We used to hear, some years ago, so much about the Pride of Learning that it would be a commonplace to allude to that fault among the contingent disadvantages of study. One of the Fathers describes how he was flogged by an angel for his predilection for Cicero,—an anecdote which must have made many a school-boy, innocent of any such error, feel that life was only a dilemma between the rods of terrestrial and celestial pedagogues. But it is obvious that the saint had in his mind a sense that the reading of “Tusculan Disputations” had set him up—saint though he was—above the proper spirit of implicit docility and unqualified admiration for more sacred instructions. The critical spirit, which is the inevitable accompaniment of high erudition, is obviously a good way off from that ovine frame of mind which divines, in all ages, have extolled as the proper attitude for their flocks. Nay, in a truer and better sense than that of the open-mouthed credulity so idly inculcated, it must be owned that, short of that really great knowledge of which Bacon spoke and which allies itself with the infinite wisdom of love and faith, there are few things more hurtful to a man than to be aware that he knows a great deal more than those about him. The main difference between what are called self-made men and those who have been educated in the upper grades is that the former, from their isolation, have a constant sense of their own knowledge, as if it were a Sunday coat, while the others wear it easily as their natural attire. The best thing which could happen to a village Crichton would be to be mercilessly snubbed by an Oxford don. The days when women were “Précieuses” and “Blue Stockings” were those in which it was a species of miraculous Assumption of Virgins when they were lifted into the heaven of Latin Grammar. But, passing over the injury to healthy eyesight and mental vigor contingent on learning, and the moral faults sometimes engendered thereby, I proceed to ask another question. What is the ethical value of the Knowledge bought at such a price, and heaped together by mankind during the thirty centuries since Solomon uttered his warning? How has it contributed to their moral welfare?