A SEQUEL OF THE GLADSTONE CONTROVERSY.
II
One of the most mischievous prejudices of our day is the popular theory that the cure for all evils is to be sought in the intellectual education of the masses. Those nations, we are told by every declaimer, in which the education of the people is most universal, are the most moral, the richest, the strongest, the freest, and their prosperity rests upon the most solid and lasting foundation. Make ignorance a crime, teach all to read and write, and war will smooth its rugged front, armies will be disbanded, crime will disappear, and mankind will have found the secret of uninterrupted progress, the final outcome of which will surpass even our fondest dreams.
This fallacy, which has not even the merit of being plausible, is, of course, made to do service in M. de Laveleye’s pamphlet on the comparative bearing of Protestantism and Catholicism on the prosperity of nations.
“It is now universally admitted,” he informs us (p. 22), “that the diffusion of enlightenment is the first condition of progress.… The general spread of education is also indispensable to the exercise of constitutional liberty.… In short, education is the basis of national liberty and prosperity.”
He then goes on to declare that in this matter of popular education Protestant countries are far in advance of those that are Catholic; that this is necessarily so, since “the Reformed religion rests on a book—the Bible; the Protestant, therefore, must know how to read. Catholic worship, on the contrary, rests upon sacraments and certain practices—such as confession, Masses, sermons—which do not necessarily involve reading. It is, therefore, unnecessary to know how to read; indeed, it is dangerous, for it inevitably shakes the principle of passive obedience on which the whole Catholic edifice reposes: reading is the road that leads to heresy.”
We will first consider the theory, and then take up the facts.
“The diffusion of enlightenment is the first condition of progress. Education is indispensable to the exercise of constitutional liberty. Education is the basis of national liberty and prosperity.”
Enlightenment is, of course, of the mind, and means the development, more or less perfect, of the intellectual faculties; and education, since it is here considered as synonymous with enlightenment, must be taken in this narrow sense.
Progress is material, moral, intellectual, social, political, artistic, religious, scientific, literary, and indefinitely manifold. Now, it is assumed that the diffusion of enlightenment is not merely promotive, but that it is an essential condition of progress in its widest and fullest meaning. This is the new faith—the goddess of culture, holding the torch of science and leading mankind into the palace of pleasure, the only true heaven.
By conduct, we have already said, both individuals and nations are saved or perish; and we spoke of the civilized. Barbarous states are destroyed by catastrophes—they die a violent death; but the civilized are wasted by internal maladies—suis et ipsa Roma viribus ruit. They grow and they decay, they progress and they decline. At first poverty, virtue, industry, faith, hopefulness, strong characters and heroic natures; at last wealth, corruption, indolence, unbelief, despair, children too weak even to admire the strength of their fathers, too base to believe that they were noble. Public spirit dies out; patriotism is in the mouths of politicians, but, like the augurs of Rome, they cannot speak the word and look one another in the face. The country is to each one what he can make out of it, and the bond of union is the desire of each citizen to secure his own interests. The bondholders love their country, and the sans-culottes are disloyal; class rises against class, civil discord unsettles everything, revolution succeeds revolution, and when the barbarian comes he holds an inquest over the corpse. It generally happens, too, that those civilizations which spring up quickest and promise most fair are fated to die earliest; as precocious children disappoint fond mothers. If the teaching of history is a trustworthy guide, we are certainly safe in affirming that civilized states and empires perish, not from lack of knowledge, but of virtue; not because the people are ignorant, but because they are corrupt.
The assumption, however, is that men become immoral because they are ignorant; that if they were enlightened, they would be virtuous.
“The superstition,” says Herbert Spencer (Study of Sociology, p. 121), “that good behavior is to be forthwith produced by lessons learned out of books, which was long ago statistically disproved, would, but for preconceptions, be utterly dissipated by observing to what a slight extent knowledge affects conduct; by observing that the dishonesty implied in the adulterations of tradesmen and manufacturers, in fraudulent bankruptcies, in bubble-companies, in ‘cooking’ of railway accounts and financial prospectuses, differs only in form, and not in amount, from the dishonesty of the uneducated; by observing how amazingly little the teachings given to medical students affect their lives, and how even the most experienced medical men have their prudence scarcely at all increased by their information.”
