so nearly to the conclusion, without being reminded still again of what we have adverted to before, that there will be persons ready to impute sanguine extravagance to our expectations of the result of such an order of means and exertions, for the improvement of the education and mental condition of the people, as we see already beginning to work. When the means are of so little splendid a quality, it will be said, by what inflation of fancy is their power admeasured to such effects?
And what _is_ it, then, and how much, that is expected as the result, by the zealous advocates of schools, and the whole order of expedients, for the instruction of that part of the rising generation till lately so neglected? Are they heard maintaining that the communication of knowledge, or true notions of things, to youthful minds, will _infallibly_ ensure their virtue and happiness? They are not quite so new to the world, to experimental labor in the business of tuition, or to self-observation. Their vigilance would hardly overlook such a circumstance as the very different degree of assurance with which the effects may be predicted, of ignorance on the one hand, and of knowledge on the other. There is very nearly an absolute certainty of success in the method for making clowns, sots, vagabonds, and ruffians. You may safely leave it to themselves to carry on the process for becoming complete. Let human creatures grow up without discipline, destitute therefore of salutary information, sound judgment, or any conscience but what will shape itself to whatever they like, serving in the manner of some vile friar pander in the old plays,–and no one takes any credit for foresight in saying they will be a noxious burden on the earth; except indeed in those tracts of it where they seem to have their appropriate place and business, in being matched against the wolves and bears of the wilderness. When they infest what should be a civilized and Christianized part of the world, the philanthropist is sometimes put in doubt whether to repress, or indulge, the sentiment which tempts him to complacency in the operation of an epidemic which is thinning their numbers.
The consequences of ignorance are certain, unless almost a miracle interpose; but unhappily those of knowledge are of diffident and restricted calculation; unless we could make a trifle of the testimony of all ages, and suppress the evidence of present experience, that men may see and approve the better, and yet follow the worse. It is the hapless predicament of our nature, that the noblest of its powers, the understanding, has but most imperfectly and precariously that commanding hold on the others, which is essential to the good order of the soul. Our constitution is like a machine in which there is a constant liability of the secondary wheels to be thrown out of the catch and grapple of the master one. And worse than so, these powers which ought to be subordinate and obedient to the understanding, are not left to stand still when detached from its control. They have a strong activity of their own, from the impulse of other principles: indeed, it is this impulse that _causes_ the detachment. It is frightful to look at the evidence from facts, that these active powers _may_ grow strong in the perversity which will set the judgment at defiance, during the very time that it is successfully training to a competence for dictating to them what is right. The assertions of those who are determined to find the chief or only cause of the wrong direction of the passions and will in misapprehension of the understanding, are a gross assumption, in a question of fact, against an infinite crowd of facts pressing round with their evidence. This evidence is offered by men without number distinctly and deliberately acknowledging their conviction of the evil quality and fatal consequences, of courses which they are soon afterwards seen pursuing, and without the smallest pretence of a change of opinion; by the same men in more advanced stages still owning the same conviction, and sometimes in strong terms of self-reproach, in the checks and pauses of their career; and by men in the near prospect of death and judgment expressing, in bitter regret, the acknowledgment that they had persisted in acting wrong when they knew better. And this assumption, made against such evidence, is to be maintained for no better reason, that appears, than a wilful determination that human nature cannot, must not, shall not, be so absurd and depraved as to be capable of such madness: as if human nature were taking the smallest trouble to put on any disguise before them, to beguile them into a good opinion; as if it could be cajoled by their flattery to assume even a semblance of deserving it; as if it had the complaisance to check one bad propensity, to save them from standing contradicted and exposed to ridicule for speaking of it with indulgence or respect; as if it stayed or cared to thank them for their pains in attempting to make out a plausible extenuation. It has, and keeps, and shows its character, in perfect indifference to the puzzled efforts of its apologists to reduce its moral turpitude to just so much error of the understanding. But, as for understanding–it should be time to look to their own, when they find themselves asserting, in other words, that there is actually as much virtue in the world as there is knowledge of its principles and laws. We should rather have surmised that, deplorably deficient as that knowledge is, the reduction of a fifth or tenth part of it to practice would make a glorious change in England and Europe.
