An Essay on the Evils of Popular IgnoranceFoster, John
Philosophy
An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance
Foster, John
Education; Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Literacy; Missions -- India; Religious education
In so pleading, we happily can appeal to one fact in evidence that the
intellectual and religious culture, in the introductory stages of life,
tends to secure that the persons so trained shall be, when they are come
to maturity, marked off from the neglected barbarous mass, by at least an
external respect, but accompanied, we trust, in many of them, by a still
better sentiment, to the means for keeping truth and duty constantly in
their view. Observe the numbers now attending, with a becoming deportment,
public worship and instruction, as compared with what the proportion is
remembered or recorded to have been half a century since, or any time
previous to the great exertions of benevolence to save the children of the
inferior classes from preserving the whole mental likeness of their
forefathers.
It can be testified also, by persons whose observation has been the
longest in the habit of following children and youth from the instruction
of the school institutions into mature life, that, in a gratifying number
of instances, they have been seen permanently retaining too much love of
improvement, and too much of the habit of a useful employment of their
minds, to sink, in their ordinary daily occupations, into that wretched
inanity we were representing; or to consume the free intervals of time in
the listlessness, or worthless gabble, or vain sports, of which their
neighbors furnished plenty of example and temptation.
* * * * *
These representations have partly included, what we may yet specify
distinctly as one of the unhappy effects of gross ignorance--_a degraded
state of domestic society_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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