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of the immortal HOWARD was the genuine spirit of christianity, and of the Reformation; and, although comparatively few persons have it in their power to leave their homes, as he did, and to traverse oceans, and mountains, and empires, in search of want and wretchedness, which they might pity and relieve, the same noble and benevolent temper may be traced in that amiable eagerness which pervades the Protestant world to feel for the miseries of their fellow men, and which, passing immeasurably beyond every consideration of kindred, and nation, and creed, is anxious to bless the whole of mankind with every temporal and spiritual privilege which it is in their power to be

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CHAPTER IV.

OF THE EFFECT WHICH THE REFORMATION HAS PRODUCED ON THE PROGRESS OF KNOWLEDGE.

THE field which the title prefixed to this chapter spreads before us is ample and interesting; but our limits permit us to cast over it only a cursory glance. Every person who is not altogether a stranger to reflection, must be aware that knowledge is of infinite importance to man, both in his individual and social state. It constitutes the dignity of his nature. It allies him to superior beings. Without it he is degraded, destroyed, lost.

Knowledge to the soul

Is power, and liberty, and peace."

Very considerable is the influence which the progressive advancement of knowledge sends forth on a nation's character, manners, and felicity. Its tendency is to polish the rudeness of nature, and to soothe its ferocity; to restrain the passions, and humanize the heart. By it the social principle is strengthened, society is established, its laws are settled and explained, its wants provided for, its labours abridged, its whole system softened, dignified, improved. What is

it so much as the progress of knowledge, especially religious knowledge, among the inhabitants of her scattered villages, that has given to the national character of our own beloved land such a tone of high superiority over the character of other states? And what is it but the pressure of the darkness of that deep and sullen night which has been induced and cherished by those petty spiritual tyrants, who have been the scourge and the curse of ill-fated Ireland, that has sunk her people so immensely below the rank, in European society, which they are fitted, and, under a happier influence, would have been entitled to claim? The melancholy state of this our sister isle, speaks volumes as to the vast importance of knowledge to mankind, and proclaims, with a voice which all the world should hear, that outrage, and anarchy, and crime, are the mournful consequences of its departure *.

We were led, when treating, in a former part of our essay, of the bearing which the Reformation had on

*

"In Antrim, Armagh, and Londonderry," says one of her ministers, contrasting the condition of her instructed with that of her uninstructed provinces," the number of educated children is, to the whole population, in the proportion of one to twelve: and these are peaceable, quiet counties. But, in the county of Limerick-Limerick, two well known by its atrocities and murdersWhat is the number of children educated there? There are many who will be surprised to learn that it is only as one to nine hundred and seventy-seven! In the province of Ulster, it is as one to seventeen; and in Munster, as one to five hundred !"-The Rev. W. Daly's Speech at the Nineteenth Anniversary of the British and Foreign Bible Society.

the interests of liberty, to advert to the melancholy condition of the world, during the dark ages, in respect of knowledge and learning; and to the means which were employed by the ambitious priesthood of the Roman Church, for putting out the intellectual light of mankind. It is not necessary now to enlarge on this part of the subject. Suffice it to remark, that useful knowledge was utterly banished from among the great mass of the people of the western world; and that the condition, even of the clerical orders, was not much superior to that of those whom they professed to guide. The Bible was unknown to most, and despised by all; and the study of its original languages was stigmatized as in the highest degree criminal and dangerous. Even the Faculty of Theology at Paris declared, before the assembled parliament, that, if the study of Greek and Hebrew was permitted, religion was undone*! Nor was it only

* "We might have lived for ever in peace and harmony,” observed the vicar of the Bishop of Constance, ingenuously, "though there had been never such a thing as a Bible;”—and Cardinal Hessius observed, in the same spirit, “that the affairs of the church would have been on a much better footing, if the Gospels had never been written." Learning fell into as much disrepute as the Bible among the clergy of the old establishment. "To understand Greek rendered a man liable to be suspected of heresy, and Hebrew of more." In 1523, the magistrates of Lucerne having ordered the house of Colinus, a learned professor, to be searched for heretical books, one of the monks who performed the office, meeting with a Homer, called out, “This is Lutheran, all that is Greek is Lutheran !"—" There is a new language called Greek, invented by the heretics," said a preacher to his congregation, "and a book printed in that language called the New

religious knowledge that was interdicted-the complete extinction of intellectual freedom and investigation was attempted, and, with respect to the vast majority of mankind, was accomplished. In short, the maxim, that "ignorance is the parent of devotion and of civil subordination"-a maxim the most monstrous that ever blighted minds could adopt, was, by a train of deep laid policy, rendered dominant over all the christian world, and, from that time, dreariness and barrenness were the melancholy characteristics of many ages in the history of man. Mind, with all its energies, was dormant; the sublime faculties of the human soul, by which it is allied to superior natures, were subjected to stagnation; and human society resembled the wide waste of an Arabian desert, or the gloom of the moonless and starless midnight sky.

Through the stillness and sullenness of that awful night, indeed, a solitary star did sometimes appear, attempting to scatter, in some faint degree, the surrounding darkness; and, amid the great intellectual and moral waste which the world in those ages presented to view, there does here and there meet the eye a green spot, on which we love to linger-just as the wearied traveller, after toiling for days together among the horrors of an African desert, lights him, at last, on some verdant spot, enjoys it with rapture, and leaves it with reluctance, casting back to it many a longing, lingering look!

Testament, which contains many dangerous things. Hebrew is another new language; whoever learns it becomes a Jew!"

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