It is not knowledge, but character, that is important; and character is formed more by faith, by hope, by love, admiration, enthusiasm, reverence, than by any patchwork of alphabetical and arithmetical symbols. The young know but little; but they believe firmly, they hope nobly, and love generously; and it is while knowledge is feeble and these spontaneous acts of the soul are strong that character is moulded. The curse of our age is that men will believe that, in education, to spell, to read, to write, is what signifies, and they cast aside the eternal faith, the infinite hope, the divine love, that more than all else make us men.
“The true test of civilization,” says Emerson, “is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops—no, but the kind of man the country turns out.” Is there some mystic virtue in printed words that to be able to read them should make us men? And even in the most enlightened countries what do the masses of men know? Next to nothing; and their reading, for the most part, stupefies them. The newspaper, with its murders, suicides, hangings, startling disclosures, defalcations, embezzlements, burglaries, forgeries, adulteries, advertisements of nostrums, quack medicines, and secrets of working death in the very source of life, with all manner of hasty generalizations, crude theories, and half-truths jumbled into intellectual pot-pourris; the circulating library, with its stories, tales, romances of love, despair, death, of harrowing accidents, of hair-breadth escapes, of successful crime, and all the commonplaces of wild, reckless, and unnatural life—these are the sources of their knowledge. Or, if they are ambitious, they read “How to get on in the world,” “The art of making money,” “The secret of growing rich,” “The road to wealth,” “Successful men,” “The millionaires of America,” and the Mammon-worship, and the superstition of matter, and the idolatry of success become their religion; their souls die within them, and what wretched slaves they grow to be!
In the newspaper and circulating library God and man, heaven and earth—all things—are discussed, flippantly, in snatches, generally; all possible conflicting and contradictory views are taken; and these ignorant masses, who, in the common schools, have been through the Fourth Reader, and who know nothing, not even their own ignorance, are confused. They doubt, they lose faith, and are enlightened by the discovery that God, the soul, truth, justice, honor, are only nominal—they do not concern positivists. Can anything be more pitiful than the state of these poor wretches?—neither knowing nor believing; without knowledge, yet having neither faith nor love. God pity them that they are communists, internationalists, solidaires; for what else could they be? No enthusiasm is possible for them but that of destruction.
Religion is the chief element in civilization, and consequently in progress. For the masses of men, even though the whole energy of mankind should spend itself upon some or any possible common-school system, the eternal principles which mould character, support manhood, and consecrate humanity will always remain of faith, and can never be held scientifically. If it were possible that science should prove religion false, it would none the less remain true, or there would be no truth.
What children know when they leave school is mechanical, external to their minds, fitted on them like clothes on the body; and it is soon worn threadbare, and hangs in shreds and patches. Take the first boy whom you meet, fourteen or fifteen years old, fresh from the common school, and his ignorance of all real knowledge will surprise you. What he knows is little and of small value; what is of moment is whether he believes firmly, hopes strongly, and loves truly. Not the diffusion of enlightenment do we want so much, but the diffusion of character, of honest faith, and manly courage.
Man is more than his knowledge. Simple faith is better than reading and writing. And yet the educational quacks treat the child as though he were mere mind, and his sole business to use it, and chiefly for low ends, shrewdly and sharply, with a view to profit; as though life were a thing of barter, and wisdom the art of making the most of it.
Poor child! who wouldst live by admiration, hope, and love, how they dwarf thy being, stunt thy growth, and flatten all thy soaring thoughts with their dull commonplaces—thrift, honesty is the best policy, time is money, knowledge is wealth, and all the vocabulary of a shop-keeping and trading philosophy. Poor child! who wouldst look out into the universe as God’s great temple, and behold in all its glories the effulgence of heaven; to whom morning, noon, and night, and change of season, golden flood of day and star-lit gloom, all speak of some diviner life, how they stun thy poetic soul, full of high dreams and noble purposes, with their cold teaching that man lives on bread alone—put money in thy purse! And when thou wouldst look back with awe and reverence to the sacred ages past, to the heroes, sages, saints of the olden times, they come with their gabble and tell thee there were no railroads and common schools in those days.
Is it strange that this education should hurt the nation’s highest interests by driving in crowds, like cattle to the shambles, our youths from God and nature and tilling of the soil to town and city, or, worse, into professions to which only their conceit or distaste for hard labor calls them? What place for morality is there in this Poor Richard’s Catechism—education of thrift and best policy? We grow in likeness to what we love, not to what we know. With low aims and selfish loves only narrow and imperfect characters are compatible.