The persons, therefore, whose zeal is combined with knowledge in the prosecution of plans for the extension of education, proceed on a calculation of an effect more limited, in apparent proportion to the means, and with less certainty of even that more limited measure in any single instance, than they would have been justified in anticipating in many other departments of operation. They would, for example, predict more positively the results of an undertaking to cultivate any tract of waste land, to reclaim a bog, or to render mechanical forces available in an untried mode of application; or, in many cases, the decided success of the healing art as applied to a diseased body. They must needs be moderate in their confidence of calculation for good, on a moral nature whose corruption would yield an enemy of mankind a gratifying probability in calculating for evil. In comparing these opposite calculations, they would be glad if they might make an exchange of the respective probabilities. That is to say, let a man, if such there be, who could be pleased with the depravity and misery of the race, a sagacious judge too, of their moral constitution, and a veteran observer of their conduct,–let him survey with the look of an evil spirit a hundred children in one of the benevolent schools, and indulge himself in prognosticating, on the strength of what he knows of human nature, the proportion, in numbers and degree, in which these children will, in subsequent life, exemplify the _failure_ of what is done for their wisdom and welfare;–let him make his calculation, and, we say, there may be times when the friends of these institutions would be glad to transfer the quantity of probability from his side to theirs; would feel they should be happy if the proportion in which they fear he may be right in calculating on evil from the nature of the beings under discipline, were, instead, the proportion in which it is rational to reckon on good from the efficacy of that discipline. “Evil, be thou my good,” might be their involuntary apostrophe, in the sense of wishing to possess the stronger power, transmuted to the better quality.
But we shall know where to stop in the course of observations of this darkening color: and shall take off the point of the derider’s taunt, just forthcoming, that we are here unsaying, in effect, all that we have been so laboriously urging about the vast benefit of knowledge to the people. It was proper to show, that the prosecutors of these designs are not suffering themselves to be duped out of a perception of what there is, in the nature of the youthful subjects, to counteract the intention of the discipline, and with too certain a power to limit its efficacy to a very partial measure of the effect desired. These projectors might fairly be required to prove they are not unknowing enthusiasts; but then, in keeping clear of the vain extravagances of expectation, they are not to surrender their confidence that something great and important can be done; it should be possible for a man to be sober, short of being dead. They are not to gravitate into a state of feeling as if they thought the understanding and the moral powers are but casually associated in the mind; as if an important communication to the one, might, so to speak, never be heard of by the others; as if these subordinates had just one sole principle of action–that of disobeying their chief, so that it could be of no use to appeal to the master of the house respecting the conduct of his inmates; as if, therefore, _all_ presumption of a relation between means and ends, as a ground of confidence in the efficacy of popular instruction, must be illusory. It might not indeed be amiss for them to be _told_ that the case is so, by those who would desire, from whatever motive, to repress their efforts and defeat their designs. For so downright a blow at the vital principle of their favorite object would but serve to provoke them to ascertain more definitely what there really is for them to found their schemes and hopes upon, and therefore to verify to themselves the reasons they have for persisting, in assurance that the labor will be far from wholly lost. And for this assurance it is, at the very lowest, self-evident, that there is at any rate such an efficacy in cultivation, as to give a certainty that a well-cultivated people _cannot_ remain on the same degraded moral level as a neglected ignorant one–or anywhere near it. None of those even that value such designs the least, ever pretend to foresee, in the event of their being carried into effect, an undiminished prevalence of rudeness and brutality of manners, of delight in spectacles and amusements of cruelty, of noisy revelry, of sottish intemperance, or of disregard of character. It is not pretended to be foreseen, that the poorer classes will then continue to display so much of that almost desperate improvidence respecting their temporal means and prospects, which has aggravated the calamities of the present times. It is not predicted that a universal school-discipline will bring up several millions to the neglect, and many of them in an impudent contempt, of attendance on the ministrations of religion. The result will at all hazards, by every one’s acknowledgment, be _the contrary of this_.
