An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance

by John Foster

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.