Science, when cherished for itself—which it seldom is and in very exceptional cases—refines and purifies its lovers, and chastens the force of passion; though even here we must admit that the wisest of mankind may be the meanest, morally the most unworthy. But for the great mass of men, even of those who are called educated, the possession of such knowledge as they have or can have has no necessary relation with higher moral life. Their learning may refine, smooth over, or conceal their sin; it will not destroy it. The furred gown and intertissued robe hide the faults that peep through beggars’ rags, but they are there all the same. There may be a substitution of pride for sensuality, or a skilful blending or alternation of the finer with the coarser. Vice may lose its grossness, but not its evil. And herein we detect the wretched sophistry of criminal statistics, which deal, imperfectly and roughly enough, with what is open, shocking, and repulsive. The hidden sins that “like pitted speck in garnered fruit,” slowly eating to the core of a people’s life, moulder all; the sapping of faith, the weakening of character, the disbelief in goodness; the luxury, the indulgence, the heartlessness and narrowness of the rich; the cunning devices through which “the spirit of murder” works in the very means of life,
“While rank corruption, mining all within,
Infects unseen”
—cannot be appreciated by the gross tests of numbers and averages. The poor, by statistics as by the world, are handled without gloves. In the large cities of civilized countries, both in ancient and in modern times, we have unmistakable proof of what knowledge can do to form character and produce even the social virtues. These populations have had the advantage of the best schools in the most favorable circumstances, and yet in character and morality they are far beneath the less educated peasantry. Sensual indulgence, contempt of authority, hatred and jealousy of those above them, make these the dangerous classes, eager for socialistic reforms, radical upheavals of the whole existing order; and were it not for the more religious tillers of the soil, chaos and misrule would already prevail. In Greece and Rome it was in the cities that civilization first perished, as it was there it began—began with men who had great faith and strong character, but little knowledge; perished among men who were learned and refined, but who in indulgence and debauch had lost all strength and honesty of purpose.
In the last report of the Commissioner of Education some interesting facts, bearing on the relation of ignorance to crime, are taken from the Forty-fifth Annual Report of the inspector of the State penitentiary for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
“It is doubted if in any State, or indeed in any country,” says the commissioner, “forty-four volumes containing the annual statistical tables relating to the populations of a penal institution, covering nearly half a century, can, on examination, be regarded as more complete.”
The number of prisoners received into the institution from 1850 to 1860 was 1,605, of whom 15 per cent. were illiterate, 15 per cent. were able to read, and 70 per cent., or more than two-thirds, knew how to read and write; from 1860 to 1870, 2,383 prisoners were received into the penitentiary, and of these 17 per cent. were illiterate, 12 per cent. could read, and about 71 per cent. could read and write.
Of the 627 convicts who were in the penitentiary during the year 1867, 62 per cent., or five-eighths of the whole number, had attended the public schools of the State, 25 per cent., or two-eighths, had gone to private institutions, and 12 per cent., or one-eighth, had never gone to school.
But, as we have said, statistics deal with crime, and chiefly with the more open and discoverable sort, not with morality; whereas nations are destroyed not so much by crime as by immorality.
The thief is caught and sent to the penitentiary; but the trader who adulterates or gives short measure, the banker who puts forth a false or exaggerated statement, the merchant who fails with full hands, the stock-gambler who robs thousands, Crédit-Mobilier men and “ring” men generally who plunder scientifically, Congressmen who take money for helping to swindle the government, getters-up of “bubble companies”—salted diamond-fields and Emma Mines—compared with whom pickpockets and burglars are respectable gentlemen—these know not of penitentiaries; prisons were not built for such as they. The poor man abandons his wife, without divorce marries another, and is very properly sent to State prison. His rich and educated fellow-citizen gets a divorce, or is a free-lover, or keeps a harem, and for him laws were not made. Even that respectable old dame Society only gently shakes her head. We must not expect too much of gentlemen, you know. The ignorant girl falls, commits infanticide, and is incarcerated or hanged—heaven forbid that we should attempt to tell what she would have done had she been educated!—at any rate, she would not have gone to prison, though her guilt would not have been less.