But more specifically:–The promoters of the plans of popular education see a most important advantage gained in the very outset, in the obvious fact, that in their schools a very large portion of time is employed well, that otherwise would infallibly be employed ill. Let any one introduce himself into one of these places of concourse, where there has been time to mature the arrangements. He should not enter as an important personage, in patronizing and judicial state, as if to demand the respectful looks of the whole tribe from their attention to their printed rudiments and their slates; but glide in as a quiet observer, just to survey at his leisure the character and operations of the scene. Undoubtedly he may descry here and there the signs of inattention, weariness or vacancy, not to say of perverseness. Even these individuals, however, are out of the way of practical harm; and at the same time he will see a multitude of youthful spirits acknowledging the duty of directing their best attention to something altogether foreign to their wild amusements; of making a rather protracted effort in one mode or another of the strange business of _thinking_. He will perceive in many the unequivocal indications of a serious and earnest effort made to acquire, with the aid visible signs and implements, a command of what is invisible and immaterial. They are thus rising from the mere animal state to tread in the precincts of an intellectual economy; the economy of thought and truth, in which they are to live forever; and never, in all futurity, will they have to regret, for itself, [Footnote: _For itself_–a phrase of qualification inserted to meed the captious remark, that there have been instances of bad men, under the reproach of conscience of the dread of consequences, expressing a regret that they had ever been well instructed, since this was an aggravation of their guilt, and perhaps had subserved their evil propensities with the more effectual means and ability.] _this_ period and part of their employments. He will be delighted to think how many regulated actions of the mind, how many just ideas distinctly admitted, that were unknown or unimpressed at the beginning of the day’s exercise, (and among these ideas, some to remind them of God and their highest interest,) there will have been by the time the busy and well-ordered company breaks up in the evening, and leaves silence within these walls. He will not indeed grow romantic in hope; he knows the nature of which these beings partake; knows therefore that the desired results of this process will but partially follow; but still rejoices to think those partial results which will most certainly follow, will be worth incomparably more than all they will have cost to the learners, or the teachers, or the patrons.
Now let him, when he has contemplated this scene, consider how the greatest part of this numerous company would have been employed during the same hours, whether of the Sabbath or other days, but for such a provision of means for their instruction. And, for the contrast, he has only to leave the school, and walk a mile round the neighborhood, in which it will be very wonderful, (we may say this of most parts of England,) if he shall not, in a populous district, especially near a great town, and on a fine day, meet with a great number of wretched, disgusting imps, straggling or in knots, in the activity of mischief and nuisance, or at least the full cry of vile and profane language; with here and there, as a lord among them, an elder larger one growing fast into an insolent adult blackguard. He may make the comparison, quite sure that such as they are, and so employed, would many now under the salutary discipline of yonder school have been, but for its institution. But the two classes so beheld in contrast, might they not seem to belong to two different nations? Do they not seem growing into two extremely different orders of character? Do they not even seem preparing for different worlds in the final distribution?
The friends of these designs for a general and highly improved education, may proceed further in this course of verifying to themselves the grounds of their assurance of happy consequences. A number of ideas, the most important that were ever formed in human thought, or imparted to men from the Supreme Mind, will be so communicated and impressed in these institutions, that it is absolutely certain they will be fixed irrevocably in the minds of the pupils. And in the case of many, if not the majority of these destined adventurers into the temptations of life, these important ideas, thus inserted deep in their souls, will distinctly present themselves to judgment and conscience an incalculable number of times. What a number, if the sum of all these reminiscences, in all the minds now assembled in a numerous school, could be conjectured! But if one in a hundred of these recollections, if one in a thousand, shall be efficacious, who can compute the amount of the good resulting from the instruction which shall have so enforced and fixed these ideas that they shall inevitably be thus recollected? And is it altogether out of reason to hope that the desired efficacy will, far oftener than once in a thousand times, attend the luminous rising again of a solemn idea to the view of the mind! Is still less than _this_ to be predicted for our unhappy nature, while, however fallen, it is not abandoned by the care of its Creator!
