John Foster

“ To these joys of tumult, the people of the savage and the more cultivated nations sacrificed everything belonging to the peaceful economy of life, with a desperate, frantic fury. All this was the confession that there was little felicity in the heart or in the home. Nor was it found in these resources; if the wild elation might be mistaken for happiness while it lasted, it was brief in each instance, and it subsided in an aggravated dreariness of the soul. ”

“ Time, in sweeping away successive generations, has preserved, in substance, the sad inheritance to that which is as yet the latest.
Even that portion of beneficial effect which actually has resulted from this co-operation of new forces, has served to make a more obvious exposure of the unhappiness and offensiveness of what is still the condition of the far greater part of our population; as a dreary waste is made, to give a more sensible impression how dreary it is, by the little inroads of cultivation and beauty in its hollows, and the faint advances of an unwonted green upon its borders. ”

“ A gloomy and humiliating spectacle truly it is, to be offered by a world of rational and moral agents, if we see that, instead of a repression of the propensity to wickedness by reverence of the Sovereign Judge, and the anticipation of a future life, there is merely a restraint put on its external activity, and that by the force of men's fears of one another. But nearly to this it was, as the only strong restraint, that those heathens were left by their ignorance, or a notion so slight as to be little better, of a future existence and judgment. ”

“ What would the great tribe of the uneducated people do with the half of their time, which we will suppose that such a state would give to their voluntary disposal? Every one can answer infallibly, that the far greater number of them would consume it in idleness, vanity or every sort of intemperance. Educate them, then, bring them under a grand process of intellectual and moral reformation;—or, in all circumstances and events, calamitous or prosperous, they are still a race made in vain! ”

“ It is the hapless predicament of our nature, that the noblest of its powers, the understanding, has but most imperfectly and precariously that commanding hold on the others, which is essential to the good order of the soul. Our constitution is like a machine in which there is a constant liability of the secondary wheels to be thrown out of the catch and grapple of the master one. ”

“ To pass from beholding that bright and sumptuous display, in order to see what there was corresponding to it in the subsequent state of the popular cultivation, is like going out from some magnificent apartment with its lustres, music, refections, and assemblage of elegant personages, to be beset by beggars in the gloom and cold of a winter night. ”

“ Now imagine a week, month, or year, of the intercourse in such a domestic society, the course of talk, the mutual manners, and the progress of mind and character; where there is a sense of drudgery approaching to that of slavery, in the unremitting necessity of labor; where there is none of the interest of imparting knowledge or receiving it, or of reciprocating knowledge that has been imparted and received; where there is not an acre, if we might express it so, of intellectual space around them, clear of the thick, universal fog of ignorance ”

“ The whole energy of their moral and intellectual nature goes out as in brute instinct on present objects, to make the most they can of them for the moment, taking the chance for whatever may be next. They are left totally devoid even of the thought, that what they are doing is the beginning of a life as an important adventure for good or evil; their whole faculty is engrossed in the doing of it; and whether it signify anything to the next ensuing stage of life, or to the last, is as foreign to any calculation of theirs, as the idea of reading their destiny in the stars. ”

“ If alarmed at such a view, will not they who have so long held the sovereign control over the national economy feel the bitterest regret that it had not been given them to obviate the possible dangers of such a crisis and such a change, or rather to prevent such a crisis and a change so abrupt, by exertions in every way, and on the widest scale, to rescue the people from their ignorance and barbarism, instead of trusting to it for an uncontested undisturbed continuance of their own domination? ”

“ It has seemed a mournful thing to behold, in contemplation, the multitude of lifeless? forms, occupying in silence the same abodes in which they had lived, or scattered upon the gardens, fields, and roads; and then to see the countenances of the beings yet languishing in life, looking despair, and impressed with the signs of approaching death. We have even sometimes had the vivid and horrid picture offered to our imagination, of a number of human creatures shut up by their fellow mortals in some strong hold, under an entire privation of sustenance ”

“ But while any attempt to carry the representation of the fatal effects of ignorance over the extent of so dreary a scene is declined, let it not be forgotten that they have been an awful reality; that they have actually existed, in time, and place, and number of victims; that there actually were the men, and so many men, who exemplified, and in so many ways, the truth we are illustrating. And a truth which has its demonstration in facts ought to come with the weight of all the facts that we believe ever did demonstrate it. ”

“ May not the notion of it, as entertained by some persons, be rather an image of the polity of an age long past, or of that which remains unaltered as if it were a part of eternal nature in the dominions of the East, than a model for the conformation of society here in the present times? Is it required, that there should be a sentiment of obsequiousness in the people, affecting them in a manner like the instinct by which a lower order of animals is in awe of a higher, by which the common tribe of beasts would cower at the sight of lions? ”

“ It shall be as if men of wicked designs could be compelled to wear labels on their breasts wherever they go, to announce their character in conspicuous letters; or nightly assassins could be forced to carry torches before them, to reveal the murder in their visages; or, as if, according to a vulgar superstition, evil spirits could not help betraying their dangerous presence by a tinge of brimstone in the flame of the lamps. Thus evident, by the light of reason and religion, shall have been the true nature of certain important facts in the policy of a Christian nation ”