Has the very great diffusion of enlightenment among our people during the hundred years that we have been an independent nation made them more moral and more worthy?
“The true test of civilization is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops—no, but the kind of man the country turns out.”
The Yankee is smarter than the Puritan—is he as true a man? Is the inventor of a sewing-machine or a patent bedstead as worthy as he who believes in God and in liberty against the whole earth with all his heart and soul, even though the heart be hard and the soul narrow? What compensation is there in all our philanthropies, transcendentalisms, sentimentalities, patent remedies for social evils, for the loss of the strong convictions, reverent belief, and simple dignity of character that made our fathers men? Do we believe in the goodness and honesty of men as they did, or is it possible that we should? What can come of beliefs in oversouls, whims, tendencies, abstractions, developments? If we were shadows in a shadow-land, this might do.
Look at a famous trial where the very aroma and fine essence of our civilization was gathered: What bright minds, keen intellects! Poetry, eloquence, romance; the culture, the knowledge, the scientific theories, of the age—all are there. And yet, when the veil is lifted, we simply turn away heart sick and nauseated. Not a hundred statistical prison reports would reveal the festering corruption and deep depravity, the coarse vulgarity and utter heartlessness that is there, whatever the truth may be, if in such surroundings it can be found at all.
In Laing’s Notes of a Traveller (p. 221) we find a most striking example of almost incredible corruption united with great intellectual culture. “In this way,” he says, “we must account for the singular fact that the only positively immoral religious sect of the present times in the Christian world arose and has spread itself in the most educated part of the most educated country in Europe—in and about Königsberg, the capital of the province of Old Prussia. The Muckers are a sect who combine lewdness with religion. The conventicles of this sect are frequented by men and women in a state of nudity; and to excite the animal passion, but to restrain its indulgence, is said to constitute their religious exercise. Many of the highest nobility of the province, and two of the established clergy of the city, besides citizens, artificers, and ladies, old and young, belong to this sect; and two young ladies are stated to have died from the consequences of excessive libidinous excitement. It is no secret association of profligacy shunning the light. It is a sect—according to the declarations of Von Tippelskirch and of several persons of consideration in Königsberg who had been followers of it themselves—existing very extensively under the leadership of the established ministers of the Gospel, Ebel and Diestel, of a Count von Kaniz, of a Lady von S——, and of other noble persons.… The system and theory of this dreadful combination of vice with religion are, of course, very properly suppressed.… The sect itself appears, by Dr. Bretscheider’s account of it, to have been so generally diffused that he says ‘it cannot be believed that the public functionaries were in ignorance of its existence; but they were afraid to do their duty from the influence of the many principal people who were involved in it.’”
But we are not the advocates of ignorance. We will praise with any man the true worth and inestimable value of education. Even mere mental training is, to our thinking, of rare price. Water is good, but without bread it will not sustain life. Wine warms and gladdens the heart of man; but if used without care, it maddens and drives to destruction. We are crying out against the folly of the age which would make the school-room its church, education its sacrament, and culture its religion. It is the road to ruin. Culture is for the few; and what a trumpery patchwork of frippery and finery and paste diamonds it must ever remain for the most of these! For the millions it means the pagan debauch, the bacchanal orgy, and mere animalism.
“The characters,” wrote Goethe—who was pagan of the pagans and “decidirter Nicht-Christ”—“which we can truly respect have become rarer. We can sincerely esteem only that which is not self-seeking.… I must confess to have found through my whole life unselfish characters of the kind of which I speak only there where I found a firmly-grounded religious life; a creed, which had an unchangeable basis, resting upon itself—not dependent upon the time, its spirit, or its science.”
This foundation of a positive religious faith is as indispensable to national as to individual character, and without it the diffusion of enlightenment cannot create a great or lasting civilization. Religion ought to constitute the very essence of all primary education. It alone can touch the heart, raise the mind, and evoke from their brutish apathy the elements of humanity, especially the reason; and it is therefore the one indispensable element in any right system of national education. A population unable to read or write, but with a religious faith and discipline, has before now constituted, and may again constitute, a great nation; but a people without religious earnestness has no solid political character. Religion is the widest and deepest of all the elements of civilization; it reaches those whom nothing else can touch; but for the masses of men there can be no religion without the authoritative teaching of a church.
