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
exclusively on something that has been improper in his practical courses.
He professes to acknowledge the evil of this; and perhaps with a certain
stress of expression; intended, by an apparent respondence to the serious
emphasis which the monitor is laying on another part of the
accountableness and guilt, to take him off from thus endeavoring, as it
appears to the ignorant sufferer, to make him more of a sinner than there
is any reason, so little can he conceive that it should much signify what
his thoughts, tempers, affections, motives, and so forth, may have been.
By continuing to press the subject, the instructor may find himself in
danger of being regarded as having taken upon him the unkind office of
inquisitor and accuser in his own name, and of his own will and authority.
When inculcating the necessity of repentance, he will perceive the
indistinctness of apprehension of the difference between the horror of
sin merely from dread of impending consequences, and an antipathy to its
essential nature. And even if this distinction, which admits of easy
forms of exemplification, should thus be rendered in a degree
intelligible, the man cannot make the application. The instructor
observes, as one of the most striking results of a want of disciplined
mental exercise, an utter inability for self-inspection. There is before
his eyes, looking at him, but a stranger to himself, a man on whose mind
no other mind, except One, can shed a light of self-manifestation, to
save him from the most fatal mistakes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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