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
death, a comprehensive, honest declaration of the laws of duty, and the
pure doctrines of salvation. To think! that they should have mistaken for
the house of God, and the very gate of heaven, a place where the Regent of
the nether world had so short a way to come from his dominions, and his
agents and purchased slaves so short a way to go thither. If we could
imagine a momentary visit from Him who once entered a fabric of sacred
denomination with a scourge, because it was made the resort of a common
traffic, with what aspect and voice, with what infliction but the "rebuke
with flames of fire," would he have entered this mart of iniquity,
assuming the name of his sanctuary, where the traffic was in delusions,
crimes, and the souls of men? It was even as if, to use the prophet's
language, the very "stone cried out of the wall, and the beam out of the
timber answered it," in denunciation; for a portion of the means of
building, in the case of some of these edifices, was obtained as the price
of dispensations and pardons. [Footnote: That most superb Salisbury
Cathedral, for example.]
In such a hideous light would the earlier history of one of these mighty
structures, pretendedly consecrated to Christianity, be presented to the
reflecting Protestant; and then would recur the idea of its cost, as
relative to what that expenditure might really have done for Christianity
and the people. It absorbed in the construction, sums sufficient to have
supplied, costly as they would have been, even manuscript Bibles, in the
people's own language, (as a priesthood of truly apostolic character would
have taken care the Scriptures should speak,) to all the families of a
province; and in the revenues appropriated to its ministration of
superstition, enough to have provided men to teach all those families to
read those Bibles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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