their being governed.--The people arrived, in this age, at a state which renders it impracticable to preserve national tranquillity without improving their minds and making some concession to their claims.--Folly and probable calamity of an obstinate resolution to maintain subordination in the nations of Europe in the arbitrary and despotic manner of former times.--Facility and certain success of a better system. Section V. Extreme poverty of religious knowledge among the uneducated people: their notions respecting God, Providence, Jesus Christ, the invisible world.--Fatal effect of their want of mental discipline as causing an inaptitude to receive religious information.--Exemplifications,--in a supposed experiment of religious instruction in a friendly visit to a numerous uneducated family; in the stupidity and thoughtlessness often betrayed in attendance on public religious services; in the impossibility of imparting religious truths, with any degree of clearness, to ignorant persons, when alarmed into some serious concern by sickness; in the insensibility and invincible delusion sometimes retained in the near approach to death.--Rare instances of the admirable efficacy of religion to animate and enlarge the faculties, even in the old age of an ignorant man.--Excuses for the intellectual inaptitude and perversion of uncultivated religious minds.--Animadversions on religious teachers. Section VI. Supposed method of verifying the preceding representation of the ignorance of the people.--Renewed expressions of wonder and mortification that this should be the true description of the English nation.--Prodigious exertions of this nation for the accomplishment of objects foreign to the improvement of the people.--Effects which might have resulted from far less exertion and resources applied to that object.--The contrast between what has been done, and what might have been done by the exertion of the national strength, exposed in a series of parallel representations.--Total unconcern, till a recent period, of the generality of persons in the higher classes respecting the mental state of the populace.--Indications of an important change in the manner of estimating them.--Measures attempted and projected for their improvement.--Some of these measures and methods insignificant in the esteem of projectors of merely political schemes for the amendment of the popular condition.--But questions to those projectors on the efficacy of such schemes.--Most desirable, nevertheless, that the political systems and the governing powers of states _could_ be converted to promote so grand a purpose.--But expostulations addressed to those who, desponding of this aid, despond therefore of the object itself.--Incitement to individual exertion.--Reference to the sublimest Example.--Imputation of extravagant hope.--Repelled; first, by a full