The withdrawment, we said, of the grand truth in question, from a man's faith, (together with everything of taste andhabitwhich that faith might have created,) would necessarily break up the government over his conscience. How evident then is it, that among the people of the heathen lands, under a disastrous ignorance of this and all the other sublime truths, that are the most fit to rule an immortal being during his sojourn on earth, no man could feel any peremptory obligation to be universally virtuous, or adequate motives to excite an endeavor to approach that high attainment, even were there not a perfect inability to form the true conception of it. And then how much of course it was that the general mass would be dreadfully depraved. Though a momentary surprise may at times have seized us on the occurrence, in their history, of some monstrous form of flagitiousness, we do not wonder at beholding a state of the people such in its general character as the sacred writers exhibit, in descriptions to which the other records of antiquity add their confirming testimony and ample illustrations. For while the immense aggregate is displayed to the mental view, as pervaded, agitated, and stimulated, by the restless forces of appetites and passions, and those forces operating with an impulse no less perverted than strong, let it be asked what kinds and measure of restraint there could be upon such a world of creatures so actuated, to keep them from rushing in all ways into evil. Conceive, if you can, the fiction of such a multitude, so actuated, having been placed under an adjustment of restraints competent to withhold them. And then take off, in your imagination, one after another of these, to see what will follow. Take off, at last, all the coercion that can be applied through the belief of a judgment to come, and a future state of retribution;—by doing which you would also empower the race to defy, if any recognition of him remained, the Supreme Governor, whose possible inflictions, being confined to the present life, might at any time be escaped by shortening it. All these sacred bonds being thus dissolved, behold this countless multitude abandoned to be carried or driven the whole length to which the impulses of their appetites and passions would go,—or could go before they were arrested by some obstruction opposed to them from a quarter foreign to conscience. And the main and final thing in reserve to limit their career, after all the worthier restraints were annihilated, would be only this,—the resistance which men's self-interest opposes to one another's bad inclinations. 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.
Not but that it has been, in all nations and times, of infinite practical service that there is involved in the constitution of the world a law by which a coarse self-interest thus interposes to obstruct in a degree the violent propensity to evil; for it has prevented, under Providence, more actual mischief, beyond comparison more, than all other causes together. The man inclined to perpetrate an iniquity, of the nature of a wrong to his fellow-mortals, is apprized that he shall provoke a reaction, to resist or punish him; that he shall incur as great an evil as that he is disposed to do, or greater; that either a revenge regardless of all formalities of justice will strike him, or a process instituted in organized society will vindictively reach his property, liberty, or life. This defensive array, of all men against all men, compels to remain shut up within the mind an immensity of wickedness which is there burning to come out into action. But for this, Noah's flood had been rendered needless. But for this, our planet might have been accomplishing its circles round the sun for thousands of years past without a human inhabitant. Through the effect of this essential law, in the social economy, it was possible for the race to subsist, notwithstanding all that ignorance of the Divine Being, of heavenly truth, and of uncorrupt morality, in which we are contemplating the heathen nations as benighted. But while thus it prevented utter destruction, it had no corrective operation on the depravity of the heart. It was not through a judgment of things being essentially evil that they were forborne; it was not by the power of conscience that wicked propensity was kept under restraint. It was only by a hold on the meaner principles of his nature, that the offender in will was arrested in prevention of the deed. And so the race were such virtually, as they would have hastened to become actually, could they have ceased to be afraid of one another's strength and retaliation.' [Footnote: It is not very uncommon to hear credit given to human nature apparently in sober simplicity, for the whole amount of the negation of bad actionsthusprevented, as just so much genuine virtue, by some dealers in moral and theological speculation.] But even this restraint imposed by mutual apprehension, important as its operation was in the absence of nobler influences, was yet of miserably partial efficacy. Men were continually breaking through this protective provision, and committed against one another a stupendous amount of crimes. And no wonder, when we consider that the evil passions, endowed as they seem to be with a portentous excess of vigor by the very circumstance ofbeingevil, (as the demoniacs were the strongest of men,) are exasperated the more by a certain degree of awe impressed on them by the defensive attitude of their objects. When strength so great might thus be irritated to greater, and when there were no "powers of the world to come," to invade the dreadful cavern of iniquity in the mind, and there combat and subdue it, there would often be no want of the audacity to send it forth into action at all hazards, and in defiance and contempt of the restraining force which operated through mutual fear of vindictive reaction.
But it may be said, perhaps, that in thus representing the people who were destitute of divine knowledge, as left with hardly any other control on their bad dispositions than one of a quality little more dignified than fetters literally binding the limbs, we are underrating what there still was among them to take effect in the way ofinstruction. Even this coarse principle of control itself, it may be alleged, this prudence of reciprocal fear became refined into something worthier of moral agents. For it passed, by a compromise among the species, from the form of individual self-defence and revenge into that of institutions oflaw; and legislation, it will be said, is a teacher of morals. Retaining, indeed, the rough expedient of physical force, in readiness to coerce or punish where it cannot deter by warning, it yet strongly endeavors the repression of evil emotions by means of rightprinciples, marked out, explained, and inculcated. Itteachesthese principles as dictates of reason and justice, while it embodies them in the menacing authority of enactments. There was therefore, it may be pleaded, as muchinstructionamong the ancient heathen as there was legislation.
In answering this, we may forego any rigorous examination of the quality of principles and precepts enunciated by legislators who themselves, in common with the people, looked on human existence and duty through a worse than twilight medium; who had no divine oracles to impart wisdom, and were, some of them, reduced to begin their operations with the lie that pretended they had such oracles; from all which it was inevitable that some of their maxims and injunctions would even in their efficacy be noxious, as being at variance with eternal rectitude. It is enough to observe, on the claims of legislation to the character of a moral preceptor, that it retained so palpably, after all, the nature of the gross element from which it was a refinement or transfusion, that even what it might teach right, as to the matter, it was unable to teach with the right moral impression. With all its gravity, and phrases of wisdom, and show of homage to virtue, it was, and was plainly descried to be, that very sameNoli me tangere,in a disguised form; a less provoking and hostile manner only of keeping up the state of preparation for defensive war. Every one knew right well that the pure approbation and love of goodness were not the source of law; but that it was an arrangement originating and deriving all its force from self-interest; a contrivance by which each man was glad to make the collective strength of society his guarantee against his neighbor's interest and wish to do him wrong. While pleased that others were under this restraint, he was often vexed at being under it also himself; but on the whole deemed this security worth the cost of suffering the interdict on his own inclinations,—perhaps as believing other men's to be still worse than his, or seeing their strength to be greater. We repeat that a preceptive system thus estimated could not, even had the principles to which it gave expression in the mandates of law been no other than those of the soundest morality, have impressed them with the weight of sanctity on the conscience. And all this but tends to show the necessity that the rules and sanctions of morality, to come with simplicity and power on the human mind, should primarily emanate, and be acknowledged as emanating, from a Being exalted above all implication and competition of interest with man.
