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
Occasion is taken this once more of adverting to such facts, not so much
for the purpose of magnifying the nature, as of simply exhibiting the
effect, of an influence that can breathe with such power on the obtuse
intellectual faculties; which it appears, in the most signal of these
instances, almost to create anew. It is exceedingly striking to observe
how the contracted, rigid soul seems to soften, and grow warm, and expand,
and quiver with life. With the new energy infused, it painfully struggles
to work itself into freedom, from the wretched contortion in which it has
so long been fixed as by the impressed spell of some infernal magic. It is
seen filled with a distressed and indignant emotion at its own ignorance;
actuated with a restless earnestness to be informed; acquiring an unwonted
pliancy of its faculties to thought; attaining a perception, combined of
intelligence and moral sensibility, to which numerous things are becoming
discernible and affecting, that were as non-existent before. It is not in
the very extreme strength of their import that we employ such terms of
description; the malice of irreligion may easily parody them into poetical
excess; but we have known instances in which the change, the intellectual
change, has been so conspicuous, within a brief space of time, that even
an infidel observer must have forfeited all claim to be esteemed a man of
sense, if he would not acknowledge,--This that you call divine grace,
whatever it may really be, is the strangest awakener of faculties after
all. And to a devout man, it is a spectacle of most enchanting beauty,
thus to see the immortal plant, which has been under a malignant blast
while sixty or seventy years have passed over it, coming out at length in
the bloom of life.
We cannot hesitate to draw the inference, that if religion is so
auspicious to the intellectual faculties, the cultivation and exercise of
those faculties must be of great advantage to religion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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