“The characters,” wrote Goethe—who was pagan of the pagans and “decidirter Nicht-Christ”—“which we can truly respect have become rarer. We can sincerely esteem only that which is not self-seeking.… I must confess to have found through my whole life unselfish characters of the kind of which I speak only there where I found a firmly-grounded religious life; a creed, which had an unchangeable basis, resting upon itself—not dependent upon the time, its spirit, or its science.”
This foundation of a positive religious faith is as indispensable to national as to individual character, and without it the diffusion of enlightenment cannot create a great or lasting civilization. Religion ought to constitute the very essence of all primary education. It alone can touch the heart, raise the mind, and evoke from their brutish apathy the elements of humanity, especially the reason; and it is therefore the one indispensable element in any right system of national education. A population unable to read or write, but with a religious faith and discipline, has before now constituted, and may again constitute, a great nation; but a people without religious earnestness has no solid political character. Religion is the widest and deepest of all the elements of civilization; it reaches those whom nothing else can touch; but for the masses of men there can be no religion without the authoritative teaching of a church.
And now let us return to M. de Laveleye. “The general spread of education,” he says (p. 23), “is indispensable to the exercise of constitutional liberty.… Education is the basis of national liberty and prosperity.”
In view of the facts that constitutional liberty has existed, and for centuries, in states in which there was no “general spread of education,” and that “the diffusion of enlightenment” is found in our own day to co-exist with the most hateful despotisms, we might pass on, without stopping to examine more closely these loose and popular phrases; but since the fallacies which they contain form a part of the culture-creed of modern paganism, and are accepted as indisputable truths by the multitude, they have a claim upon our attention which their assertion by Mr. Gladstone’s friend could not give them.
There is no necessary connection between popular education and civil liberty, as there is none between the enlightenment and the morality of a people. This is a subject full of import—one which, in this age and country, ought to be discussed with perfect freedom and courage. Courage indeed is needed precisely here; for to deny that there is a God, to treat Christ as a myth or a common man, to declaim against religion as superstition, to make the Bible a butt for witticisms and fine points, to deny future life and the soul’s immortality, to denounce marriage, to preach communism, and to ridicule whatever things mankind have hitherto held sacred—this is not only tolerable, it is praiseworthy and runs with the free thought of an enlightened and inquiring age. But to raise a doubt as to the supreme and paramount value of intellectual training; of its sovereign efficacy in the cure of human ills; of its inseparable alliance with freedom, with progress, with man’s best interests, is pernicious heresy, and ought not to be borne with patiently. In our civilization, through the action of majorities, there is special difficulty in such discussions, since with us nothing is true except what is popular. Majorities rule, and are therefore right. With rare eloquence we denounce tyrant kings and turn to lick the hands of the tyrant people. Whoever questions the wisdom of the American people is not to be argued with—he is to be pitied; and therefore both press and pulpit, though they flaunt the banner of freedom, are the servants of the tyrant. To have no principles, but to write and speak what will please the most and offend the fewest—this is the philosophy of free speech. We therefore have no independent, and consequently no great, thinkers. It is dangerous not to think with majorities and parties; for those who attempt to break their bonds generally succeed, like Emerson, only in becoming whimsical, weak, and inconclusive. It is not surprising, then, that the Catholics, because they do not accept as true or ultimate what is supposed to be the final thought and definite will of American majorities on the subject of education, should be denounced, threatened, and made a Trojan Horse of to carry political adventurers into the White House.
Nevertheless, the observant are losing confidence in the theory, so full of inspiration to demagogues and declaimers, that superstition and despotism must be founded on ignorance. In Prussia at this moment universal education co-exists with despotism. Where tyrannical governments take control of education they easily make it their ally.
Let us hear what Laing says of the practical results of the Prussian system of education, which it is so much the fashion to praise.
“If the ultimate object,” he says, “of all education and knowledge be to raise man to the feeling of his own moral worth, to a sense of his responsibility to his Creator and to his conscience for every act, to the dignity of a reflecting, self-guiding, virtuous, religious member of society, then the Prussian educational system is a failure. It is only a training from childhood in the conventional discipline and submission of mind which the state exacts from its subjects. It is not a training or education which has raised, but which has lowered, the human character.… The social value or importance of the Prussian arrangements for diffusing national scholastic education has been evidently overrated; for now that the whole system has been in the fullest operation in society upon a whole generation, we see morals and religion in a more unsatisfactory state in this very country than in almost any other in the north of Europe; we see nowhere a people in a more abject political and civil condition, or with less free agency in their social economy. A national education which gives a nation neither religion, nor morality, nor civil liberty, nor political liberty is an education not worth having.… If to read, write, cipher, and sing be education, the Prussian subject is an educated man. If to reason, judge, and act as an independent free agent, in the religious, moral, and social relations of man to his Creator and to his fellow-men, be the exercise of the mental powers which alone deserves the name of education, then is the Prussian subject a mere drum boy in education, in the cultivation and use of all that regards the moral and intellectual endowments of man, compared to one of the unlettered population of a free country. The dormant state of the public mind on all affairs of public interest, the acquiescence in a total want of political influence or existence, the intellectual dependence upon the government or its functionary in all the affairs of the community, the abject submission to the want of freedom or free agency in thoughts, words, or acts, the religious thraldom of the people to forms which they despise, the want of influence of religious and social principle in society, justify the conclusion that the moral, religious, and social condition of the people was never looked at or estimated by those writers who were so enthusiastic in their praises of the national education of Prussia.”
In spite of the continued progress of education, there is even less liberty, religious, civil, and political, in Prussia to-day than when these words were written, thirty years ago.
Nothing more dazzles the eyes of men than great military success; and this, together with the habit which belongs to our race of applauding whoever wins, has produced, especially in England and the United States, where Bismarck is looked upon, ignorantly enough, as the champion of Protestantism, a kind of blind admiration and awe for whatever is Prussian. “Protestant Prussia,” boasts M. de Laveleye, “has defeated two empires, each containing twice her own population, the one in seven weeks, the other in seven months”; and in the new edition of Appleton’s Encyclopædia we are informed that these victories are attributed to the superior education of her people. As well might the tyranny of the government and the notorious unchastity and dishonesty of the Prussians be ascribed to their superior education. Not to the general intelligence of the people, but to the fact that the whole country has been turned into a military camp, and that to the one purpose of war all interests have been made subservient, must we seek for an explanation of the victories of Sadowa and Sedan.