The institutions themselves will gradually improve, in both the method and the compass of their discipline. They will acquire a more vigorous mechanism, and a more decidedly intellectual character. In this latter respect, it is but comparatively of late years that schools for the inferior classes have ventured anything beyond the humblest pretensions. Mental cultivation–enlarged knowledge–elements of science–habit of thinking–exercise of judgment–free and enlightened opinion–higher grade in society–were terms which they were to be reverently cautious of taking in vain. There would have been an offensive sound in such phrases, as seeming to betray somewhat of the impertinence of a _disposition_, (for the idea of the _practicability_ of any such invasion would have been scorned,) to encroach on a ground exclusively appropriate to the superior orders. Schools for the poor were to be as little as possible scholastic. They were to be kept down to the lowest level of the workshop, excepting perhaps in one particular–that of working hard: for the scholars were to throw time away rather than be occupied with anything beyond the merest rudiments. The advocates and the petitioners for aid of such schools, were to avow and plead how little it was that they pretended or presumed to teach. The argument in their behalf was either to begin or end with saying, that they taught _only_ reading and writing; or if it could not be denied that there was to be some meddling with arithmetic and grammar,–we may safely appeal to some of the veterans of these pleaders, whether they did not, thirty or forty years since, bring out this addition with the management and hesitation of a confession and apology. It is a prominent characteristic of that happy revolution we have spoken of as in commencement, that this aristocratic notion of education is breaking up. The theory of the subject is loosening into enlargement, and will cease by degrees to impose a niggardly restriction on the extent of the cultivation, proper to be attempted in schools for the inferiors of the community.
As these institutions go on, augmenting in number and improving in organization, their pupils will bring their quality and efficacy to the proof, as they grow to maturity, and go forth to act their part in society. And there can be no doubt, that while too many of them may be mournful exemplifications of the power with which the evil genius of the corrupt nature, combined with the infection of a bad world, resists the better influences of instruction, and may, after the advantage of such an introductory stage, be carried down towards the old debasement, a very considerable proportion will take and permanently maintain a far higher ground. They will have become imbued with an element, which must put them in strong repulsion to that coarse vulgar that will be sure to continue in existence, in this country, long enough to be a trial of the moral taste of this better cultivated race. It will be seen that they cannot associate with it by choice, and in the spirit of companionship. And while they are thus withheld on their part, from approximating, it may be hoped that in certain better disposed parts of that vulgar, there may be a conversion of the repelling principle into an impulse to approach and join them on their own ground. There will be numbers among it who cannot be so entirely insensate or perverse, as to look with carelessness at the advantages obtained through the sole medium of personal improvement, by those who had otherwise been exactly on the same level of low resources and estimation as themselves. The effect of this view on pride, in some, and on better propensities, it may be hoped, in others, will be to excite them to make their way upward to a community which, they will clearly see, could commit no greater folly than to come downward to them. And we will presume a friendly disposition in most of those who shall have been raised to this higher standing, to meet such aspirers and help them to ascend.
And while they will thus draw upward the less immovable and hopeless part of the mass below them, they will themselves, on the other hand, be placed, by the respectability of their understanding and manners, within the influence of the higher cultivation of the classes above them; a great advantage, as we have taken a former occasion to notice:–a great advantage, that is to say, if the cultivation among those classes _be_ generally of such a quality and measure, that the people could not be brought a few degrees nearer to them without becoming, through the effect of their example, more in love with sense, knowledge, and propriety of conduct. For it were somewhat too much of simplicity, perhaps, to take it for quite a thing of course that the people would always perceive such intellectual accomplishments as would keep them modest or humble in their estimate of their own, and such liberal spirit and manners as would at once command their respect and conduce to their refinement, when they made any approach to a communication with the classes superior in possessions and station. If this _might_ have been assumed as a thing of course, and if therefore it might have been confidently reckoned on, that the more improving of the people would receive from the ranks above them a salutary influence, similar to that which we have been supposing they will themselves exert on a part of the vulgar mass below them, there had been a happy omen for the community; and if it may not be so assumed, are we to have the disgraceful deficiencies of the upper classes pleaded as an argument against raising the lower from their degradation? Must the multitude flounder along the mud at the bottom of the upward slope, because their betters will not be at the cost of making for themselves a higher terraced road across it than that they are now walking on?
