"Leads to bewilder, and dazzles to blind."
These vaunted esprits forts had entered the realms of learning and returned as conquerors laden with treasures; but instead of consecrating the spoil to the service of the true, the good, and the beautiful, they paid it as a votive tribute to the evil genius of license and disorder. The world then saw these very men to whom princes had offered the incense of adulation enthrone an impure goddess on the altar of the Most High, and fall prostrate before a public harlot.
If further proof were needed of the immoral tendency of science separated from religion, we could silently point to the nameless abominations of the Communists, Fourierists, and other such vile and degraded fraternities; we could dwell on the cold-blooded murders and frightful suicides that fill so many domestic hearths with grief and shame; the scarcely concealed corruption of public and professional men; the adroit peculation and wilful embezzlement of the public money; those monopolizing speculations and voluntary insolvencies so ruinous to the community at large; and, above all, those shocking atrocities so common in unbelieving countries—the legal dissolution of the matrimonial tie and the wanton tampering with life in its very bud. These humiliating facts are sufficient to convince any impartial mind that there can be no social virtue, no morality, no true and lasting greatness without religion.
Here we meet the question, When should these salutary doctrines be inculcated? As well might it be asked when the builder should lay the foundation of his edifice, or the farmer sow his field. If religious principles be not laid broad and deep in childhood, there is great danger that the superstructure will topple and fall. Youth has been called the seed-time of life; and experience as well as reason proves the same law to hold good in mental as in material husbandry; "What you sow that you shall reap." Men do not seek grapes from thorns, nor figs from thistles. Yet, by a strange inconsistency, some would expect virtuous youths from godless schools. But the order of nature cannot be reversed. Like generates like.
In childhood the mind is simple and docile; the soul, pure and candid; and the heart may easily be cast into any mould. It is of the highest importance for parents and educators to bear in mind that the first impressions are the last forgotten. The pious child may in after-life, in an evil hour, be led astray by the force of passion or bad example, but at least, when the fires of youth have cooled with advancing age, there is great probability that he will return again to virtue and piety. With great truth the poet has said,
"Take care in youth to form the heart and mind,
For as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined."
One of the greatest thinkers of our age, thoroughly convinced of the paramount importance of early moral training, would have the air of the school-room, as it were, impregnated with religion. "It is necessary," says Guizot, "that natural education should be given and received in the midst of a religious atmosphere, and that religious impressions and religious observances should penetrate all its parts." It would, indeed, be well if those who advocate the exclusion of religion from our schools would read and maturely weigh these words of the illustrious Protestant statesman and historian. A little further on occurs the following remarkable passage: "Religion is not a study or an exercise, to be restricted to a certain place and a certain hour; it is a faith and a law which ought to be felt everywhere, and which in this manner alone can exercise all its beneficent influence upon our minds and lives." In the same spirit Disraeli says, "Religion should be the rule of life, not a casual incidence." It is then absurd to devote six days of the week to the teaching of human learning, and trust to a hurried hour in the Sunday-school for the imparting of religious knowledge. By such a system, we may make expert shop-boys, first-rate accountants, shrewd and thriving "earth-worms," as Bishop Berkeley says; but it would be presumption to think of thus making good citizens, still less virtuous Christians.
To-day more than ever we need a thorough religious education. The enemies of Christianity are now making war upon its dogmas more generally and craftily than at any former period. Their attacks, for being wily and concealed, are all the more pernicious. The impious rage of a Voltaire, or the "solemn sneer" of a Gibbon, would be less dangerous than this insidious warfare. They disguise their designs under the appearance of devotion to progressive ideas, hatred of superstition and intolerance, all the better to instil the slow but deadly poison. By honeyed words, a studied candor, a dazzle of erudition, they have spread their "gossamer nets of seduction" over the world. The press teems with books and journals in which doctrines subversive of religion and morality are so elegantly set forth that the unguarded reader, like Roger in Ariosto, is very apt to be deceived by the fascination of false charms, and to mistake a most hideous and dangerous object for the very type of beauty. The serpent stealthily glides under the silken verdure of a polished style. Nothing is omitted. The passions are fed and the morbid sensibilities pandered to; firmness in the cause of truth or virtue is called obstinacy; and strength of soul, a refractory blindness. The bases of morality are sapped in the name of liberty; the discipline of the church, when not branded as sheer "mummery," is held up as hostile to personal freedom; and her dogmas with one or two exceptions are treated as opinions which may be received or rejected with like indifference.
Nor is this irreligious tendency confined to literary publications; it finds numerous and powerful advocates in men of scientific pursuits, who, like Belial in Milton, "strive to make the worse appear the better cause." The chemist has never found in his crucible that intangible something which men call spirit; so, in the name of science, he pronounces it a myth. The anatomist has dissected the human frame; but failing to meet the immaterial substance—the soul, he denies its existence. The physicist has weighed the conflicting theories of his predecessors in the scales of criticism; and finally decides that bodies are nothing more than the accidental assemblage of atoms, and rejects the very idea of a Creator. The geologist, after investigating the secrets of the earth, triumphantly tells us that he has accumulated an overwhelming mass of facts to refute the biblical cosmogony and thus subvert the authority of the inspired record. The astronomer flatters himself that he has discovered natural and necessary laws which do away with the necessity of admitting that a divine hand once launched the heavenly bodies into space and still guides them in their courses; the ethnographer has studied the peculiarities of the races, he has met with widely-different conformations, and believes himself sufficiently authorized to deny the unity of the human family; in a word, they conclude that nothing exists but matter, that God is a myth, and the soul "the dream of a dream."
Thus do men attack these sacred truths which, in the words of Balmes, "cannot be shaken without greatly injuring and finally destroying the social edifice." What, then, must be done to save society from the perils that menace it—to stem the tide that bids fair to sweep away eventually even civilization itself? What is the remedy for the profligacy that disgraces some of our crowded centres, and the demoralization that is fast gangrening our rural districts? There is one, and we believe there is but one. Let the rising generation be "brought up" in a "religious atmosphere." If we Christianize our youth, we may be sure of having a virtuous and a virile people; for it is an ethical truth, that "the morals are but the outward forms of the inner life."