And now let us return to M. de Laveleye. “The general spread of education,” he says (p. 23), “is indispensable to the exercise of constitutional liberty.… Education is the basis of national liberty and prosperity.”
In view of the facts that constitutional liberty has existed, and for centuries, in states in which there was no “general spread of education,” and that “the diffusion of enlightenment” is found in our own day to co-exist with the most hateful despotisms, we might pass on, without stopping to examine more closely these loose and popular phrases; but since the fallacies which they contain form a part of the culture-creed of modern paganism, and are accepted as indisputable truths by the multitude, they have a claim upon our attention which their assertion by Mr. Gladstone’s friend could not give them.
There is no necessary connection between popular education and civil liberty, as there is none between the enlightenment and the morality of a people. This is a subject full of import—one which, in this age and country, ought to be discussed with perfect freedom and courage. Courage indeed is needed precisely here; for to deny that there is a God, to treat Christ as a myth or a common man, to declaim against religion as superstition, to make the Bible a butt for witticisms and fine points, to deny future life and the soul’s immortality, to denounce marriage, to preach communism, and to ridicule whatever things mankind have hitherto held sacred—this is not only tolerable, it is praiseworthy and runs with the free thought of an enlightened and inquiring age. But to raise a doubt as to the supreme and paramount value of intellectual training; of its sovereign efficacy in the cure of human ills; of its inseparable alliance with freedom, with progress, with man’s best interests, is pernicious heresy, and ought not to be borne with patiently. In our civilization, through the action of majorities, there is special difficulty in such discussions, since with us nothing is true except what is popular. Majorities rule, and are therefore right. With rare eloquence we denounce tyrant kings and turn to lick the hands of the tyrant people. Whoever questions the wisdom of the American people is not to be argued with—he is to be pitied; and therefore both press and pulpit, though they flaunt the banner of freedom, are the servants of the tyrant. To have no principles, but to write and speak what will please the most and offend the fewest—this is the philosophy of free speech. We therefore have no independent, and consequently no great, thinkers. It is dangerous not to think with majorities and parties; for those who attempt to break their bonds generally succeed, like Emerson, only in becoming whimsical, weak, and inconclusive. It is not surprising, then, that the Catholics, because they do not accept as true or ultimate what is supposed to be the final thought and definite will of American majorities on the subject of education, should be denounced, threatened, and made a Trojan Horse of to carry political adventurers into the White House.
Nevertheless, the observant are losing confidence in the theory, so full of inspiration to demagogues and declaimers, that superstition and despotism must be founded on ignorance. In Prussia at this moment universal education co-exists with despotism. Where tyrannical governments take control of education they easily make it their ally.
Let us hear what Laing says of the practical results of the Prussian system of education, which it is so much the fashion to praise.
“If the ultimate object,” he says, “of all education and knowledge be to raise man to the feeling of his own moral worth, to a sense of his responsibility to his Creator and to his conscience for every act, to the dignity of a reflecting, self-guiding, virtuous, religious member of society, then the Prussian educational system is a failure. It is only a training from childhood in the conventional discipline and submission of mind which the state exacts from its subjects. It is not a training or education which has raised, but which has lowered, the human character.… The social value or importance of the Prussian arrangements for diffusing national scholastic education has been evidently overrated; for now that the whole system has been in the fullest operation in society upon a whole generation, we see morals and religion in a more unsatisfactory state in this very country than in almost any other in the north of Europe; we see nowhere a people in a more abject political and civil condition, or with less free agency in their social economy. A national education which gives a nation neither religion, nor morality, nor civil liberty, nor political liberty is an education not worth having.… If to read, write, cipher, and sing be education, the Prussian subject is an educated man. If to reason, judge, and act as an independent free agent, in the religious, moral, and social relations of man to his Creator and to his fellow-men, be the exercise of the mental powers which alone deserves the name of education, then is the Prussian subject a mere drum boy in education, in the cultivation and use of all that regards the moral and intellectual endowments of man, compared to one of the unlettered population of a free country. The dormant state of the public mind on all affairs of public interest, the acquiescence in a total want of political influence or existence, the intellectual dependence upon the government or its functionary in all the affairs of the community, the abject submission to the want of freedom or free agency in thoughts, words, or acts, the religious thraldom of the people to forms which they despise, the want of influence of religious and social principle in society, justify the conclusion that the moral, religious, and social condition of the people was never looked at or estimated by those writers who were so enthusiastic in their praises of the national education of Prussia.”