Thus we see, that the pagan ignorance precluded one grand requisite for crushing the dominion of iniquity; for there was nothing to insinuate or to force its way into the recesses of the soul, to applytherea repressive power to the depraved ardor which glowed in the passions. That was left, inaccessible and inextinguishable, as the subterranean fires in a volcanic region. And in the mighty impulse to evil with which it was continually operating as an energy of feeling, it compelled the subservience of the intellect; and thus combined the passions with a faculty skilful to guide their direction, to diversify their objects, to invent expedients, and to seize and create occasions. What was it that this intelligent depravity would stop short of accomplishing? Reflect on the extent of human genius, in its powers of invention, combination, and adaptation; and then think of all this faculty, in an immense number of minds, through many ages, and in every imaginable variety of situation, exerted with unremitting activity in aid of the wrong propensities. Reflect how many ideas, apt and opportune for this service, would spring up casually, or be suggested by circumstances, or be attained by the earnest study of beings goaded in pursuit of change and novelty. The simple modes of iniquity were put under an active ministry of art, to combine, innovate, and augment. And so indefatigable was its exercise, that almost all conceivable forms of immorality were brought to imagination, most of them into experiment; and the greater number into prevailing practice, in those nations: insomuch that the sated monarch would have imposed as difficult a task on ingenuity in calling for the invention of a new vice, as of a new pleasure. They would perhaps have been nearly identical demands when he was the person to be pleased.
Such are some of the most obvious illustrations that the absence of knowledge was a cause, and added in an unknown measure to the strength of all other causes, of the excessive corruption in the heathen nations. And if this depravity of a world of moral agents did not, contemplated simply as a destruction of theirrectitude, appear equivalent to the gravest import of the terms "the people are destroyed," themiseryinseparable from the depravity instantly comes in our view to complete their verification.
We are aware that the wickedness and misery of the ancient world, as asserted in illustration of the natural effect of estrangement from divine truth, are apt to be regarded as of the order of topics which have dwindled into insignificance, worn out by being repeated just because they have often been repeated before; a sort of exhausted quarries and dried-up wells. There is a certain class of vain and sneering mortals, in whose conceit nothing is such proof of superior sense as dis-carding the greatest number of topics and arguments as obsolete or impertinent. It is to be reckoned on that some of these, on hearing again the old maxims, that a people without divine instruction must be a vicious one, and that a vicious people must be an unhappy one,—and those maxims accompanied with a description of the old pagan world as illustrative evidence,—will be prompt to let forth their comments in some such strain as the following:—"The state of the ancient heathens, thus brought upon us in one cheap declamation more, is now a matter of trivial import, just fit to give some show and exaggeration to the stale common-place, that ignorance is likely to produce depravity, and that depravity and misery are likely enough to go together. The pagans might be wretched enough; and perhaps also the matter has been extravagantly magnified for the service of a favorite theme, or to make a rhetorical show. At any rate, it is not now worth while to go so far back to concern ourselves about it. The ancient heathens had their day and their destiny, and it is of little importance to us what they were or suffered."
It is fortunate, we may reply, to be "wiser than the ancients," without the trouble oflearninganything by means of them. It is fortunate, also, to have ascertained how much of all that ever existed can teach us nothing. We have a signal improvement in the fashion of wisdom, when that high endowment may be possessed as a thing distinct from compass of thought, from study of causes and effects as illustrated on the great scale, from aptitude to be instructed by the past, and from contemplation of the divine government as carried over a wide extent of time. But indeed this is not a privilege peculiar to this later day. In any former age there were men in sufficient number who were wise enough to be indifferent to all but immediate passing events, as knowing no lessons that persons like them had to learn from remoter views, looking either into the past or the future; who could even have before them the very monuments of awful events that were gone by, without perceiving inscribed on them any characters for contemplation to read. It is not impossible there might be persons who could plan their schemes, and debate their questions, and even follow their amusements, quite exempt from solemn reflections, within view of the ruins of Jerusalem, after the Roman legions had left it and its myriads of dead to silence. Any reference to that dreadful spectacle, as an example of the consequences of the ignorance and wickedness of a people, might have been heard with unconcern, and lightly passed over as foreign to the matters requiring their attention: it was all over with the people dead, and the people alive had their own concerns to mind. But would not exactly such as these have been the men most likely to fall into the vices and impieties which would provoke the next avenging visitation, and to perish in it? In all times, the triflers with the great exemplifications of the connection of depravity with misery and ruin, who thought it but an impertinent moralizing that attempted to recall such funereal spectacles for admonition, were fools, whatever self-complacency they might feel in a habit of thinking more fitted, they would perhaps say, for making our best advantage of the world as we find it. And we of the present time are convicted of exceeding stupidity, if we think it not worth while to go a number of ages back to contemplate the mass of mankind, the wide world of beings such as ourselves, sunk in darkness and wretchedness, and to consider what it is that is taught by so melancholy an exhibition. What is to give fulness of evidence to an instruction, if a world be too narrow; what is to give it weight, if a world be too light?
It is to be acknowledged, that the mental darkness which we are representing as so greatly the cause of the wickedness and unhappiness of those nations of old, had the effect of protecting them, in a measure, from some kinds of suffering. They had not, as we have been observing, illumination enough, to have conscience enough, for inflicting the severest pains of remorse; and for oppressing them with a distinct alarming apprehension of a future account. But that they were unhappy, was practically acknowledged in the very quality of what they ardently and universally sought as the highest felicities of existence. Those delights were violent and tumultuous, in all possible ways and degrees estranged from reflection, and adverse to it. The whole souls of great and small, in the most barbarous and in the more polished state, were passionately set on revelry, on expedients for inflaming licentiousness to madness; or concourses of multitudes for pomps, celebrations, shows, games, combats; on the riots of exultation and revenge after victories. The ruder nations had, in their way, however pitiable on the score of magnificence, their grand festive, triumphal, and demoniac confluxes and revellings. 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.
The fact of their being unhappy had a still more gloomy attestation in the mutual enmity which seems to have been of the very essence of life so vital a principle, that it could not be spared for an hour. No, they could not live without this luxury drawn from the fountains of death! What is the most conspicuous material of ancient history, what is it that glares out the most hideously from that darkness and oblivion in which the old world is veiling its aspect, but the incessant furies of miserable mortals against their fellow-mortals, "hateful and hating one another?" We cannot look that way but we see the whole field covered with inflicters and sufferers, not seldom interchanging those characters. If that field widens to our view, it is still, to the utmost line to which the shade clears away, a scene of cruelty, oppression, and slavery; of the strong trampling on the weak, and the weak often attempting to bite at the feet of the strong; of rancorous animosities and murderous competitions of persons raised above the mass of the community; of treacheries and massacres; and of war between hordes, and cities, and nations, and empires; warnever, in spirit, intermitted, and suspended sometimes in act only to acquire renewed force for destruction, or to find another assemblage of hated creatures to cut in pieces. Powerful as "the spirit of the first-born Cain" has continued, down to our age, and in the most improved divisions of mankind, there was, nevertheless, in the ancient pagan race, (as there is in some portions of the modern,) a more complete, uncontrolled actuation of the all-killing, all-devouring fury, a more absolute possession of Moloch.
Now it isas miserythat we are exhibiting all this depravity. To be thus,was suffering. The disease and the pain are inseparable in the description, and they were so in the reality. And both together, inevitably seizing on beings who had rejected or lost divine knowledge, maintained a hold as fatal and invincible as that of the intervolved serpents of Laocoon.
