An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance | Page 6

confirmed by common practices.--Confirmed especially
by the manner of slaughtering animals destined for food.--Displayed in
the abuse of the laboring animals.--General characteristic of the people
an indistinct and faint sense of right and wrong.--Various
exemplifications.--Dishonor to our country that the people should have
remained in such 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