In spite of the continued progress of education, there is even less liberty, religious, civil, and political, in Prussia to-day than when these words were written, thirty years ago.
Nothing more dazzles the eyes of men than great military success; and this, together with the habit which belongs to our race of applauding whoever wins, has produced, especially in England and the United States, where Bismarck is looked upon, ignorantly enough, as the champion of Protestantism, a kind of blind admiration and awe for whatever is Prussian. “Protestant Prussia,” boasts M. de Laveleye, “has defeated two empires, each containing twice her own population, the one in seven weeks, the other in seven months”; and in the new edition of Appleton’s Encyclopædia we are informed that these victories are attributed to the superior education of her people. As well might the tyranny of the government and the notorious unchastity and dishonesty of the Prussians be ascribed to their superior education. Not to the general intelligence of the people, but to the fact that the whole country has been turned into a military camp, and that to the one purpose of war all interests have been made subservient, must we seek for an explanation of the victories of Sadowa and Sedan.
Who would pretend that the Spartans were in war superior to the Athenians because they had a more perfect system of education and were more intelligent or had a truer religion? Or who would think of accounting in this way for the marvellous exploits of Attila with his Huns, of Zingis Khan with his Moguls, of Tamerlane with his Tartars, of Mahmood, Togrul-Beg, and Malek-Shah with their Turkish hordes?
In fact, it may be said, speaking largely and in general, that the history of war is that of the triumph of strong and ignorant races over those which have become cultivated, refined, and corrupt. The Romans learned from their conquered slaves letters and the vices of a more polished paganism. Barbarism is ever impending over the civilized world. The wild and rugged north is ever rushing down upon the soft and cultured south: the Scythian upon the Mede, the Persian, and the Egyptian; the Macedonian upon Greece, and then upon Asia and Africa; the Roman upon Carthage, and in turn falling before the men of the North—Goth, Vandal, Hun, Frank, and Gaul; the Mogul and the Tartar upon China and India; the Turk upon Southern Europe, Asia, and Africa; and to-day, like black clouds of destiny, the Russian hordes hang over the troubled governments of more educated Europe. Look at Italy during the middle ages—the focus of learning and the arts for all Christendom, and yet an easy prey for every barbarous adventurer; and in England the Briton yields to the Saxon, who in turn falls before the Norman. It would be truer to say that Prussia owes her military successes to the ignorance of her people, though they nearly all can read and write. Had she had to deal with intelligent, enlightened, and thinking populations, she could not have made the country a camp of soldiers.
The Prussian policy of “blood and iron” has been carried out, in defiance of the wishes of the people as expressed through their representatives, who were snubbed and scolded and sent back home as though they were a pack of schoolboys; yet the people looked on in stolid indifference, and allowed the tax to be levied after they had refused to grant it.
We will now follow M. de Laveleye a step farther.
“With regard to elementary instruction,” he says, “the Protestant states are incomparably more advanced than the Catholic. England alone is no more than on a level with the latter, probably because the Anglican Church, of all the reformed forms of worship, has most in common with the Church of Rome.”
If any one has good reason to praise education, and above all the education of the people, certainly we Catholics have. The Catholic Church created the people; she first preached the divine doctrine of the brotherhood and equality of all men before God, which has wrought and must continue to work upon society until all men shall be recognized as equals by the law. She drew around woman her magic circle; from the slave struck his fetters and bade him be a man; lifted to her bosom the child; baptized all humanity into the inviolable sacredness of Christ’s divinity; she appealed, and still appeals, from the tyranny of brute force and success, in the name of the eternal liberties of the soul, to God. Her martyrs were and are the martyrs of liberty; and if she were not to-day, all men would accept accomplished facts and bow before whatever succeeds.
The barbarians, who have developed into the civilized peoples of Europe, despised learning as they contemned labor. War was their business. The knight signed his name with his sword, in blood; the pen, like the spade, was made for servile hands. To destroy this ignorant, idle life of pillage and feud, the church organized an army, unlike any the world had ever seen, unlike any it will ever see outside her pale—an army of monks, who, with faith in Christ and the higher life, believed in knowledge and in work. They became the cultivators of the mind and soil of Europe.
