Chapter IV (2)

Dr. Porter, indeed, gives the subjective and what he calls the objective, together, in one and the same thought; but he leaves the way open for the question, whether the object does or does not exist distinct from and independent of the subject. This is the difficulty one has with Locke's _Essay on the Understanding_. Locke makes ideas the immediate object of the cognitive act; for he defines them to be "that with which the mind is immediately conversant." If the soul can elicit the cognitive act with these ideas, which it is not pretended are things, how prove that there is any real world beyond them? It has never been done, and never can be done; for we have only the soul, for whose activity the _idea_ or concept suffices, with which to do it, and hence the importance to psychologists of the question, How do we know that we know? and which they can answer only by a paralogism, or assuming the reality of knowledge with which to prove knowledge real.

For the philosopher there is no such question, and nothing detracts so much from the philosophical genius of the illustrious Balmes as his assertion that all philosophy turns on the question of certainty. {678} The philosopher, holding that to know is to know, has, after knowing, or having thought the object, no question of certainty to ask or to answer. The certainty that the object exists in nature is in the fact that the soul thinks it. The object is always a force or activity distinct from and independent of the subject, and since it is an activity it must be either real being or real existence.

The error of the author, as of all psychologers, is not in assuming that the soul cannot think without the concurrence of the object, or that the object is not really object in relation to the soul's cognitive power, but in supposing that the soul can find the object in that which has no real existence. He assumes that abstractions or mental conceptions, which have no real existence aside from the concrete or reality from which the mind forms them, may be real objects of the soul in the fact of knowledge. But no abstractions or conceptions exist _a parte rei_. There are white things and round things, but no such existence as whiteness or roundness. These and other abstractions are formed by the mind operating on the concretes, and taking them under one aspect, or generalizing a quality they have in common with all concretes of their class, and paying no heed to anything else in the concrete object. But these abstractions or general conceptions are cognizable and apprehended by the mind only in the apprehension of their concretes, white or round things. They are, as abstracted from white things or round things, no more objects of thought or of thought-knowledge than of sensible perception. We speak of abstractions which are simply nullities, not of genera and species, or universals proper, which are not abstractions but real; yet even these do not exist apart from the individual. They and their individuals subsist always together in a synthetic relation, and though distinguishable are never separable. The species is not a mere name, a mere mental conception or generalization; it is real, but exists and is known only as individualized.

The unreal is unintelligible, and, like all negation, is intelligible only in the reality denied. The soul, then, can think or know only the real, only real being, or real existences by the light of real being. If the soul can know only the real, she can know things only in their real order, and consequently the order of the real and of the knowable is the same, and the principles of the real are the principles of science. The soul is an intelligent existence, and the principles, causes, and conditions of her existence are the principles, causes, and conditions of her intelligence, and therefore of her actual knowledge. We have, then, only to ascertain the principles of the real to determine the principles of science. The principles of the real are given us in the first verse of Genesis: "In the beginning God created heaven and earth," and in the first article of the Creed, "I believe in one God, maker of heaven and earth, and all things visible and invisible." Or, as stated in strictly scientific terms, as affirmed in intuition, Being creates existences. The real and necessary being given in the scientific formula or intuition is indeed God; but this is not intuitively known, and can be known only discursively or by contemplation and reflection. We must not, then, in stating the first principles of the real, and of knowledge as given in intuition, use the term God, but being. We know by intuition being, but do not by intuition know that being is God. Hence the mistake of those who say we have intuition of God, or know by intuition that God is. {679} We have intuition of that which is God, but not that what is given is God. Ontology is a most essential part of philosophy; but exclusive ontologists are as much sophists as are exclusive psychologists.