It is true, that a comprehensive estimate of the state of the people we are contemplating, would bring in view several minor circumstances which, though not availing to change materially the effect of the picture, are themselves of less gloomy color. But at the same time such an estimate would include other forms also of infelicity, besides those which were at once the result and punishment of depravity, the stings with which sin rewarded the infatuation that loved it. If the design had been to exhibit anything like a general view, we must have taken account of such particulars as these: the unhappiness of being without an assurance of an all-comprehending and merciful Providence, and of wanting therefore the best support in sorrow and calamity; the insuppressible impatience, or the deep melancholy, with which the more thoughtful persons must have seen departing from life, leaving them hopeless of ever meeting again in a life elsewhere, the relations or associates who were dear to them in spite of the prevailing effect of paganism to destroy philanthropy; and the gloomy sentiment with which they must have thought of their own continual approach toward death; a sentiment not always unaccompanied with certain intimidating hints and hauntings of possibilities in the darkness beyond that confine. But the more limited intention in the preceding description has been to illustrate their unhappiness as inflicted by their depravity, necessarily consequent on their ignorance. And what words so true, so irresistibly prompted at the view of such a scene, as those pronounced of a nation that at once despised the pagans and imitated them,—"The people are destroyed for lack of knowledge."
Let us not be suspected of having lost sight of the fact, that vice and misery have, in our nature, a deeper source than ignorance; or of being so absurd as to imagine that if the inestimable truths unknown to the heathen world had been, on the contrary, in all men's knowledge, but a slight portion of the depravity and wretchedness we have described could then have had an existence. To say, that under long absence of the sun any tract of terrestrial naturemust infalliblybe reduced to desolation, is not to say or imply, that under the benignant influence of that luminary the same region must, as necessarily and unconditionally, be a scene of beauty; but the only hope, for the only possibility, is for the field visited by much of that sweet influence. And it were an absurdity no less gross in the opposite extreme to the one just mentioned, to assert the uselessness, for rectifying the moral world, of a diffusion of the knowledge which shall compel men to see what is wrong; to deny that the impulses of the corrupt passions and will must suffer some abatement of their force and daring when encountered, like Balaam meeting the angel, by a clear manifestation of their bad and ruinous tendency, by a convinced judgment, a protesting conscience, and the aspect of the Almighty Judge,—instead of their being under the tolerance of a judgment not instructed to condemn them, or, (as ignorance is sure to quicken into error,) perverted to abet them.
From this view of the prevalence and malignant effects of ignorance among the people of the ancient world, both Jews and Gentiles, we may come down, with a few brief notices in passing over the long subsequent periods, towards our own times. For any attempt to prosecute the object through the ages and regions of later heathenism, (with the infatuated Judaism still more destructive to its subjects,) would be to lose ourselves in a boundless scene of desolation, an immense amplitude of darkness, frightfully alive throughout with the activity of all noxious and hideous things.
But by this time we are become aware how continually we are driven upon what will be in hazard of appearing an exaggerated phraseology; insomuch that we are almost afraid of accepting the epithets of description and aggravation which offer themselves as most appropriate to the subject. There are some self-complacent persons whose minds are so unapt to recognize the magnitude of a subject, or so averse perhaps to the contemplation of it if it be of tragical aspect, that strong terms accumulated to exhibit even what surpasses in its plain reality all the powers of language, offend them as declamatory exaggeration. Let it then be just observed, without one ambitious epithet, that since that period when ancient history, strictly so named, left off describing the state of mankind, more than a myriad of millions of our race have been on earth, and quitted it without one ray of the knowledge the most important to spirits sojourning here, and going hence.
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 actuallywerethe 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 everdiddemonstrate it. When they are not presented in breadth and detail prominently in our view, we are apt to lose the due effect of our knowing them to have existed.
It will be enough to advert very briefly to the Mohammedan imposture, though that is perhaps the most signal instance within all time, of a malignant delusion maintained directly and immediately by ignorance, by an absolute determination and even a fanatic zeal not to receive one new idea. Tenets involving the most palpable impossibilities, and asserted in self-contradictory terms, must stand inviolable to all question or controversy; literature must be scouted as a profane folly; not a principle of true philosophy is to be admitted; hardly is an application of the plainest mechanics to improve a machine or implement to be tolerated; or an infidel is to be onlypardoned, through contempt, for a successful obtrusion of science to render the most important service,—to save, for instance, a Mussulman ship-with its proud, besotted commander and crew from destruction, [Footnote: There is a very curious example of this related in Dr Clarke's Travels.] lest an acknowledgment made to science should allow one momentary surmise of imperfection to insult the all-sufficiency and sanctity of the unalterable creed and institutes; lest any diminutive crevice should be made on any side of the temple of the vile superstition, for the passage of one glimpse of true light to annoy the foul fiend that dwells there, invested "in the dunnest smoke of hell." Not, however, that this is the policy of doubt and apprehension, the evading and repelling caution of men who suspect themselves to be wrong and dread being forced to meet the proof. For the subjects of this execrable usurpation on the human understanding have, in general, the firmest assurance that all things in the system are right: it has itself secured them againstknowinganything that could discompose their sense of certainty. 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. And such a catastrophe it is probable the great body of them, in the temper of mind prevailing among them at this hour, would choose to incur by preference, we do not say to a serious, patient consideration of the true religion, but even to the admission among them of a system merely favoring knowledge in general, an order of measures which should urge upon the adults, and peremptorily enforce for the children, a discipline of intellectual improvement. There would be little national hesitation of choice, (at least in the central regions of the dominion of this hateful imposture,) between the introduction of any general system of expedients for driving them from their stupefaction into something like thinking and learning, and a general plague, to rage as long as any remained for victims. [Footnote: In the interval since this was written, some change has taken place in favor of the admission of the elements of knowledge, in the capital, and in the second city of the Mohammedan regions; but with very slight alterative influence on the mass; and with respect to the faith, probably none at all. Within this interval, also, the central power has been hastening rapidly to its catastrophe.]
But let us now look, for a moment, at the intellectual state of the people denominated Christian, during the ages preceding the Reformation. The best of all the acquisitions by earth from heaven, Christianity, might have seemed to bring with it an inevitable necessity of a great and permanent difference soon to be effected, in regard to the competence of men's knowledge to prevent their destruction. It was as if, in the physical system, some one production, far more salutary to life than all the other things furnished from the elements, had been reserved by the Creator to spring up in a later age, after many generations of men had been languishing through life, and prematurely dying, from the deficient virtue of their sustenance and remedies. The image of the inestimable plant had been shown to the prophets in their visions, but the reality was now given to the world; it was of "wholly a right seed," "had the seed in itself," and claimed to be cultivated by the people, who in every land were suffering the maladies which it had the properties to heal. But, while by the greater part of mankind it was not accounted worth admission to a place on their blasted, desolated soil, the manner in which its virtue was frustrated among those who pretended to esteem it, as it was, the best gift of the divine beneficence, is recorded in eternal reproach of the Christian nations.