“The praise,” says Hallam, speaking of the middle ages, “of having originally established schools belongs to some bishops and abbots of the VIth century.”
Ireland is converted and at once becomes a kind of university for all Europe. In England the episcopal sees became centres of learning. Wherever a cathedral was built a school with a library grew up under its shadow. Pope Eugenius II., in a council held in Rome in 826, ordered that schools should be established throughout Christendom at cathedral and parochial churches and other suitable places. The Council of Mayence, in 813, admonishes parents that they are in duty bound to send their children to school. The Synod of Orleans, in 800, enjoins the erection in towns and villages of schools for elementary instruction, and adds that no remuneration shall be received except such as the parents voluntarily offer. The Third General Council of Lateran, in 1179, commanded that in all cathedral churches a fund should be set aside for the foundation and support of schools for the poor. Free schools were thus first established by the Catholic Church. The monasteries were the libraries where the arts and letters of a civilization that had perished were carefully treasured up for the rekindling of a brighter and better day.
As early as the XIIth century many of the universities of Europe were fully organized. Italy took the lead, with universities at Rome Bologna, Padua, Naples, Pavia, and Perugia—the sources
“Whence many rivulets have since been turned,
O’er the garden Catholic to lead
Their living waters, and have fed its plants.”
The schools founded at Oxford and Cambridge in the IXth and Xth centuries had in the XIIth grown to be universities. At Oxford there were thirty thousand, at Paris twenty-five thousand, and at Padua twenty thousand students. Scattered over Europe at the time Luther raised his voice against the church were sixty six universities.
“Time went on,” says Dr. Newman, speaking of the mediæval universities; “a new state of things, intellectual and social, came in; the church was girt with temporal power; the preachers of S. Dominic were in the ascendant: now, at length, we may ask with curious interest, did the church alter her ancient rule of action, and proscribe intellectual activity? Just the contrary; this is the very age of universities; it is the classical period of the schoolmen; it is the splendid and palmary instance of the wise policy and large liberality of the church, as regards philosophical inquiry. If there ever was a time when the intellect went wild, and had a licentious revel, it was at the date I speak of. When was there ever a more curious, more meddling, bolder, keener, more penetrating, more rationalistic exercise of the reason than at that time? What class of questions did that subtle metaphysical spirit not scrutinize? What premise was allowed without examination? What principle was not traced to its first origin, and exhibited in its most naked shape?… Well, I repeat, here was something which came somewhat nearer to theology than physical research comes; Aristotle was a somewhat more serious foe then, beyond all mistake, than Bacon has been since. Did the church take a high hand with philosophy then? No, not though that philosophy was metaphysical. It was a time when she had temporal power, and could have exterminated the spirit of inquiry with fire and sword; but she determined to put it down by argument; she said: ‘Two can play at that, and my argument is the better.’ She sent her controversialists into the philosophical arena. It was the Dominican and Franciscan doctors, the greatest of them being S. Thomas, who in those mediæval universities fought the battle of revelation with the weapons of heathenism.”[249]
To find fault with the church because popular education in the middle ages was not organized and general as it has since become would be as wise as to pick a quarrel with the ancient Greeks for not having railroads, or with the Romans because they had no steamships. Reading and writing were not taught then universally as they are now because it was physically and morally impossible that they should have been. Without steam and the printing-press, common-school systems would not now be practicable, nor would the want of them be felt. We have great reason to be thankful that the art of printing was invented and America discovered before Luther burned the Pope’s bull, else we should be continually bothered with refuting the cause-and-effect historians who would have infallibly traced both these events to the Wittenberg conflagration.
All Europe was still Catholic when gunpowder drove old Father Schwarz’s pestle through the ceiling, when Gutenberg made his printing-press, when Columbus landed in the New World; and these are the forces which have battered down the castles of feudalism, have brought knowledge within the reach of all, and some measure of redress to the masses of the Old World, by affording them the possibility and opportunity of liberty in the New. These forces would have wrought to even better purpose had Protestantism not broken the continuity and homogeneity of Christian civilization. The Turk would not rest like a blight from heaven upon the fairest lands of Europe and Asia, nor the darkness of heathenism upon India and China, had the civilized nations remained of one faith; and thus, though our own train might have rushed less rapidly down the ringing grooves of change, the whole human race would have advanced to a level which there now seems but little reason to hope it will ever reach.