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But it would be an admirable turn to make the lower orders act beneficially on the higher. And it is an important advantage likely to accrue from the better education of the common people, that their rising attainments would compel not a few of their superiors to look to the state of their own mental pretensions, on perceiving that _this_, at last, was becoming a ground on which, in no small part, their precedence was to be measured. Surely it would be a most excellent thing, that they should find themselves thus incommodiously pressed upon by the only circumstance, perhaps, that could make them sensible there are more kinds of poverty than that single one to which alone they had hitherto attached ideas of disgrace; and should be forced to preserve that ascendency for which wealth and station would formerly suffice, at the cost, now, of a good deal more reading, thinking, and general self-discipline. And would it be a worthy sacrifice, that to spare some substantial agriculturalists, idle gentlemen, and sporting or promenading ecclesiastics, such an afflictive necessity, the actual tillers of the ground, and the workers in manufacture and mechanics, should continue to be kept in stupid ignorance?
It is very possible this may excite a smile, as the threatening of a necessity or a danger to these privileged persons, which it is thought they may be comfortably assured is very remote. This danger (namely, that a good many of them, or rather of those who are coming in the course of nature to succeed them in the same rank, will find that its relative consequence cannot be sustained but at a very considerably higher pitch of mental qualification) is threatened upon no stronger presages than the following:–Allow us first to take it for granted, that it is not a very protracted length of time that is to pass away before the case comes to be, that a large proportion of the children of the lower classes are trained, through a course of assiduous instruction and exercise in the most valuable knowledge, during a series of years, in schools which everything possible is done to render efficient. Then, if we include in one computation all the time they will have spent in real mental effort and acquirement there, and all those pieces and intervals of time which we may reasonably hope that many of them will improve to the same purpose in the subsequent years, a very great number of them will have employed, by the time they reach middle age, many thousands of hours more than people in their condition have heretofore done, in a way the most directly tending to place them greatly further on in whatever of importance for repute and authority intelligence is to bear in society. And how must we be estimating the natural capacities of these inferior classes, or the perceptions of the higher, not to foresee as a consequence, that these latter will find their relative situation greatly altered, with respect to the measure of knowledge and mental power requisite as one most essential constituent of their superiority, in order to command the unfeigned deference of their inferiors?
Our strenuous promoters of the schemes for cultivating the minds of all the people, are not afraid of professing to foresee, that when schools, of that completely disciplinarian organization which they are, we hope, gradually to attain, shall have become general, and shall be vigorously seconded by all those auxiliary expedients for popular instruction which are also in progress, a very pleasing modification will become apparent in the character, the moral color, if we might so express it, of the people’s ordinary employment. The young persons so instructed, being appointed, for the most part, to the same occupations to which they would have been destined had they grown up in utter ignorance and vulgarity, are expected to give evidence that the meanness, the debasement almost, which had characterized many of those occupations in the view of the more refined classes, was in truth the debasement of the men more than of the callings; which will come to be in more honorable estimation as associated with the sense, decorum, and self-respect of the performers, than they were while blended and polluted with all the low habits, manners, and language, of ignorance and vulgar grossness. And besides, there is the consideration of the different degrees of merit in the performance itself; and who will be the persons most likely to excel, in the many branches of workmanship and business which admit of being better done in proportion to the degree of intelligence directed upon them? And again, who will be most in requisition for those offices of management and superintendence, where something must be confided to judgment and discretion, and where the value is felt, (often vexatiously felt from the want,) of some capacity of combination and foresight?
