For these works are the works of that same 'school' which the Jesuit
thought so dangerous, and calculated to affect unfavourably the
morality of the English nation--the school which the Jesuit contrived
to bring under suspicion as a school in which doctrines that differed
from opinions received on essential points were secretly
taught,--contriving to infect with his views on that point the lady
who was understood, at that time, to be the only person qualified to
reflect on questions of this nature; the school in which Raleigh was
asserted to be perverting the minds of young men by teaching them the
use of profane anagrams; and it cannot be denied, that anagrams, as
well as other 'devices in letters,' _were_ made use of, in involving
'the bolder meanings' contained in writings issued from this school,
especially when the scorn with which science regarded the things it
found set up for its worship had to be conveyed sometimes in a point
or a word. It is a school, whose language might often seem obnoxious
to the charge of profanity and other charges of that nature to those
who do not understand its aims, to those who do not know that it is
from the first a school of Natural Science, whose chief department was
that history which makes the basis of the '_living_ art,' the art of
_man's_ living, the _essential_ art of it,--a school in which the use
of words was, in fact, more rigorous and scrupulous than it had ever
been in any other, in which the use of words is for the first time
scientific, and yet, in some respects, more bold and free than in
those in which mere words, as words, are supposed to have some
inherent virtue and efficacy, some mystic worth and sanctity in them.
This was the learning in which the art of a new age and race first
spoke, and many an old foolish, childish, borrowed notion went off
like vapour in it at its first word, without any one's ever so much as
stopping to observe it, any one whose place was within. It is the
school of a criticism much more severe than the criticism which calls
its freedom in question. It is a school in which the taking of names
in vain in general is strictly forbidden. That is the first
commandment of it, and it is a commandment with promise.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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