As the hostility of heathenism, in the direct endeavors to extirpate the Christian religion, became evidently hopeless, in the nations within the Roman empire, there was a grand change of the policy of evil; and all manner of reprobate things, heathenism itself among them, rushed as by general conspiracy into treacherous conjunction with Christianity, retaining their own quality under the sanction of its name, and by a rapid process reducing it to surrender almost everything distinctive of it but that dishonored name: and all this under protection of the "gross darkness covering the people." There were indeed in existence the inspired oracles, and these could not be essentially falsified. But there was no lack of expedients and pre-texts for keeping them in a great measure secreted. It might be done under a pretence that reverence for their sanctity required they should be secluded as within the recesses of a temple, nor be there consulted but by consecrated personages; a pretence excellently contrived, since it was its own security against exposure, the people being thus kept unaware that the sacred writings themselves expressly invited popular inspection, by declaring themselves addressed to mankind at large. The deceivers were not worse off for the other facilities. In the progress of translation, the holy Scriptures could be intercepted and stopped short in a language but little less unintelligible than the original ones to the bulk of the people, in order that this "profane vulgar" might never hear the very words of God, but only such report as it should please certain men, at their discretion, to give of what he had said; men, however, of whom the majority were themselves too ignorant to cite it in even a falsified import. But though the people had understood the language, in the usage of social converse, there was a grand security against them in keeping them so destitute of the knowledge of letters, that the Bible, if such a rare thing ever could happen to fall into any of their hands, would be no more to them than a scroll of hieroglyphics. When to this was added, the great cost of a copy of so large a book before the invention of printing, it remained perhaps just worth while, (and it would be a matter of no difficulty or daring,) to make it, in the maturity of the system, an offence, and sacrilegious invasion of sacerdotal privilege, to look into a Bible. If it might seem hard thus to constitute a new sin, in addition to the long list already denounced by the divine law, amends were made by indulgently rescinding some articles in that list, and qualifying the principles of obligation with respect to them all.
In this latency of the sacred authorities, withdrawn from all communication with the human understanding, there were retained still many of the terms and names belonging to religion. They remained, but they remained only such as they could be when the departing spirit of that religion was leaving them void of their import and solemnity, and so rendered applicable to purposes of deception and mischief. They were as holy vessels, in which the original contents might, as they were escaping, be clandestinely replaced by the most malignant preparations. And as crafty and wicked men had a direct interest in this substitution, the pernicious operation went on incessantly; and with an ability, and to an extent to evince that the utmost barbarism of the times cannot extinguish genius, when it is iniquity that sets it on fire. How prolific was the invention of the falsehoods and absurdities of notion, and of the vanities and corruptions of practice, which it was devised to make the terms and names of religion designate and sanction! while it was also managed, with no less sedulity and success, that the inventors and propagators should be held in submissive reverence by the community, as the oracular depositaries of truth. That community had not knowledge enough of any other kind, to create a resisting and defensive power against this imposition in the concern of religion. A sound exercise of reason on subjects out of that province, a moderate degree of instruction in literature and science rightly so called, might have produced, in the persons of superior native capacity, somewhat of a competency and a disposition to question, to examine, to call for evidence, and to detect some of the fallacies imposed for Christian faith. But in such completeness of ignorance, the general mind was on all sides pressed and borne down to its fate. All reaction ceased; and the people were reduced to exist in one huge, unintelligent, monotonous substance, united by the interfusion of a vile superstition, which permitted just enough mental life in the mass to leave it capable of being actuated to all the purposes of cheats, and tyrants,—a proper subject for the dominion of "our Lord God the Pope," as he was sometimes denominated; and might have been denominated without exciting indignation, in the hearing of millions of beings bearing the form of men and the name of Christians.
Reflect that all this took place under the nominal ascendency of the best and brightest economy of instruction from heaven. Reflect that it was in nations where even the sovereign authority professed homage to the religion of Christ, and adopted and enforced it as a grand national institution, that the popular mass was thus reduced to a material fit for all the bad uses to which priestcraft could wish to put the souls and bodies of its slaves. And then consider whatshouldhave been the condition of this great aggregate, wherever Christianity was acknowledged by all as the true religion. The peopleshouldhave consisted of so many beings having each, in some degree, the independent, beneficial use of hismind; all of them trained with a reference to the necessity of their being apprized of their responsibility to their Creator, for the exercise of their reason on the matters of belief and choice; all of them capacitated for improvement by being furnished with the rudiments and instrumental means of knowledge; and all having within their reach, in their own language, the Scriptures of divine truth, some by immediate possession, the rest by means of faithful readers, while the book existed only in manuscript; all of them after it came to be printed.
Can any doubt arise, whether there were in the Christian states resources competent, if so applied, to secure to all the people an elementary instruction, and the possession of the printed Bible? Resources competent! All nations, sufficiently raised above barbarism to exist as states, have consumed, in uses the most foreign and pernicious to their welfare, an infinitely greater amount of means than would have sufficed, after due provision for comfortable physical subsistence, to afford a moderate share of instruction to all the people. And in those popish ages, that expenditure alone which went to ecclesiastical use would have been far more than adequate to this beneficent purpose. Think of the boundless cost for supporting the magnificence and satiating the rapacity of the hierarchy, from its triple-crowned head, down through all the orders branded with a consecration under that head to maintain the delusion and share the spoil. Recollect the immense system of policy for jurisdiction and intrigue, every agent of which was a devourer. Recollect the pomps and pageants, for which the general resources were to be taxed: while the general industry was injured by the interruption of useful employment, and the diversion of the people to such dissipation as their condition qualified and permitted them to indulge in. Think also of the incalculable cost of ecclesiastical structures, the temples of idolatry as in truth they were. One of the most striking situations for a religious and reflective Protestant is, that of passing some solitary hour under the lofty vault, among the superb arches and columns, of any one of the most splendid of these edifices remaining at this day in our own country. If he has sensibility and taste, the magnificence, the graceful union of so many diverse inventions of art, the whole mighty creation of genius that quitted the world without leaving even a name, will come with magical impression on his mind, while it is contemplatively darkening into the awe of antiquity. But he will be recalled—the sculptures, the inscriptions, the sanctuaries enclosed off for the special benefit, after death, of persons who had very different concerns during life from that of the care of their salvation, and various other insignia of the original character of the place, will help to recall him—to the thought, that these proud piles were in fact raised to celebrate the conquest, and prolong the dominion, of the Power of Darkness over the souls of the people. They were as triumphal arches, erected in memorial of the extermination of that truth which was given to be the life of men.
As he looks round, and looks upwards, on the prodigy of design, and skill, and perseverance, and tributary wealth, he may image to himself the multitudes that, during successive ages, frequented this fane in the assured belief, that the idle ceremonies and impious superstitions, which they there performed or witnessed, were a service acceptable to heaven, and to be repaid in blessings to the offerers.