Such as these are among the subordinate benefits reasonably, we might say infallibly, calculated upon. Our philanthropists are confident in foreseeing also, that very many of these better educated young persons will be valuable co-operators with all who may be more formally employed in instruction, against that ignorance from which themselves have been so happily saved; will exert an influence, by their example and the steady avowal of their principles, against vice and folly in their vicinity; and will be useful advisers of their neighbors in their perplexities, and sometimes moderators in their discords. It is predicted, with a confidence so much resting on general grounds of probability, as hardly to need the instances already afforded in various parts of the country to confirm it, that here and there one of the well-instructed humbler class will become a competent and useful public teacher of the most important truth. It is, in short, anticipated with delightful assurance, that great numbers of those who shall go forth from under the friendly guardianship which will take the charge of their youthful minds, will be examples through life and at its conclusion, of the power and felicity of religion.
Here we can suppose it not improbable that some one may, in pointed terms, put the question,–Do you then, at last, mean to affirm that you can, by the proposed course, by any course, of discipline, absolutely secure that effectual operation and ascendency of religion in the mind, which shall place it in the right condition toward God, and in a state of fitness for passing, without fear or danger, into the scenes of its future endless existence?
We think the cautious limitation of language, hitherto observed in setting forth our expectations, might preclude such a question. But let it be asked, since there can be no difficulty to reply. We do _not_ affirm that any form of discipline, the wisest and best in the power of the wisest and best men to apply, is competent of itself thus to subject the mind decidedly and permanently to the power of religion. On the contrary, we believe that grand effect can be accomplished only by a special influence of the Divine Being, operating by the means applied in a well-judged system of instruction, or, if he pleases, independently of them. But next, it is perfectly certain, notwithstanding, that the application of these human means will, in a multitude of instances, be efficacious to that most happy end.
This certainty arises from a few very plain general considerations. The first is, that the whole system of means appointed by the Almighty to be employed as a human process for presenting religion solemnly in view before men’s minds, and enforcing it on them, is an appointment _expressly intended_ for working that great effect which secures their final felicity; though to what extent in point of number is altogether unknown to the subordinate agents. They are perfectly certain, in employing the appointed expedients in prosecution of the work, that they must be proceeding on the strength of a positive relation subsisting between those means and the results to be realized, in what instances, in what measure, at what time, it shall please the sovereign Power. The appointment cannot be one of mere exercise for the faculties and submissive obedience of those who are summoned to be active in its execution.
Accordingly, there are in the divine revelation very many explicit and animating assurances, that their exertions shall certainly be in a measure effectual to the proposed end. And if these assurances are made in favor of the exertions for inculcating religion generally, that is, on men of all conditions and ages, they may be assumed as giving special encouragement to those for impressing it on young minds, before they can be preoccupied and hardened by the depravities of the world. There is plainly the more hope for the efficacy of those exertions the less there is to frustrate them. But besides, the authority itself, which has assured a measure of success to religious instruction as administered generally, has marked with peculiar strength the promise of its success as applied to the young; thus affording rays of hope which have in ten thousand instances animated the diligence of pious parents, and the other benevolent instructors of children.
There is also palpable matter of fact to the point, that an education which combines the discipline of the conscience and the intellectual faculty will be rendered, in many instances, efficacious to the formation of a religious character. This obvious fact is, that a much greater proportion of the persons so educated do actually become the subjects of religion, than of a similar number of those brought up in ignorance and profligacy. Take collectively any number of families in which such an education prevails, and the same number in which it does not, and follow the young persons respectively into subsequent life. But any one who hears the suggestion, feels there is no need to wait the lapse of time and follow their actual course. As instructed by what he has already seen in society, he can go forward with them prophetically, with perfect certainty that many more of the one tribe than that of the other, will become persons not only of moral respectability but decided piety. Any one that should assert respecting them that the probabilities are equal and indifferent, would be considered as sporting a wilful absurdity, or betraying that he is one of those who did not come into the world for anything they can learn in it. And the experience which thus authorizes a perfect confidence of prediction, is evidence that, though discipline must wholly disclaim an absolute power to effect the great object in question, there is, nevertheless, such a constitution of things that it most certainly will, as an instrumental cause, in many instances effect it.