But to come more nearly to M. de Laveleye’s assertion that the Protestant states are incomparably more advanced than the Catholic, with the exception of England, which in this matter is at least up to the standard of Catholic countries. In the report of the Commissioner of Education for 1874 there is a statistical account of the state of education in foreign countries which throws some light upon this subject.
The school attendance, compared with the population, is in Austria as 1 to 10; in Belgium, as 1 to 10½; in Ireland, as 1 to 16; in Catholic Switzerland, as 1 to 16; in England, as 1 to 17. In Bavaria it is as 1 to 7, upon the authority of Kay, in his Social Condition of the People in England and Europe. Catholic Austria, Bavaria, Belgium, and Ireland have proportionately a larger school attendance than Protestant England. England and Wales (report of 1874), with a population of 22,712,266, had a school population of 5,374,700, of whom only about half were registered, and not half of these attended with sufficient regularity to bring grants to their schools. Ireland, with a population of 5,411,416, had on register 1,006,511, or nearly half as many as England and Wales, though her population is not a fourth of that of these two countries. “The statistical fact,” says Laing, speaking of Rome as it was under the popes, “that Rome has above a hundred schools more than Berlin, for a population little more than half that of Berlin, puts to flight a world of humbug about systems of national education carried on by governments and their moral effects on society.… In Catholic Germany, in France, Italy, and even Spain, the education of the common people in reading, writing, arithmetic, music, manners, and morals, is at least as generally diffused and as faithfully promoted by the clerical body as in Scotland. It is by their own advance, and not by keeping back the advance of the people, that the popish (sic) priesthood of the present day seek to keep ahead of the intellectual progress of the community in Catholic lands; and they might, perhaps, retort on our Presbyterian clergy, and ask if they, too, are in their countries at the head of the intellectual movement of the age. Education is in reality not only not repressed, but is encouraged, by the popish church, and is a mighty instrument in its hands, and ably used.”[250]
Professor Huxley’s testimony is confirmatory of this admission of Laing. “It was my fortune,” he says, “some time ago to pay a visit to one of the most important of the institutions in which the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church in these islands are trained; and it seemed to me that the difference between these men and the comfortable champions of Anglicanism and Dissent was comparable to the difference between our gallant Volunteers and the trained veterans of Napoleon’s Old Guard. The Catholic priest is trained to know his business and do it effectually. The professors of the college in question, learned, zealous, and determined men, permitted me to speak frankly with them. We talked like outposts of opposed armies during a truce—as friendly enemies; and when I ventured to point out the difficulties their students would have to encounter from scientific thought, they replied: ‘Our church has lasted many ages, and has passed safely through many storms. The present is but a new gust of the old tempest; and we do not turn out our young men less fitted to weather it than they have been in former times to cope with the difficulties of those times.’”[251]
“It is a common remark,” says Kay, “of the operatives of Lancashire, and one which is only too true: ‘Your church is a church for the rich, but not for the poor. It was not intended for such people as we are.’ The Roman church is much wiser than the English in this respect.… It is singular to observe how the priests of Romanist (sic) countries abroad associate with the poor. I have often seen them riding with the peasants in their carts along the roads, eating with them in their houses, sitting with them in the village inns, mingling with them in their village festivals, and yet always preserving their authority.”[252]
With us, too, the masses of the people are fast abandoning Protestantism. There is no Catholic country in Europe in which the social condition of the masses is so wretched as in England, the representative Protestant country. For three hundred years, it may be said, the Catholic Church had no existence there. The nation was exclusively under Protestant influence; and yet the lower classes were suffered to remain in stolid ignorance, until they became the most degraded population in Christendom.
“It has been calculated,” says Kay, writing in 1850, “that there are at the present day, in England and Wales, nearly 8,000,000 persons who cannot read and write.” That was more than half of the whole population at that time. But this is not the worst. A population ignorant of reading and writing may nevertheless, to a certain extent, be educated through religious teaching and influence; but these unhappy creatures were left, helpless and hopeless, to sink deeper and deeper beneath the weight of their degradation, without being brought into contact with any power that could refine or elevate them; and if their condition has somewhat improved in the last quarter of a century, this is no more to be attributed to Protestantism than the Catholic Emancipation Act or the Atlantic cable.