and the vast fabric of our republican federation was founded by the poor colonists who sought independence in the freedom of the wilderness, and combined against the power of a selfish despot. Education sows a seed which may sprout even during the life-time of the sower, and bless individual life with the sweets of a guaranteed triumph over the power of death. Resurgam, “I shall live after death,” expresses the significance of that triumph, and of the “esoteric doctrine of Pythagoras.”
C.—PERVERSION.
The Christian church has constantly perverted the purpose of education, but has never yet deserved the [[187]]reproach of having neglected its means. From the very beginning the sect of the apostle-training Galilean has been a sect of assiduous educators. They were not satisfied with founding schools and opening their doors to all comers, but went forth in quest of new converts, and pursued their aim with a persistence of zeal and a versatility of skill that could not fail to accomplish its purpose. As soon as a sufficient increase of power enabled them to control the institutes of primary instruction they turned their chief attention to the dogmatical education of the young. They derived no aid from the attractiveness and still less from the plausibility of their doctrine, but they realized Schopenhauer’s remark that “there is in childhood a period measured by six, or at most by ten years, when any well-inculcated dogma, no matter how extravagantly absurd, is sure to retain its hold for life.” And though the propagation of an unnatural creed is not favored by natural fertility, the naturally barren doctrine of renunciation was thus successfully propagated by a system of incessant grafting. By the skilful application of that process the most dissimilar plants were made subservient to its purpose. The “Worship of Sorrow” with its whining renunciation of worldly enjoyments, and its indifference to health and physical education, was grafted on the manful naturalism of the Hebrew law-giver. Saint-worship, the veneration of self-torturing fanatics, was grafted on a stem of pagan mythology, and dozens of Christian martyrs have thus usurped the honor and the sacrifices of pagan temples. Christian holidays were grafted on the festivals of [[188]]the nature-loving Saxons. But persuasion failing, the missionaries of the cross did not hesitate to resort to more conclusive measures. Like refractory children cudgeled along the path of knowledge, the obstinate skeptics of northern Europe were harassed with fire and sword till they could not help admitting the dangers of unbelief. The garden-lands of the Albigenses were wasted till they found no difficulty in yearning for the peace of a better world. Philosophers were tortured in the prisons of the Holy Inquisition till the sorrows of life favored the renunciation of its hopes.
For thirteen centuries the sunshine of millions of human hearts was ruthlessly sacrificed to promote the task of luring mankind from life to ghost-land, and during all those ages education was systematically turned from a blessing into an earth-blighting curse.
D.—PENALTIES OF NEGLECT.
There is a story of a Portuguese slave-dealer who carried a private chaplain on his pay-roll, and frequently expressed his solicitude for the spiritual welfare of his shackled captives. A very similar kind of spiritual duty has for centuries been made the excuse for an almost total neglect of secular education. Divorced from the control of common sense, religion soon degenerated into mere ceremonialism. A priest who would travel twenty miles through a snow-storm to supply a dying man with a consecrated wafer had no sympathy with the needs of the living. He would extort the last penny of his [[189]]tithes at the risk of starving a village full of needy parishioners. He would groan at the sight of an unbaptized child, but had not a drop of water to cool the brows of burning Moors or Jews. He would rave about the cruelty of a prince who had deprived the clergy of their mass-shillings, but had no ear for the laments of the exiled Moriscos or the curses of starving serfs.
Such was the morality which arrogated the right of suppressing that system of physical and intellectual education which had filled the homes of the Mediterranean nations with all the blessings of health, science, and beauty. Theological training had failed to kindle the dawn of a supernatural millennium, but had thoroughly succeeded in extinguishing the light of human reason. Not absolute ignorance only, but baneful superstition—worse than ignorance by just as much as poison is worse than hunger—was for centuries the inevitable result of all so-called school-training; and the traditions of that age of priest-rule have made religion almost a synonyme of cant. It also gave book-learning its supposed tendency to mental aberration. Can we wonder at that result of an age when the literary products of Christian Europe were confined almost exclusively to ghost-stories and manuals of ceremony? Can we wonder that delusions of the most preposterous kind assumed the virulence of epidemic diseases? Maniacs of self-mutilation, of epileptic contortions, of were-wolf panics, traversed Europe from end to end. Men gloried in ignorance, and boasted their neglect of worldly science till the consequences [[190]]of that neglect avenged its folly in actual madness.
The saddest of all the sad “it might have beens” is, perhaps, a reverie on the probable results of earlier emancipation—of the employment of thirteen worse than wasted centuries in scientific inquiries, agricultural improvements, social and sanitary reforms. We might have failed to enter the portals of the New Jerusalem, but we would probably have regained our earthly paradise.