He may say to himself, Here, on this very floor, under that elevated and decorated vault, in a "dim religious light" like this, but with the darkness of the shadow of death in their souls, they prostrated themselves to their saints, or their "queen of heaven;" nay, to painted images and toys of wood or wax, to some ounce or two of bread and wine, to fragments of old bones, and rags of cast-off vestments. Hither they came, when conscience, in looking back or pointing forward, dismayed them, to purchase remission with money or atoning penances, or to acquire the privilege of sinning with impunity in a certain manner, or for a certain time; and they went out at yonder door in the perfect confidence that the priest had secured, in the one case the suspension, in the other the satisfaction, of the divine law. Here they solemnly believed, as they were taught, that, by donatives to the church, they delivered the souls of their departed sinful relations from their state of punishment; and they went out of that door resolved, such as had possessions, to bequeath some portion of them, to operate in the same manner for themselves another day, in the highly probable case of similar need. Here they were convened to listen in reverence to some representative emissary from the Man of Sin, with new dictates of blasphemy or iniquity promulgated in the name of the Almighty: or to witness the trickery of some farce, devised to cheat or frighten them out of whatever remainder the former impositions might have left them of sense, conscience, or property. Here, in fine, there was never presented to their understanding, from their childhood to their death, a comprehensive, honest declaration of the laws of duty, and the pure doctrines of salvation. To think! that they should have mistaken for the house of God, and the very gate of heaven, a place where the Regent of the nether world had so short a way to come from his dominions, and his agents and purchased slaves so short a way to go thither. If we could imagine a momentary visit from Him who once entered a fabric of sacred denomination with a scourge, because it was made the resort of a common traffic, with what aspect and voice, with what infliction but the "rebuke with flames of fire," would he have entered this mart of iniquity, assuming the name of his sanctuary, where the traffic was in delusions, crimes, and the souls of men? It was even as if, to use the prophet's language, the very "stone cried out of the wall, and the beam out of the timber answered it," in denunciation; for a portion of the means of building, in the case of some of these edifices, was obtained as the price of dispensations and pardons. [Footnote: That most superb Salisbury Cathedral, for example.]
In such a hideous light would the earlier history of one of these mighty structures, pretendedly consecrated to Christianity, be presented to the reflecting Protestant; and then would recur the idea of its cost, as relative to what that expenditure might really have done for Christianity and the people. It absorbed in the construction, sums sufficient to have supplied, costly as they would have been, even manuscript Bibles, in the people's own language, (as a priesthood of truly apostolic character would have taken care the Scriptures should speak,) to all the families of a province; and in the revenues appropriated to its ministration of superstition, enough to have provided men to teach all those families to read those Bibles.
In all this, and in the whole constitution of the Grand Apostasy, involving innumerable forms of abuse and abomination, to which our object does not require any allusion, how sad a spectacle is held forth of the people destroyed for lack of knowledge. If, as one of their plagues, an inferior one in itself, they were plundered as we have seen, of their worldly goods, it was that the spoil might subserve to a still greater wrong. What was lost to the accommodation of the body, was to be made to contribute to the depravation of the spirit. It supplied means for multiplying the powers of the grand ecclesiastical machinery, and confirming the intellectual despotism of the usurpers of spiritual authority. Those authorities enforced on the people, on pain of perdition, an acquiescence in notions and ordinances which, in effect, precluded their direct access to the Almighty, and the Saviour of the world; interposing between them and the Divine Majesty a very extensive, complicated, and heathenish mediation, which in a great measure substituted itself for the real and exclusive mediation of Christ, obscured by its vast creation of intercepting vanities the glory of the Eternal Being, and thus almost extinguished the true worship. But how calamitous was such a condition!—to be thus intercepted from direct intercourse with the Supreme Spirit, and to have the solemn and elevating sentiment of devotion flung downward, on objects to some of which even the most superstitious could hardly pay homage without a sense of degradation.
It was, again, a disastrous thing to be under a directory of practical life framed for the convenience of a corrupt system; a rule which enjoined many things wrong, allowed a dispensation from nearly everything that was right, and abrogated the essential principle and ground-work of true morality. Still again, it was an unhappy thing, that the consolations in sorrow and the view of death should either be too feeble to animate, or should animate only by deluding. And it was the consummation of evil in the state of the people of those dark ages, it was, emphatically to be "destroyed," that the great doctrines of redemption should have been essentially vitiated or formally supplanted, so that multitudes of people were betrayed to rest their final hopes on a ground unauthorized by the Judge of the world. In this most important matter, the spiritual authorities might themselves be subjects of the fatal delusion in which they held the community; and well they deserved to be so, in judicial retribution of their wickedness in imposing on the people, deliberately and on system, innumerable things which they knew to be false.
We have often mused, and felt a gloom and dreariness spreading over the mind while musing, on descriptions of the aspect of a country after a pestilence has left it in desolation, or of a region where the people are perishing by famine. 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; and presenting each day their imploring, or infuriated, or grimly sullen, or more calmly woful countenances, at the iron and impregnable gates; each succeeding day more haggard, more perfect in the image of despair; and after awhile appearing each day one fewer, till at last all have sunk. Now shall we feel it as areliefto turn in thought, as to a sight of less portentous evil, from the inhabitants of a country, or from those of such an accursed prison-house, thus pining away, to behold the different spectacle of national tribes, or any more limited portion of mankind, on whosemindsare displayed the full effects of knowledge denied; who are under the process of whatever destruction it is, that spirits can suffer from want of the vital aliment to the intelligent nature, especially from "a famine of the words of the Lord?"
To bring the two to a close comparison, suppose the case, that some of the persons thus doomed to perish in the tower were in the possession of the genuine light and consolations of Christianity, perhaps even had actually been adjudged to this fate, (no extravagant supposition,) for zealously and persistingly endeavoring the restoration of the purity of that religion to the deluded community. Let it be supposed that numbers of that community, having conspired to obtain this ad-judgment, frequented the precincts of the fortress, to see their victims gradually perishing. It would be quite in the spirit of the popish superstition, that they should believe themselves to have done God service, and be accordingly pleased at the sight of the more and more deathlike aspect of the emaciated countenances. The while, they might be themselves in the enjoyment of "fulness of bread," We can imagine them making convivial appointments within sight of the prison gates, and going from the spectacle to meet at the banquet. Or they might delay the festivity, in order to have the additional luxury of knowing that the tragedy was consummated; as Bishop Gardiner would not dine till the martyrs were burnt.—Look at these two contemporary situations, that of the persons with truth and immortal hope in their spirits, enduring this slow and painful reduction of their bodies to dissolution,—and that of those who, while their bodies fared sumptuously, were thus miserably perishing in soul, through its being surrendered to the curse of a delusion which envenomed it with such a deadly malignity: and say which was the more calamitous predicament.
If we have no hesitation in pronouncing, let us consider whether we have ever been grateful enough to God for the dashing in pieces so long since in this land, of a system which maintains, to this hour, much of its stability over the greater part of Christendom. If we regret that certain fragments of it are still held in veneration here, and that so tedious a length of ages should be required, to work out a complete mental rescue from the infatuation which possessed our ancestors, let us at the same time look at the various states of Europe, small and great, where this superstition continues to hold the minds of the people in its odious grasp; and verify to ourselves what we have to be thankful for, by thinking what receptionourminds would give to an offer of subsistence on their mummeries, masses, absolutions, legends, relics, mediation of saints, and corruptions, even to complete reversal of the evangelic doctrines.