The first principles of reality are being, existence, and the creative act of being, whence the ideal formula or judgment, Being creates existences. This is the _primum_ in the real order. All that is real and not necessary and self-sufficing being must be from being; for without real uncreated being there can be nothing, and existences are something only in so far as they participate of being. Things can exist from being, or hold from it, only by virtue of its creative act, which produces them by its own energy from nothing, and sustains them as existent. There is only the creative act by which existences can proceed from being. Emanation, generation, evolution, which have been asserted as the mode of procession of existences, give nothing really or substantially distinguishable from being. Existences, then, can really proceed from being only by the creative act, and, indeed, only by the free creative act of being; for necessary creation is no creation at all, and can be only a development or evolution of being itself. In theological language, then, God and creation include all the real; what is not God is creature or existence, and what is not creature or existence is God. There is no reality which is neither God nor creature, no _tertium quid_ between being and existence, or between existence and nothing. The _primum_ of the real is, then, the ideal formula or divine judgment, _Ens creat existentias_, for it affirms in their principle and their real relation all that is and all that exists. This formula is a proper judgment, for it has all the terms and relations of a judgment, subject, predicate, and copula. Being is the subject, existences is the predicate, and the creative act the copula, which at once unites the predicate to the subject and distinguishes it from it. It is divine, because it is _a priori_, the _primum_ of the real; and as only the real is intelligible or knowable, it must precede as its principle, type, and condition, every judgment that can be formed by an existence or creature, and therefore can be only the judgment of God affirming his own being and creating the universe and all things, visible and invisible, therein.

Now, as the soul can only know the real, this divine judgment must be not only the _primum_ of the real, but of the knowable; and since the soul can know only as she exists, in the real relations in which she stands, and knows only by the aid of the object on which she depends for her existence and activity, it follows that this judgment is the _primum scientificum_, or the principle of all real or possible science.

Is it asked, How is this known or proved, if not by psychological observation and analysis? The answer is, by the analysis of thought, which discloses the divine judgment as its idea, or necessary and apodictic element. This is not psychologism nor the adoption of the psychological method. Psychologism starts from the assumption that thought, as to the activity that produces it, whatever may or may not be its object, is purely psychical, and that the ontological, if obtainable at all, is so by an induction from psychological facts. The first assumption is disproved by the fact just shown, that thought is not produced or producible by the psychical activity alone, but by the joint action of the two factors subject and object, in which both are affirmed. {680} The other assumption is disposed of by the fact that what is found in the analysis of thought is not particular facts or phenomena from which the first principles are concluded by way of induction, which could give us only a generalization or abstraction, but the first principles themselves intuitively given.

Philosophers generally assert that certain conditions precedent, or certain ideas _a priori_, are necessary to every fact of experience or actual cognition. Kant, in his masterly _Critik der reinen Vernunft_, calls them sometimes cognitions, sometimes synthetic judgments, _a priori_, but fails to identify them with the divine judgment, and holds them to be necessary forms of the subject. Cousin asserts them and calls them necessary and absolute ideas, but fails to identify them with the real, and even denies that they can be so identified. Reid recognized them, and called them the first principles of human belief, sometimes the principles of common sense, after Father Bouffier, which all our actual knowledge presupposes and must take for granted. Professor Porter also recognizes them, holds them to be intuitively given, calls them certain necessary assumptions, first truths or principles without which no science is possible, but fails to identify them with the divine judgment, and seems to regard them as abstract principles or ideas, as if abstractions could subsist without their concretes, or principles ever be abstract. We deny that they are abstract ideas, necessary assumptions, or necessary forms of the understanding or cognitive faculty, and hold them to be the principles of things, alike of the real and the knowable, without which no fact exists and no act of knowledge is possible. They cannot be created by the mind, nor formed by the mind operating on the concrete objects of existence, nor in any manner obtained by our own mental activity; for without them there is no mind, no mental activity, no experience. Dr. Porter, after Reid, Kant, Cousin, and others, has clearly seen this, and conclusively proved it--no philosopher more conclusively--and it is one of the merits of his book. He therefore justly calls them intuitions, or principles intuitively given; yet either we do not understand him, or he regards them as abstract truths or abstract principles. But truths and principles are never abstract, and only the concrete or real can be intuitively given. Those intuitions, then, must be either real being or contingent existences; not the latter, for they all bear the marks of necessity and universality; then they must be the real and necessary being, and therefore the principles of things, and not simply principles of science. Dr. Porter makes them real principles in relation to the mental act; but we do not find that he identifies them with the principles of the real. He doubtless holds that they represent independent truths, and truths which are the principles of things; but that he holds them, as present to the mind, to be the principles themselves, we do not find.

