An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance | Page 9

valuable changes and additions still require
to be followed by something more, to complete the scheme of
improvement. In thus tracing backward the condition of a now fair and
productive place of human dwelling and subsistence, it may easily be
recollected, what a vast number of the earth's inhabitants there are
whose places of dwelling are in all those states of worse cultivation and
commodiousness, and what multitudes leading a miserable and
precarious life amidst the inhospitableness of the waste, howling
wilderness. Each presented circumstance of fertility or shelter, salubrity
or beauty, may be named as what is wanting to a much greater number
of the occupants of the world, than those to whom the "lines are fallen
in such pleasant places."
When, in like manner, a person richly possessed of the benefits
imparted by means of knowledge, finds, in attempting to recount them,
that they rise so fast on his view, in their variety, combinations, and
gradations from less to greater, as to overpower his computing faculty,
he may be reminded that this account of his wealth is, in truth, that of
many other men's poverty. And if, while these benefits are coming so
numerously in his sight, like an irregular crowd of loaded fruit-trees,
one partially seen behind the offered luxury of another, and others still
descried, through intervals, in the distance, he can imagine them all
devastated and swept away from him, leaving him in a scene of mental
desolation,--and if he shall then consider that nearly such is the state of
the great multitude,--he will surely feel that a deep compassion is due
to so depressed a condition of existence. And how strongly is its
infelicity shown by the very circumstance, that a being who is himself
but very imperfectly enlightened, and who is exposed to sorrow and
doomed to death, is nevertheless in a state to be able to look down upon
the victims of the "lack of knowledge" with profound commiseration.
The degree of pity is the measure of a conscious superiority.
We may say to persons so favored,--If knowledge has been made the
cause that you are, beyond all comparison, better qualified to make the

short sojourn on this earth to the greatest advantage, think what a fatal
thing that must be which condemns so many, whose lot is
contemporary and in vicinity with yours to pass through the most
precious possibilities of good unprofited, and at last to look back on life
as a lost adventure. If through knowledge you have been introduced
into a new and superior world of ideas and realities, and your
intellectual being has there been brought into exercise among the
highest interests, and into communication with the noblest objects,
think of that condition of the soul to which this better economy has no
existence. If knowledge rendered efficacious has become, in your
minds, the light and joy of the Christian faith and hope, look at the state
of those, whose minds have never been cultivated to an ability to
entertain the principles of religious truth, even as mere intellectual
notions. You would not for the wealth of an empire consent to descend,
were it possible, from the comparative elevation to which you have
been raised by means of knowledge, into melancholy region of spirits
abandoned to ignorance.
But in this situation have the mass of the people been, from the time of
the prophet whose words we have cited, down to this hour.
The prophets had their exalted privilege of dwelling amidst the
illuminations of heaven effectually countervailed, as to any elation of
feeling it might have imparted, by the grief of beholding the daily
spectacle of the grossest manifestations and mischiefs of ignorance
among the people, for the very purpose of whose exemption from that
ignorance it was that they bore the sacred office. One of the most
striking of the characteristics by which their writings so forcibly seize
the imagination is, a strange continual fluctuation and strife of lustre
and gloom, produced by the intermingling and contrast of the
emanations from the Spirit of infinite wisdom, with those proceeding
from the dark, debased souls of the people. We are tempted to
pronounce that nation not only the most perverse, but the most
unintelligent and stupid of all human tribes. The revealed law of God in
the midst of them; the prophets and other organs of oracular
communication; religious ordinances and emblems; facts, made and
expressly intended to embody truths, in long and various series; the
whole system of their superhuman government, constituted as a
school--all these were ineffectual to create so much just thought in their

minds, as to save them from the vainest and the vilest delusions and
superstitions.
But, indeed, this very circumstance, that knowledge shone on them
from Him who knows all things, may