It was, however, but very slowly that the people of our land realized the benefits of the Reformation, glorious as that event was, regarded as to its progressive and its ultimate consequences. Indeed, the thickness of the preceding darkness was strikingly manifested by the deep shade which still continued stretched over the nation, in spite of the newly risen luminary, whose beams lost their brightness in pervading it to reach the popular mind, and came with the faintness of an obscured and tedious dawn.
A long time there lingered enough of night for the evil spirit of popery to be at large and in power, not abashed, as Milton represents the Evil Angel on his being surprised by the guardians of paradise. Rather the case was that the vindicator itself of truth and holiness, the true Lucifer, shrunk at the rencounter and defiance of the old possessor of the gloomy dominion. The Reformation was not empowered to speak with a voice like that which said, "Let there be light—and there was light." Consider what, on its avowed national adoption in our land, were its provisions for acting on the community, and how slow and partial must have been their efficacy, for either the dissipation of ignorance in general, or the riddance of that worst part of it which had thickened round the Romish delusion, as malignant a pestilence as ever walked in darkness. There was an alteration of formularies, a curtailment of rites, a declaration of renouncing, in the name of the church and state, the most palpable of the absurdities; and a change, in some instances of the persons, but in very many others of the professions merely, of the hierarchy. Such were the appointments and instrumentality, for carrying an innovation of opinions and practices through a nation in which the profoundest ignorance and the most inveterate superstition fortified each other. And we may well imagine how fast and how far they would be effective, to convey information and conviction among a people whose reason had been just so much the worse, with respect to religion at least, as it had not been totally dormant; and who were too illiterate to be ever the wiser for the volume of inspiration itself, had it been in their native language, in every house, instead of being scarcely in one house in five thousand.
Doubtless some advantage was gained through this change of institutions, by the abolition of so much of the authority of the spiritual despotism as it possessed in virtue of being the imperative national establishment. And if, under this relaxation of its grasp, a number of persons declined and escaped into the new faith, they hardly knew how or why, it was happy to make the transition onanyterms, with however little of the exercise of reason, with however little competence to exercise it. Well was it to be on the right ground, though a man had come thither like one conveyed while partly asleep. To have grown to a state of mind in which he ceased and refused to worship relics and wafers, to rest his confidence on penance and priestly absolution, and to regard the Virgin and saints as in effect the supreme regency of heaven, was a valuable alterationthoughhe could not read, andthoughhe could not assign, and had not clearly apprehended, the arguments which justified the change. Yes, this would be an important thing gained; but not even thus muchwasgained to the passive slaves of popery but in an exceedingly limited extent, during a long course of time after it was supplanted as a national institution. It continued to maintain in the faith, feelings, and more private habits of the people, a dominion little enfeebled by the necessity of dissimulation in public observances. As far as to secure this exterior show of submission and conformity, it was an excellent argument that the state had decreed, and would resolutely enforce, a change in religion,—that is to say, till it should be the sovereign pleasure of the next monarch, readily seconded by a majority of the ecclesiastics, just to turn the whole affair round to its former position.
But the argument would expend nearly its whole strength on this policy of saving appearances. For what was there conveyed in it that could strike inward to act upon the fixed tenets of the mind, to destroy there the effect of the earliest and ten thousand subsequent impressions, of inveterate habit and of ancient establishment? Was it to convince and persuade by authority of the maxim, that the government in church and state is wiser than the people, and therefore the best judge in every matter? This, as asserted generally, was what the people firmly believed: it has always, till lately, been the popular faith. But then, was the benefit of this obsequious faith to go exclusively to the government of just that particular time,—a government which, by its innovations and demolitions, was exhibiting a contemptuous dissent from all past government remembered in the land? Were the people not to hesitate a moment to take this innovating government's word for it that all their forefathers, up through a long series of ages, had been fools and dupes in reverencing, in their time, the wisdom and authority oftheirgovernors? The most unthinking and submissive would feel that this was too much: especially after they had proof that the government demanding so prodigious a concession might, on the substitution of just one individual for another at its head, revoke its own ordinances, and punish those who should contumaciously continue to be ruled by them. You summon us, they might have said to their governors, at your arbitrary dictate to renounce, as what you are pleased to call idolatries and abominations, the faith and rites held sacred by twenty generations of our ancestors and yours. We are to do this on peril of your highest displeasure, and that of God, by whose will you are professing to act; now who will ensure us that there may not be, some time hence, a vindictive inquisition, to find who among us have been the most ready of obedience to offer wicked insult to the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church?
This deficiency of the moral power of the government, to promote the progress of conviction in the mind of the nation, would be slenderly supplied by the authority of the class next to the government in the claim to deference, and even holding the precedence in actual influence,—that is, the families of rank and consequence throughout the country. For the people well knew, in their respective neighborhoods, that many of these had never in reality forsaken the ancient religion, consulting only the policy of a time-serving conformity; and that some of them hardly attempted or wished to conceal from their inferiors that they preserved their fidelity. And then the substituted religion, while it came with a great diminution of the pomp which is always the delight of the ignorant, acknowledged,—proclaimed as one of its chief merits,—a still more fatal defect for attracting converts from among beings whose ignorance had never been suffered to doubt, till then, that men in ecclesiastical garb could modify, or suspend, or defeat for them the justice of God; it proclaimed itself unable to give any exemptions or commutations in matters of conscience.
When such were the recommendations which the new mode of religionnot, and when the recommendation which ithadwas simply, (the royal authority set out of the question,) an offer of evidence to the understandingthat it was true, no wonder that many of a generation so insensate through ignorance should never become its proselytes. But even as to those who did, while it was a happy deliverance, as we have said, to escape almost any way from the utter grossness of popery, still they would carry into their better faith much of the unhappy effect of that previous mental debasement. How should a man in the rudeness of an intellect left completely ignorant of truth in general, have a luminous apprehension of its most important division? There could not be in men's minds a phenomenon similar to what we image to ourselves of Goshen in the preternatural night of Egypt, a space of perfect light, defined out by a precise limit amidst the general darkness.
Only consider, that the new ideas admitted into the proselyte's understanding as the true faith, were to take their situation there in nearly those very same encompassing circumstances of internal barbarism which had been so perfectly commodious to the superstition recently dwelling there; and that which had been favorable and adapted in the utmost degree, that which had afforded much of the sustenance of life, to the false notions, could not but be most adverse to the development of the true ones. These latter, so environed, would be in a condition too like that of a candle in the mephitic air of a vault. The newly adopted religion, therefore, of the uncultivated converts from popery, would be far from exhibiting, as compared with the renounced superstition, a magnitude of change, and force of contrast, duly corresponding to the difference between the lying vanities of priestcraft and a communication from the living God. The reign of ignorance combined with imposture had fixed upon the common people of the age of the Reformation, and of several generations downward, the doom of being incapable of admitting genuine Christianity but with an excessively inadequate apprehension of its attributes;—as in the patriarchal ages a man might have received with only the honors appropriate to a saint or prophet, the visitant in whom he was entertaining an angel unawares. Happy for both that ancient entertainer of such a visitant, and the ignorant but honest adopter of the reformed religion, when that which they entertained rewarded them according to its own celestial quality, rather than in proportion to their inadequate reception. We may believe that the Divine Being, in special compassion to that ignorance to which barbarism and superstition had condemned inevitably the greater number of the early converts to the reformed religion, did render that faith beneficial to them beyond the proportion of their narrow and still half superstitious conception of it. And this is, in truth, the consideration the most consolatory in looking back to that tenebrious period in which popery was slowly retiring, with a protracted exertion of all the craft and strength of an able and veteran tyrant contending to the last for prolonged dominion.
