There is a story of a Portuguese slave-dealer who carried a private chaplain on his pay-roll, and frequently expressed his solicitude for the spiritual welfare of his shackled captives. A very similar kind of spiritual duty has for centuries been made the excuse for an almost total neglect of secular education. Divorced from the control of common sense, religion soon degenerated into mere ceremonialism. A priest who would travel twenty miles through a snow-storm to supply a dying man with a consecrated wafer had no sympathy with the needs of the living. He would extort the last penny of his tithes at the risk of starving a village full of needy parishioners. He would groan at the sight of an unbaptized child, but had not a drop of water to cool the brows of burning Moors or Jews. He would rave about the cruelty of a prince who had deprived the clergy of their mass-shillings, but had no ear for the laments of the exiled Moriscos or the curses of starving serfs. Such was the morality which arrogated the right of suppressing that system of physical and intellectual education which had filled the homes of the Mediterranean nations with all the blessings of health, science, and beauty. Theological training had failed to kindle the dawn of a supernatural millennium, but had thoroughly succeeded in extinguishing the light of human reason. Not absolute ignorance only, but baneful superstition—worse than ignorance by just as much as poison is worse than hunger—was for centuries the inevitable result of all so-called school-training; and the traditions of that age of priest-rule have made religion almost a synonyme of cant. It also gave book-learning its supposed tendency to mental aberration. Can we wonder at that result of an age when the literary products of Christian Europe were confined almost exclusively to ghost-stories and manuals of ceremony? Can we wonder that delusions of the most preposterous kind assumed the virulence of epidemic diseases? Maniacs of self-mutilation, of epileptic contortions, of were-wolf panics, traversed Europe from end to end. Men gloried in ignorance, and boasted their neglect of worldly science till the consequences of that neglect avenged its folly in actual madness. The saddest of all the sad “it might have beens” is, perhaps, a reverie on the probable results of earlier emancipation—of the employment of thirteen worse than wasted centuries in scientific inquiries, agricultural improvements, social and sanitary reforms. We might have failed to enter the portals of the New Jerusalem, but we would probably have regained our earthly paradise. E.—REFORM. The days of the Holy Inquisition are past; but the restless propaganda of Jesuitry still shames the inactivity of Rationalism. Our friends sit listless, relying on the theoretical advantages of their cause, while the busy intrigues of our enemies secure them all practical advantages.