An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance

by John Foster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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