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
These observations on ignorance, considered as an incapacitation for
receiving religious instruction, are pointed chiefly at that portion of
the people, unhappily the largest, who are little disposed to attend to
that kind of instruction. But we should notice its prejudicial effect on
those of them to whom religion has become a matter of serious and
inquisitive concern. The preceding assertions of the efficacy of a strong
religious interest to excite and enlarge the intellectual faculty will not
be contradicted by observing, nevertheless, that in a dark and crude state
of that facility those well-disposed persons, especially if of a warm
temperament withal, are unfortunately liable to receive delusive
impressions and absurd notions, blended with religious doctrine and
sentiment. It would be no less than plain miracle or inspiration, a more
entire and specific superseding of ordinary laws than that which we have
just been denominating "an immediate agency of the Almighty Spirit," if a
mind left uncultivated all up through the earlier age, and perhaps far on
in life, should not come to its new employment on a most important subject
with a sadly defective capacity for judgment and discrimination. The
situation reminds us of an old story of a tribe of Indians denominated
"moon-eyed," who, not being able to look at things by the light of the
sun, were reduced to look at them under the glimmering of the moon, by
which light it is an inevitable circumstance of human vision to receive
the images of things in perverted and deceptive forms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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