that source. Let even temperate philosophers say what they will of morality, independent of religion, there is one striking advantage to states arising from the latter, which the former cannot yield. Contentment and resignation are the fruits of religion; insulated morality generates discontent, and has a perpetual tendency to doubt the justice of the inequality of conditions in this life; very naturally too, if the short race of it be all to which our hopes and fears can extend. There is also a gradation in morality; there is a confined and a refined morality. Suum cuique tribuitur is a maxim of confined morality; the refined moralist is a cosmopolite; and, still more refined, he denies the rights of meum and tuum; and the government that suffers one man to enjoy more than another is an unjust government, consequently man ought to seek a just one, and so we have the revolutionary system. It is only religion, it is only the Christian religion, which can reconcile morality to the state of man. This is the beautiful morality which binds him in social order,
which gives to Cæsar what is due to Cæsar, and, in securing to every man the rights he has obtained of property, calls upon him to rectify the selfishness of corrupted nature; to do as he would be done by, to love his brother as himself, and still farther to assimilate himself to his Master and to his God, by loving his enemies. Divine morality! which could have flowed only from a divine source! Divine legislation! dictated by God himself! It is unfortunate, that the nature of man will not permit the spirit, and even the outward forms, of a religion so adapted to the actual condition of the human species to be universal; and, that the different views taken of the text, by the variance of the human understanding, should diverge into incongruous systems, and excite religious dissentions. But, however this may be deplored, it is still more deplorable, that it should ever enter into the mind of man to establish systems of education, in which that which should be the foundation of it is totally excluded from it; that the end of knowledge should be separated
from the means of it; that the rudiments of instruction should be devoted solely to the acquisition of worldly arts, of which the operation is to be left to the direction of ignorance and selfishness. It is astonishing, with the experience men have so lately and so dearly gained, that there can be found one to approve of a system, in this country, the archetype of which has desolated Europe and ruined France. In attributing the explosion of the French revolution to the deistical and atheistical philosophers, I do not hesitate to attribute the long continuation of it to the change that took place in the forms of education; to the universities of Buonaparte[[93]], to the confining of men's interests to
the duration of life. In this country, there is a system in full operation, and patronized by some of the first characters of the state, by which a very large portion of the people will, in a few years, consist of persons able to read, write, and keep accounts, who will have no knowledge, or an erroneous one, of the duties and sanctions of religion, and whose morality will consequently be dependent on their reasoning faculties; and I am very much mistaken if those faculties will not lead to similar conceptions and similar effects as those produced by the reasoning faculties of 1788 and 1789. This opinion cannot be mistaken for one of intolerance. I think it would have been happier had the whole nation been of one accord in every point of religion; and I see, in the church of England, sufficient inducements to have restrained minds, sensible of the danger of innovation, from making a few points of mysterious doctrines a plea for separating from her; but while I say this, I am far from thinking that men should be compelled into modes of worship,
I am only sorry to see them dissenting. I am an advocate for the toleration of conscientious scruples; but there is one thing which I think no government ought to tolerate, and that is public schools openly professing to banish religious instruction; for they must prove seminaries of malcontents and democrats. The luxury and aristocracy of a few well educated rich atheists and deists afford no objection; it is of the low and of the indigent that these schools are formed, of persons who may be rendered the most valuable or the most pernicious part of the community. Homo sum: he is not a man, who can be an enemy to the mental improvement of his fellow creatures. The ignorance of the lower classes is deplorable; it is the moral duty of those in higher stations, it is the noble task of governments to raise them on the scale of intellect; education cannot be too general, but let it be in the true spirit of education. We are creatures, who depend greatly, perhaps wholly, on instruction. We can in general do little of ourselves. We must at first have
guides, and, to borrow the pithy expression of the famous bishop of Down, Jeremy Taylor, "if our guides do not put something into our heads, while children, the Devil will." The arts of reading and writing are mere mechanical instruments: to render them a blessing the soul must be fashioned into a spring of thought and action, and it behoves the fashioner to temper it justly. How desirable soever it might be, that the rising generation, enjoying the same constitution, should be united in the same mode of worship, yet, as that blessing seems unattainable in the present state of the world, it would be some consolation, if the various dissenters from the established church would hold themselves bound to insist upon the Christian religion, according to their own views of it, being taught in the new schools; and, I am free to confess, that the dissenting ministers in general are not deficient of zeal in impressing their religious principles on the minds of their followers; and it is but justice to say, that the world at large have been indebted to many of them, to Watts,
to Hartley, and to others: nor do I think, that the generality of dissenters can possibly approve of that plan, which, assembling poor children to be taught reading, writing, and figures, sends them to learn the relation between the Creator and his creature, the corruption of human nature, and the means of salvation, in a garret or a cellar, where want and ignorance, or low debauchery, are to be their preceptors. It is a mistaken benevolence, and good men of all communions should deprecate the evil, and resolve to avert it by the establishment of schools where the principal objects of education should be the principal things attended to, that the secondary ones may be made subservent to them; where, while the duties of man to God, to himself, and to society, are inculcated, the scholar may exercise his powers with books and pens to advantage, and without danger to the state. Nor, without previous oral instruction, should the Bible itself be put into the hands of readers, whether children or ignorant adults. Bible societies, consisting, beyond all doubt, of pious
men, will diffuse good or evil over the world according to the prudence with which the sacred volumes are distributed. In theology, as in natural philosophy, the uninformed mind cannot, of itself, embrace even the most incontrovertible truths: the raising of the dead and the rotation of the earth are alike incomprehensible; what is not immediately intelligible is not impressive, but when once we have been taught to observe the motion of the heavenly bodies, and are made sensible, that the power, which could assign certainty of operation to nature, must be equal to the suspension of it, astronomy and religion open upon us, and we fly to Newton and the Testament; and, seeing truths unfold themselves, we willingly take much on trust in both; certain that books, where we find so many demonstrations, are not intended to deceive us in any one point, and the resurrection of our Saviour becomes sooner solved than the precession of the equinox.
It is impossible to contemplate the
advantages arising to our fellow creatures and to society from Dr. Bell's system of education for the poor, without delight and without grateful feelings to the author, and, I may add, the still active director of it. Thousands upon thousands will bless him, while he yet lives, and a perpetual series of millions will revere his memory after he shall have joined the myriads of spirits from whom he shall himself learn the celestial allelujahs, and those things which it has not entered the mind of man to conceive.