Progress is material, moral, intellectual, social, political, artistic, religious, scientific, literary, and indefinitely manifold. Now, it is assumed that the diffusion of enlightenment is not merely promotive, but that it is an essential condition of progress in its widest and fullest meaning. This is the new faith—the goddess of culture, holding the torch of science and leading mankind into the palace of pleasure, the only true heaven.
By conduct, we have already said, both individuals and nations are saved or perish; and we spoke of the civilized. Barbarous states are destroyed by catastrophes—they die a violent death; but the civilized are wasted by internal maladies—suis et ipsa Roma viribus ruit. They grow and they decay, they progress and they decline. At first poverty, virtue, industry, faith, hopefulness, strong characters and heroic natures; at last wealth, corruption, indolence, unbelief, despair, children too weak even to admire the strength of their fathers, too base to believe that they were noble. Public spirit dies out; patriotism is in the mouths of politicians, but, like the augurs of Rome, they cannot speak the word and look one another in the face. The country is to each one what he can make out of it, and the bond of union is the desire of each citizen to secure his own interests. The bondholders love their country, and the sans-culottes are disloyal; class rises against class, civil discord unsettles everything, revolution succeeds revolution, and when the barbarian comes he holds an inquest over the corpse. It generally happens, too, that those civilizations which spring up quickest and promise most fair are fated to die earliest; as precocious children disappoint fond mothers. If the teaching of history is a trustworthy guide, we are certainly safe in affirming that civilized states and empires perish, not from lack of knowledge, but of virtue; not because the people are ignorant, but because they are corrupt.
The assumption, however, is that men become immoral because they are ignorant; that if they were enlightened, they would be virtuous.
“The superstition,” says Herbert Spencer (Study of Sociology, p. 121), “that good behavior is to be forthwith produced by lessons learned out of books, which was long ago statistically disproved, would, but for preconceptions, be utterly dissipated by observing to what a slight extent knowledge affects conduct; by observing that the dishonesty implied in the adulterations of tradesmen and manufacturers, in fraudulent bankruptcies, in bubble-companies, in ‘cooking’ of railway accounts and financial prospectuses, differs only in form, and not in amount, from the dishonesty of the uneducated; by observing how amazingly little the teachings given to medical students affect their lives, and how even the most experienced medical men have their prudence scarcely at all increased by their information.”
It is not knowledge, but character, that is important; and character is formed more by faith, by hope, by love, admiration, enthusiasm, reverence, than by any patchwork of alphabetical and arithmetical symbols. The young know but little; but they believe firmly, they hope nobly, and love generously; and it is while knowledge is feeble and these spontaneous acts of the soul are strong that character is moulded. The curse of our age is that men will believe that, in education, to spell, to read, to write, is what signifies, and they cast aside the eternal faith, the infinite hope, the divine love, that more than all else make us men.
“The true test of civilization,” says Emerson, “is not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops—no, but the kind of man the country turns out.” Is there some mystic virtue in printed words that to be able to read them should make us men? And even in the most enlightened countries what do the masses of men know? Next to nothing; and their reading, for the most part, stupefies them. The newspaper, with its murders, suicides, hangings, startling disclosures, defalcations, embezzlements, burglaries, forgeries, adulteries, advertisements of nostrums, quack medicines, and secrets of working death in the very source of life, with all manner of hasty generalizations, crude theories, and half-truths jumbled into intellectual pot-pourris; the circulating library, with its stories, tales, romances of love, despair, death, of harrowing accidents, of hair-breadth escapes, of successful crime, and all the commonplaces of wild, reckless, and unnatural life—these are the sources of their knowledge. Or, if they are ambitious, they read “How to get on in the world,” “The art of making money,” “The secret of growing rich,” “The road to wealth,” “Successful men,” “The millionaires of America,” and the Mammon-worship, and the superstition of matter, and the idolatry of success become their religion; their souls die within them, and what wretched slaves they grow to be!
In the newspaper and circulating library God and man, heaven and earth—all things—are discussed, flippantly, in snatches, generally; all possible conflicting and contradictory views are taken; and these ignorant masses, who, in the common schools, have been through the Fourth Reader, and who know nothing, not even their own ignorance, are confused. They doubt, they lose faith, and are enlightened by the discovery that God, the soul, truth, justice, honor, are only nominal—they do not concern positivists. Can anything be more pitiful than the state of these poor wretches?—neither knowing nor believing; without knowledge, yet having neither faith nor love. God pity them that they are communists, internationalists, solidaires; for what else could they be? No enthusiasm is possible for them but that of destruction.
Religion is the chief element in civilization, and consequently in progress. For the masses of men, even though the whole energy of mankind should spend itself upon some or any possible common-school system, the eternal principles which mould character, support manhood, and consecrate humanity will always remain of faith, and can never be held scientifically. If it were possible that science should prove religion false, it would none the less remain true, or there would be no truth.