It is curious to see what some persons can believe, or affect to believe, when reduced to a dilemma. On the one hand, they cannot endure the idea of any considerable raising of the common people by mental improvement, in the general sense: that were ruin to social order. But then on the other, if it must not be plainly denied, that the said common people are of the very same rational nature as the most elevated divisions of the race; and that their essential worth must be in this spiritual thinking being, which worth is lost to them, if that being is sunk and degraded in gross ignorance, it follows that some kind of cultivation is required. Well then; we must give them some religious knowledge, unaccompanied by such other knowledge as would much more attractively invite them to exercise their minds, and _it will be practicable and easy enough_ to engage their habitual attention to that very subject, almost exclusively, to which the natural taste of the species is peculiarly averse. In exposing the absurdity of any scheme of education for the inferior classes, which should propose to make them intelligent about religion while intelligent about nothing else except their ordinary employments, we do not forget the instances now and then met with of pious poor men who, while very uncultivated in the general sense, evince a remarkable clearness of conception on religious topics, and in the application of these topics to their duties as men and citizens. But "remarkable" we involuntarily call these phenomena, whenever adverting to them. We naturally use some expression importing a degree of wonder at such a fact. We think it a striking illustration of the power of _religion itself_, and not of the power of religious instruction. The extreme force with which the vital spirit has seized and actuated his faculties, has in a measure remedied the incapacity he had otherwise been under of forming clear ideas of the subject. Even, however, while acknowledging and admiring this effect of a special influence from heaven, we still find ourselves involuntarily surmising, in such an instance, that the man must also have been superior in natural capacity to the generality of ignorant persons; so much out of the common course of things we account it for a man who knows so few things to know this one thing so well. We account it so from the settled conviction received through experience, that it is very unlikely a man ignorant of almost all other things _should_ well understand _one_ subject, of a nature quite foreign to that of his ordinary occupations.