The special view in which we were pleading, on behalf of popular education, that religious instruction would form a material part of it, was, that this essential ingredient would be a security against its being injurious to the good order and subordination in society. It is the more necessary to be particular on this, as some of those who have professed to lay much stress on the _religious_ instruction of the people have seemed to have little further notion of the necessity or use of religion to the lower classes, than as merely a preserver of good order. In this character it has been insisted on by persons who avowed their aversion to every idea of an education in a more enlarged sense. We have heard it so insisted on, no such long while past, by members of the most learned institutions, at the same moment that they expressed more than a doubt of the prudence of enabling the common people to read, literally to _read_, the Bible. But assuredly the good order of a populace left in the stupid general ignorance to which some of these good friends of theirs would have doomed them, cannot be preserved by any such feeble infusion of religious knowledge as these same good friends would instil into their mental grossness. As long as they are in this condition, there must be some far stronger power acting on them to preserve that good order. And if there actually _has_ been such a power, hitherto competent to preserve it, with only such an impotent scantling of religious knowledge in the majority of the mass, and competent still to preserve it, a great deal of hypocritical canting might have been spared, on the part of those whose chief or only argument for teaching the people religion is the maintenance of that good order.