The state of the matter, then, is very simple. The Supreme Cause of men’s being “made wise to salvation,” in appointing a system of means, to be put by human activity in operation toward this effect, has also appointed that in this operation they shall infallibly be attended with a measure of success in accomplishing that highest good,–a measure which was not to be accomplished otherwise than by such means. So much he has signified to men as an absolute certainty: but then, he has connected this certainty in an arbitrary, and as to our knowledge, indefinite manner with the system. It is a certainty connected with the system _as taken generally and comprehensively_; and which it is not given to us to affix to the particular instances in which the success will take place. It is a Divine Volition suspended over the whole scene of cultivation; like a cloud from which we cannot tell where precisely the shower to fertilize it will fall, certain, however, that there are spots whose verdure and flowers will tell after awhile. The agents under the Sovereign Dispenser are to proceed on this positive assurance that the success _shall be somewhere_, though they cannot know that it will be in this one instance, or in the other: “In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thy hand; for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, this, or that.” If they rate the value of their agency so high, as to hold it derogatory to their dignity that any part of their labors should be performed under the condition of possibly being unsuccessful, they may be assured that such is not exactly the estimate of Him to whom they look for the acceptance of their services, and for the reward.
But it may be added, that the great majority of those who are intent on the schemes for enlightening and reforming mankind, are entertaining a confident hope of the approach of a period, when the success will be far greater in proportion to the measure of exertion in every department of the system of instrumentality for that grand object. We cherish this confidence, not on the strength of any pretension to be able to resolve prophetic emblems and numbers, into precise dates and events of the present and approaching times. It rests on a more general mode of apprehending a relation between the extraordinary indications of the period we live in, and the substantial purport of the divine predictions. There unquestionably gleams forth, through the plainer lines, and through the mystical imagery of prophecy, the vision of a better age, in which the application of the truths of religion to men’s minds will be irresistible. And what should more naturally be interpreted as one of the dawning signs of its approach, than a new spirit come into action with insuppressible impulse, at once to dispel the fog from their intellects and bring the heavenly light to shine close upon them; accompanied by a prodigious convulsion in the old system of the world, which hardly recognized in the inferior millions the very existence of souls to need or be worth such an illumination? It is true that an eruptive activity of evil, beyond what was witnessed by our forefathers, has attended and followed that convulsion; as mephitic exhalations are emitted through the rents of an earthquake. Viewed in itself, this outbreak of the bad principles and passions might seem to portend anything rather than a grand improvement in the state of a nation or of mankind. It appears like an actual augmentation of the evil previously existing. But it should rather be regarded as the setting loose of the noxious elements accumulated and rankling under the old system; a phenomenon inevitably attendant on its breaking up, by a catastrophe absolutely necessary to open and clear the field for operations on the great scale against those evils themselves, and to give scope and means for the advancement toward a better condition of humanity.
The laborers in the institutions for instructing the young descendants of an ill-fated generation, may often regret to perceive how little the process is as yet informed with the energy which is ultimately to pervade the world. But let them regard as one great undivided economy and train of operation, these initiatory efforts and all that is to follow, till that time “when all shall know the Lord;” and take by anticipation, as in fraternity with the happier future laborers, their just share of that ultimate triumph. Those active spirits, in the happier periods, will look back with this sentiment of kindred and complacency to those who sustained the earlier toils of the good cause, and did not suffer their zeal to languish under the comparative smallness of their success.
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We shall conclude with a few sentences in the way of reply to another question, which we can surmise there may be persons ready to ask, after this long iteration of the assertion of the necessity of knowledge to the common people. The question would be to this effect: What do you, all this while, mean to assign as the _measure_ of knowledge proper for the people to be put in possession of?–for you do not specify the kinds, or limit the extent: you talk in vague general terms of mental improvement; you leave the whole matter indefinite; and for all that appears, the people are never to know when they know enough.
It is answered, that we _do_ leave the extent undefined, and should request to be informed where, and why, the line of circumscription and exclusion should be drawn.
Is it, we could really wish to know, a point at all yet decided, wherein consist the value and importance of the human nature? Any liberal scheme for its universal cultivation is met by such a jealous parsimony toward the common people, such a ready imputation of wild theory, such protesting declamations against the mischief of practically applying abstract principles, such an undisguised or betrayed precedence given to mere interests of state, and those perhaps very sordid ones, before all others,