“ And so would the idea of perfect moral excellence have come to dwell and shine in the understanding, if it had been the True Divinity that men beheld in their contemplations of a superior existence. But when the gods of their heaven were little better than their own evil qualities, exalted to the sky to be thence reflected back upon them invested with Olympian charms and splendors, their ideas of deity would evidently combine with the causes which made it impossible for them to conceive a perfect model for human excellence. See the mighty labor of human depravity to confirm its dominion! ”

“ So little is the feeling of a peaceful cordiality created among them by their seeing one another all within the habitation, that, not unfrequently, the passer-by may learn the fact of their collective number being there, from the sound of a low strife of mingled voices, some of them betraying youth replying in anger or contempt to maturity or age. It is wretched to see how early this liberty is boldly taken. As the children perceive nothing in the minds of their parents that should awe them into deference, the most important difference left between them is that of physical strength. ”

“ They will one day have learned to esteem it a far nobler form of power to lead and direct an immense society of intelligent minds, than to delude, coerce, and drive a vast semi-barbarous herd. Providence surely will one day, in the progress of society, confer on it such wise and virtuous rulers as can feel, that it is better for them to have a people who can understand and rationally approve, when deserving of approbation, their system and measures, than one bent in stupid submission, even if ignorance could henceforward suffice (which it cannot) to retain the people in that posture ”

“ And for this assurance it is, at the very lowest, self-evident, that there is at any rate such an efficacy in cultivation, as to give a certainty that a well-cultivated people cannot remain on the same degraded moral level as a neglected ignorant one—or anywhere near it. None of those even that value such designs the least, ever pretend to foresee, in the event of their being carried into effect, an undiminished prevalence of rudeness and brutality of manners, of delight in spectacles and amusements of cruelty, of noisy revelry, of sottish intemperance, or of disregard of character. ”

“ There have come in on the popular mind some ideas, which the wisest of those who dread or hate their effect there, look around in vain for the means of expelling. And these glimpses of partial intelligence, these lights of dubious and possibly destructive direction amidst the night, will continue to prompt and lead that mind, with a hazard which can sease only with the opening upon it of the true daylight of knowledge. ”

“ If knowledge rendered efficacious has become, in your minds, the light and joy of the Christian faith and hope, look at the state of those, whose minds have never been cultivated to an ability to entertain the principles of religious truth, even as mere intellectual notions. You would not for the wealth of an empire consent to descend, were it possible, from the comparative elevation to which you have been raised by means of knowledge, into melancholy region of spirits abandoned to ignorance. ”

“ And if, while these benefits are coming so numerously in his sight, like an irregular crowd of loaded fruit-trees, one partially seen behind the offered luxury of another, and others still descried, through intervals, in the distance, he can imagine them all devastated and swept away from him, leaving him in a scene of mental desolation,—and if he shall then consider that nearly such is the state of the great multitude,—he will surely feel that a deep compassion is due to so depressed a condition of existence. ”

“ Whatever the actual economy may have of wisdom in its institutions, and of splendor, and fulness of all good things, in some parts of its apportionment, they feel that what is allotted to most of them in its arrangements is pressing hardship, unremitting poverty, growing still more hopeless with the progress of time, and of what they hear trumpeted as national glory, nay, even "national prosperity and happiness unrivalled." ”

“ Alas! it will be, to that extent, just a continuation of the ignorance, debasement, and misery, so conspicuous in the bulk of the people now. And to what extent? Calculate that from the unquestionable fact that hundreds of thousands of the human beings in our land, between the ages, say of six and sixteen, are at this hour thus abandoned to go forward into life at random, as to the use they shall make of it,—if, indeed, it can be said to be at random, when there is strong tendency and temptation to evil, and no discipline to good. ”

“ Now if such were the state of their intelligence, how would this friend of truth and the people find, how would he have expected to find, their piety, their morals, and their happiness affected by such destitution of knowledge? Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? We are supposing them to be in ignorance of four parts out of five, or perhaps of nine parts out of ten, of what the Supreme Wisdom was maintaining an extraordinary dispensation to declare to them. ”

“ A blind, turbulent monster of popular power never can for a long time maintain the domination of a political community. It would rage and riot itself out of breath and strength, succumb under some strong coercion of its own creating, and lie subject and stupified, till its spirit should be recovered and incensed for new commotion. ”

“ No fell savage, or serpent, or monster, ever had a more perfect instinct to avail itself of an impervious obscurity for its lurking-place, than this imposture has shown to keep out all mental light from its realm. The delusion is so strong and absolute in ignorance, is so identified with it, and so systematically repels at all points the approach of knowledge, that it is difficult to conceive a mode of its extermination that shall not involve some fearful destruction, in the most literal sense, of the people whom it possesses. ”