An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance | Page 6

a condition.--Effects of their ignorance as appearing in several parts of the economy of life; in their ordinary occupations; in their manner of spending their leisure time, including the Sunday; in the state of domestic society; consequences of this last as seen in the old age of parents.--The lower classes placed by their want of education out of amicable communication with the higher.--Unhappy and dangerous consequences of this.--Great decline of the respect which in former times the people felt toward the higher classes and the existing order of the community.--Progress of a contrary spirit.
Section IV.
Objection, that a material increase of knowledge and intelligence among the people would render them unfit for their station, and discontented with it; would excite them to insubordination and arrogance toward their superiors; and make them the more liable to be seduced by the wild notions and pernicious machinations of declaimers, schemers, and innovators.--Observations in answer.--Special and striking absurdity of this objection in one important particular.--Evidence from matter of fact that the improvement of the popular understanding has not the tendency alleged.--The special regard meant to be had to religious instruction in the education desired for the lower classes, a security against their increased knowledge being perverted into an excitement to insubordination and disorder.--Absurdity of the notion that an improved education of the common people ought to consist of instruction specifically and almost solely religious.--The diminutive quantity of religious as well as other knowledge to which the people would be limited by some zealous advocates of order and subordination utterly inadequate to secure those objects.--But, question what is to be understood by order and subordination.--Increased knowledge and sense in the people certainly not favorable to a credulous confidence and a passive, unconditional submission, on their part, toward the presiding classes in the community.--Advantage, to a wise and upright government, of having intelligent subjects.--Great effect which a general improvement among the people would necessarily have on the manner of their being governed.--The people arrived, in this age, at a state which renders it impracticable to preserve national tranquillity without improving their minds and making some concession to their claims.--Folly and probable calamity of an obstinate resolution to maintain subordination in the nations of Europe in the arbitrary and despotic manner of former times.--Facility and certain success of a better system.
Section V.
Extreme poverty of religious knowledge among the uneducated people: their notions respecting God, Providence, Jesus Christ, the invisible world.--Fatal effect of their want of mental discipline as causing an inaptitude to receive religious information.--Exemplifications,--in a supposed experiment of religious instruction in a friendly visit to a numerous uneducated family; in the stupidity and thoughtlessness often betrayed in attendance on public religious services; in the impossibility of imparting religious truths, with any degree of clearness, to ignorant persons, when alarmed into some serious concern by sickness; in the insensibility and invincible delusion sometimes retained in the near approach to death.--Rare instances of the admirable efficacy of religion to animate and enlarge the faculties, even in the old age of an ignorant man.--Excuses for the intellectual inaptitude and perversion of uncultivated religious minds.--Animadversions on religious teachers.
Section VI.
Supposed method of verifying the preceding representation of the ignorance of the people.--Renewed expressions of wonder and mortification that this should be the true description of the English nation.--Prodigious exertions of this nation for the accomplishment of objects foreign to the improvement of the people.--Effects which might have resulted from far less exertion and resources applied to that object.--The contrast between what has been done, and what might have been done by the exertion of the national strength, exposed in a series of parallel representations.--Total unconcern, till a recent period, of the generality of persons in the higher classes respecting the mental state of the populace.--Indications of an important change in the manner of estimating them.--Measures attempted and projected for their improvement.--Some of these measures and methods insignificant in the esteem of projectors of merely political schemes for the amendment of the popular condition.--But questions to those projectors on the efficacy of such schemes.--Most desirable, nevertheless, that the political systems and the governing powers of states could be converted to promote so grand a purpose.--But expostulations addressed to those who, desponding of this aid, despond therefore of the object itself.--Incitement to individual exertion.--Reference to the sublimest Example.--Imputation of extravagant hope.--Repelled; first, by a full acknowledgment how much the hopes of sober-minded projectors of improvement are limited by what they see of the disorder in the essential constitution of our nature; and next, by a plain statement, in a series of particulars, of what they nevertheless judge it rational to expect from a general extension of good education.--Answer to the question, whether it be presumed that any merely human discipline can reduce its subjects under the predominance of religion.--Answer to the inquiry, what is