It is, however, no consideration of a portion of the people sincere, inquiring, and emerging, though dimly enlightened, from the gloom of so dreary a scene, that is most apt to occur to our thoughts in extenuation of that gloom. Our unreflecting attention allows itself to be so engrossed by far different circumstances of that period of our history, that we are imposed upon by a spectacle the very opposite of mournful. For what is it but a splendid and animating exhibition that we behold in looking back to the age of Elizabeth?
Andwasnot that, it may be asked, an age of the highest glory to our nation? Why repress our delight in contemplating it? How can we refuse to indulge an inspiring sympathy with the energy of those times, an elation of spirit at beholding the unparalleled allotment of her reign, of statesmen, heroes, and literary geniuses, but for whom, indeed, "that bright occidental star" would have left no such brilliant track of fame behind her?
Permit us to answer by inquiring, What should the intellectual condition of thepeople, properly so denominated, have been in order to correspond in a due proportion to the magnificence of these their representative chiefs, and complete the grand spectacle as that of anation? Determine that; and then inquire what actuallywasthe state of the people all this while. There is evidence that it was, what the fatal blight and blast of popery might be expected to have left it, generally and most wretchedly degraded. What it was is shown by the facts, that it was found impossible, even under the inspiring auspices of the learned Elizabeth, with her constellation of geniuses, orators, scholars, to supply the churches generally with officiating persons capable of going with decency through the task of the public service, made ready, as every part of it was, to their hands; and that to be able to read, was the very marked distinction of here and there an individual. It requires little effort but that of going low enough, to complete the general estimate in conformity to these and similar facts.
And here we cannot help remarking what a deception we suffer to pass on us from history. It celebrates some period in a nation's career, as pre-eminently illustrious, for magnanimity, lofty enterprise, literature, and original genius. There was, perhaps, a learned and vigorous monarch, and there were Cecils and Walsinghams, and Shakspeares and Spensers, and Sidneys and Raleighs, with many other powerful thinkers and actors, to render it the proudest age of our national glory. And we thoughtlessly admit on our imagination this splendid exhibition as in some manner involving or implying the collective state of the people in that age! The ethereal summits of a tract of the moral world are conspicuous and fair in the lustre of heaven, and we take no thought of the immensely greater proportion of it which is sunk in gloom and covered with fogs. The general mass of the population, whose physical vigor, indeed, and courage, and fidelity to the interests of the country, were of such admirable avail to the purposes, and under the direction, of the mighty spirits that wielded their rough agency,—this great assemblage was sunk in such mental barbarism, as to be placed at about the same distance from their illustrious intellectual chiefs, as the hordes of Scythia from the finest spirits of Athens. It was nothing to this debased, countless multitude spread over the country, existing in the coarsest habits, destitute, in the proportion of thousands to one, of cultivation, and still in a great degree enslaved by the popish superstition,—it was nothing to them, in the way of direct influence to draw forth their minds into free exercise and acquirement, that there were, within the circuit of the island, a profound scholarship, a most disciplined and vigorous reason, a masculine eloquence, and genius breathing enchantment. Both the actual possessors of this mental opulence, and the part of society forming, around them, the sphere immediately pervaded by the delight and instruction imparted by them, might as well, for anything they diffused of this luxury and benefit among the general multitude, have been a Brahminical caste, dissociated by an imagined essential distinction of nature. While they were exulting in this elevation and free excursiveness of mental existence, the prostrate crowd were grovelling through a life on a level with the soil where they were at last to find their graves. But this crowd it was that constituted the substance of thenation; to which, nation, in the mass, the historian applies the superb epithets, which a small proportion of the men of that age claimed by a strikingexceptionto the general state of the community. History too much consults our love of effect and pomp, to let us see in a close and distinct manner anything
"On the low level of th' inglorious throng;"
and our attention is borne away to the intellectual splendor exhibited among the most favored aspirants of the seats of learning, or in councils, courts, and camps, in heroic and romantic enterprises, and in some immortal works of genius. And thus we are gazing with delight at a fine public bonfire, while, in all the cottages round, the people are shivering for want of fuel.
Our history becomes very bright again with the intellectual and literary riches of a much later period, often denominated a golden age,—that which was illustrated by the talents of Addison, Pope, Swift, and their numerous secondaries in fame; and could also boast its philosophers, statesmen, and heroes. And in the lapse of four or five ages, according to the average term of human life, since the earlier grand display of mind, what had been effected toward such an advancement of intelligence in the community, that when this next tribe of highly endowed spirits should appear, they would stand in much loss opprobrious contrast to the main body of the nation, and find a much larger portion of it qualified to receive their intellectual effusions. By this time, the class of persons who sought knowledge on a wider scale than what sufficed for the ordinary affairs of life, who took an interest in literature, and constituted theAuthors' Public, had indeed extended a little, extremely little, beyond the people of condition, the persons educated in learned institutions, and those whose professions involved some necessity, and might create some taste for reading. Still theywere a class, and that with a limitation marked and palpable, to a degree very difficult for us now to conceive. They were in contact, on the one side, with the great thinkers, moralists, poets, and wits, but very slightly in communication with the generality of the people on the other. They received the emanations from the assemblage of talent and knowledge, but did not serve as conductors to convey them down indefinitely into the community. The national body, regarded in its intellectual character, had an inspirited and vigorous superior part, as constituted of these men of eminent talents and attainments, and this small class of persons in a measure assimilated to them in thinking and taste; but it was in a condition resembling that of a human frame in which, (through an injury in the spinal marrow,) some of the most important functions of vitality have terminated at some precise limit downward, leaving the inferior extremities devoid of sensation and the power of action.
It is on record, that works admirably adapted to find readers and to make them, had but an extremely confined and slowly widening circulation, according toourstandard of the popular success of the productions of distinguished talents. Nor did the writersreckonon any such popular success. In the calculations of their literary ambition, it was a thing of course that the people went for nothing. It is apparent in allusions to the people occurring in these very works, that "the lower sort," "the vulgar herd," "the canaille," "the mob," "the many-headed beast," "the million," (and even these designations generally meant something short of the lowest classes of all,) were no more thought of in any relation to a state of cultivated intelligence than Turks or Tartars. The readers are habitually recognized as a kind of select community, conversed with on topics and in a language with which the vulgar have nothing at all to do,—a converse the more gratifying on that account. And any casual allusions to the bulk of the people are expressed in phrases unaffectedly implying, that they are a herd of beings existing on quite other terms and for essentially other ends, than we, fine writers, and you, our admiring readers. It is evident in our literature of that age, (a feature still more prominent in that of France, at the same and down to a much later period,) that the main national population, accounted as creatures to which souls and senses were given just to render their limbs mechanically serviceable, were regarded by the intellectual aristocracy with hardly so active a sentiment as contempt; they were not worth that; it was the easy indifference toward what was seldom thought of as in existence.
