sooner or later, we may have to say with Abner,
"Juda est sans force, Benjamin sans vertu."
Intellectual culture, therefore, even in its highest perfection, can gain at best but an ephemeral triumph. It cannot perpetuate the civilization to which a people in the meridian of their greatness may attain; and it certainly has never raised a fallen empire, nor poured a quickening stream through the veins of a superannuated nation. This inefficiency can be accounted for only by the absence of that pure and sublime faith which commanded the respect of the hordes that poured from the north, to batter down the last remains of a gigantic fabric, as well as of that sublime moral code which tamed these rude nomads and raised them from a savage state to the loftiest heights of Christian civilization.
The term education is from the Latin e and duco, meaning literally to lead or draw out. Some writers have attempted to define it "the drawing out or development of the mental faculties." This may be a "scientific" view of head-culture; but as a definition of education, it is defective and very unphilosophical. Defective, because it embraces only a part; unphilosophical, because it substitutes the secondary for the essential. We maintain that instruction is but a branch of education, to which religion is as the parent stem. If we consult the masters of thought, and those who shape the destinies of nations, we shall be surprised to find how unanimously they hold moral training paramount to intellectual culture, and how strongly they insist on making the latter always subservient to the former. The better to substantiate our assertion against the cavillings of sceptics, we will give a few quotations, selecting only from Protestant authors. The end of education, according to Milton, "is to fit man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices both public and private of peace and war." "The hard and valuable part of education," says Locke, "is virtue; this is the solid and substantial good which the teacher should never cease to inculcate till the young man places his strength, his glory, and his pleasure in it." "The educating of a young man," writes Lord Kames, "to behave well in society is of still greater importance than making him a Solomon in knowledge;" and "We shall never know," says Sir Walter Scott, "our real calling or destiny, unless we have taught ourselves to consider every thing else as moon-shine compared with the education of the heart." And Lord Derby: "Religion is not a thing apart from education, but is interwoven with its whole system; it is a principle which controls and regulates the whole mind and happiness of the people." And Guizot: "Popular education, to be truly good and socially useful, must be fundamentally religious."
Thus, then, the essential element of education—its pith and marrow, so to speak—is the religious element. To exclude it from the school-room is, therefore, a crying injustice to the rising generation and a crime against society.
It is not one portion of the "triple man," but the whole—the physical, intellectual, and moral being—the body, the mind, the head—that must be cultivated and "brought up." Neglect any one part of man's nature, and you at once disturb the equilibrium of the whole, and produce disorder; educate the body at the expense of the mind and soul, and you will have only animated clay; educate the intelligence at the expense of the moral and religious feelings, and you but fearfully increase a man's power to effect evil. You store the arsenal of his mind with weapons to sap alike the altar and the throne, to carry on a war of extermination against every holy principle, against the welfare and the very existence of society.
Catiline, the polished patrician, was more dreaded by the Roman senate than the steel of his hired assassins. The French revolution, the most violent outbreak that ever convulsed society, was ushered in by a blaze of genius; but, like the high intelligence of the "archangel ruined," it brought desolation and death in its fiery track. Science without religion is more destructive than the sword in the hands of unprincipled men. "Talent if divorced from rectitude," says Channing, "will prove more of a demon than a god." It is these enlightened infidels that arrest the progress of true civilization and prepare those terrible catastrophes which deluge a country with blood. Who were the leaders in the work of destruction and wholesale butchery in the Reign of Terror? The nurslings of lyceums in which the chaotic principles of the "philosophers" were proclaimed as oracles of truth. Who are those turbulent revolutionists who now long to erect the guillotine by the Tuileries? And who are those secret conspirators and their myrmidon partisans who have sworn to unify Italy or lay it in ruins? Men who were taught to scout the idea of a God and rail at religion; to consider Christianity as a thing of the past and a legion of "isms" as the regenerators of the future; men who revel in wild chimeras by night, and seek to realize their mad dreams by day.
The frightful excesses to which irreligion directly leads so struck one of the most frantic revolutionists of 1793 that, yet dripping with blood, he mounted to the pediment of a temple and with a pencil wrote this memorable inscription, "The French nation recognizes the existence of a Supreme Being;" and a few hours before ascending the scaffold to suffer the just penalty of his enormities, he cried out to his countrymen, "The republic can only be established on the eternal bases of morality." Terrible confession wrung from a regicide in the most impious moment of history!
Robespierre proclaimed the truth. The only safety for a commonwealth, the only source of greatness and prosperity for a nation, as well as of tranquillity and happiness for the individual, is religion. When men reject its heavenly guidance, duty becomes as void of meaning to them as "honor" was to a well-known Shakespearean character, the most sacred obligations dwindle down into mere optional practices, and the moral code itself soon becomes little more than the bugbear of the weak-minded. "The safeguard of morality," says De Tocqueville, "is religion;" and he concludes a chapter of his American Republic with the following pertinent remark: "Religion is the companion of liberty in all its battles and triumphs; the cradle of its infancy, and the divine source of its claims; it is the safeguard of morality, and morality is the best security of law as well as the surest pledge of freedom."
The philosophers of the eighteenth century, by their monstrous errors and shameless depravity, have shown but too clearly that science without religion