Wickedly wrong as such a feeling was, there is no doubt that the actual state of the people was quite such as would naturally cause it, in men whose large and richly cultivated minds did not contain philanthropy or Christian charity enough to regret and pity the popular debasement as a calamity. For while they were indulging their pride in the elevation, and their taste in all the luxuries and varieties, of that ampler higher range of existence enjoyed by such men, in what light must they view the bulk of a nation, that knew nothing of their wit, genius, or philosophy, could not even read their writings, but as a coarse mass of living material, the mere earthy substratum of humanity, not to be accounted of in any comparison or even relation to what man is in his higher style? While they of that higher style were revelling in their mental affluence, the vast majority of the inhabitants of the island were subsisting, and had always subsisted, on the most beggarly pittance on which mind could be barely kept alive. Probably they had at that time still fewer ideas than the people of the former age which we have been describing. For many of those with which popery had occupied the faith and fancy of that earlier generation, had now vanished from the popular mind, without being replaced in equal number by better ideas, or by ideas of any kind. And then their vices had the whole grossness of vice, and their favorite amusements were at best rude and boisterous, and a large proportion of them savage and cruel. So that when we look at the shining wits, poets, and philosophers, of that age, they appear like gaudy flowers growing in a putrid marsh.
And to a much later period this deplorable ignorance, with all its appropriate consequences, continued to be the dishonor and the plague of the intellectual and moral condition of the inhabitants of England. Of England! which had through many centuries made so great a figure in Christendom; which has been so splendid in arms, liberty, legislation, science, and all manner of literature: which has boasted its universities, of ancient foundation and proudest fame, munificently endowed, and possessing, in their accumulations of literary treasure, nearly the whole results of all the strongest thinking there had been in the world: and which has had also, through the charity of individuals, such a number of minor institutions for education, that the persons intrusted to see them administered have, in very numerous instances, not scrupled to divert their resources to total different purposes, lest, perchance, the cause of damage to the people should change from a lack of knowledge to a repletion of it. Of England! so long after the Reformation, and all the while under the superintendence and tuition of an ecclesiastical establishment for both instruction and jurisdiction, co-extended with the entire nation, and furnished for its ministry with men from the discipline of institutions where everything the most important to be known was professed to be taught. Thus endowed had England been, thus was she endowed at the period under our review, (the former part of the last century,) with the facilities, the provisions, the great intellectual apparatus, to be wielded in any mode her wisdom might devise, and with whatever strength of hand she chose to apply, for promoting her several millions of rational, accountable, immortal beings, somewhat beyond a state of mere physical existence. When therefore, notwithstanding all this, an awful proportion of them were under the continual process of destruction for want of knowledge, what a tremendous responsibility was borne by whatever part of the community it was that stood, either by office and express vocation, or by the general obligation inseparable from ability, in the relation of guardianship to the rest.
But here the voice of that sort of patriotism which is in vogue as well in England as in China, may perhaps interpose to protest against malicious and exaggerated invective. As if it were a question of what might beforehand be reasonably expected, instead of an account of what actually exists, it may be alleged that surely it is a representation too much against antecedent probability to be true, that a civilized, Christian, magnanimous, and wealthy state like that of England, can have been so careless and wicked as to tolerate, during the lapse of centuries, a hideously gross and degraded condition of the people.
But besides that the fact is plainly so, it were vain to presume, in confidence on any supposed consistency of character, that itmustbe otherwise. There is no sayingwhata civilized and Christian nation, (so called,) may not tolerate. Recollect the Slave Trade, which, with the magnitude of a national concern, continued its abominations while one generation after another of Englishmen passed away; their intelligence, conscience, humanity, and refinement, as quietly accommodated to it, as if one portion of the race had possessed an express warrant from Heaven to capture, buy, sell, and drive another. This is but one of many mortifying illustrations how much the constitution of our moral sentiments resembles a Manichæan creation, how much of them is formed in passive submission to the evil principle, acting through prevailing custom; which determines that it shall but very partially depend on the real and most manifest qualities of things present to us, whether we shall have any right perception of their characters of good and evil. The agency which works this malformation in our sentiments needs no greater triumph, than that the true nature of things should be disguised to us by the very effect of their being constantly kept in our sight. Could any malignant enchanter wish for more than this,—to make us insensible to the odious quality of things not onlythoughthey stand constantly and directly in our view, butbecausethey do so? And while they do so, there may also stand as obviously in our view, and close by them, the truths whichexposetheir real nature, and might be expected to make us instantly revolt from them; and these truths shall be no other than some of the plainest principles of reason and religion. 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 nevertheless, even the cultivated part of that nation, during a series of generations, having directly before their sight an enormous nuisance and iniquity, shall yet never be struck with its quality, never be made restless by its annoyance, never seriously think of it. And so its odiousness shall never be decidedly apprehended till some individual or two, as by the acquisition of a new moral sense, receive a sudden intuition of its nature, a disclosure of its whole essence and malignity,—the essence and malignity of that very thing which has been exposing its quality, without the least reserve, by the most flagrant signs, to millions of observers.
Thus it has been with respect to the barbarous ignorance under which nine-tenths of the population of our country have continued, through a number of ages subsequent to the Reformation, surrendered to everything low, vicious, and wretched. This state of national debasement and dishonor lay spread out, a wide scene of moral desolation, in the sight of statesmen, of dignified and subordinate ecclesiastics, of magistrates, of the philosophic speculators on human nature, and of all those whose rank and opulence brought them hourly proofs what great influence they might have, in any way in which, they should choose to exert it, on the people below them. And still it was all right that the multitudes, constituting the grand living agency through the realm, should remain in such a condition that, when they died, the country should lose nothing but so much animated body, with the quantum of vice which helped to keep it in action. When at length some were beginning to apprehend and proclaim that all this was wrong, these classes were exceedingly slow in their assent to the reformed doctrine. A large proportion of them even declared, on system, against the speculations and projects for giving the people, at last, the use and value of their souls as well as their hands. The earnest and sanguine philanthropists might be pardoned the simplicity of not foreseeing such an opposition, though they ought, perhaps, to have known better than to be surprised at the phenomenon. They were to be made wiser by force, with respect to men's governing prejudices and motives. And from credulity mortified is a short transit to suspicion. So ungracious a manner of having the insight into motives sharpened, does not tend to make its subsequent exercise indulgent, when it comes to inspect the altered appearances assumed by persons and classes who have previously been in decided opposition. What arguments have prevailed with you, (the question might be,) since you have never frankly retracted your former contempt of those which convincedus? May any sinister thought have occurred, that you might defeat our ends by a certain way of managing the means? Or do you hope to deter mine and limit to some subordinate purposes, what we wish to prosecute for the most general good? Or would you rather impose on yourselves the grievance of promoting an object which you dislike, than that we should have the chief credit of promoting it? Do you sometimes accompany your working in the vineyard with maledictions on those who have reduced you to such a necessity? Would you have been glad to be saved the unwelcome service bytheirletting it alone?