Dr. Porter's error in his Part IV., in which he discusses and defines intuitions, and which must be interpreted by the foregoing parts of his work, appears to us to be precisely in his taking principle to mean the starting-point of the soul in the fact of knowledge, and distinguishing it from the principle of the real order. He distinguishes between the object _in mente_ and the object _in re_, and holds that the former is by no means identical with the latter. He thus supposes a difference between the scientific order and the real, and therefore that the principle of the one is not necessarily the principle of the other. {681} This is to leave the question still open, whether there is any real order to respond to the scientific order, and to cast a doubt on the objective validity of all our knowledge. The divine judgment, or ideal formula, we have shown, is alike the _primum raale_ and the _primum scientificum_, and therefore asserts that the principles of the two orders are identical, and that the scientific must follow the real, for only the real is knowable. Hence science is and must be objectively certain.

The intuitive affirmation of the formula, being creates existences, creates, places the soul, and constitutes her intelligent existence. The author rightly says every thought is a judgment. There is no judgment without the copula, and the only real copula is the copula of the divine judgment or intuition, that is, the creative act of being. Being creating the soul is the principle of her existence; and as we have shown that she can act only as she exists, the principle of her existence is the principle of her acts, and therefore of her knowing, or the fact of knowledge. There is, then, no thought or judgment without the creative act for its copula. The two orders, then, are united and made identical in principle by the creative act of being. The creative act unites the acts of the soul, as the soul itself, to being.

The difficulty some minds feel in accepting this conclusion grows out of a misapprehension of the creative act, which they look upon as a past instead of a present act. The author holds that what is past has ceased to exist, and that the objects we recall in memory are "created a second time." He evidently misapprehends the real character of space and time. These are not existences, entities, as say the scholastics, but simple relations, with no existence, no reality, apart from the _relata_, or the related. Things do not exist in space and time; for space and time simply mark their relation to one another of coexistence and succession. Past and future are relations that subsist in or among creatures, and have their origin in the fact that creatures as second causes and in relation to their own acts are progressive. On the side of God, there is no past, no future; for his act has no progression, and is never in _potentia ad actum_. It is a complete act, and in it all creatures are completed, consummated, in their beginning, and hence the past and the future are as really existent as what we call the present. The Creator is not a _causa transiens_, that creates the effect and leaves it standing alone, but a _causa manens_, ever present in the effect and creating it.

Creation is not in space and time, but originates the relations so-called. The creative act, therefore, can never be a past or a future act, an act that has produced or that will produce the effect, but an act that produces it always here and now. The act of conservation, as theologians teach, is identically the act of creation. God preserves or upholds us in existence by creating us at each instant of our lives. The universe, with all it contains, is a present creation. In relation to our acts as our acts or our progressiveness toward our final cause or last end, the universe _was_ created and will remain as long as the Creator wills; but in relation to God it is created here and now, and as newly created at this moment as when the sons of the morning sang together over its production, by the divine energy alone, from nothing; and the song ceases not; they are now singing it. {682} There is nothing but this present creative act that stands between existences and nothing. The continuity of our existence is in the fact that God creates and does not cease to create us.

We have only to eliminate from our minds the conceptions that transport the relations of space and time to the Creator, or represent them as relations between Creator and creature, where the only relation is that of cause and effect, and to regard the creative act as having no relations of space and time, to be able to understand how the divine judgment, intuitively affirmed, is at once the principle of the real and of the scientific, and the creative act, the copula of being and existence, is the copula of every judgment or thought, as is proved by the fact already noted, that in no language can an assertion be made without the verb _to be_, that is, without God.

Dr. Porter, engaged in constructing not the science of things, but a science of knowing--a _Wissenschaftslehre_--has apparently been content with the intuitions as principles or laws of science, without seeking to identify them with the real. He is a doctor of divinity, and cannot intend to deny, with Sir William Hamilton and the Positivists, that ontology can be any part of human science. The Positivists, with whom, in this respect, Sir William Hamilton, who has finished the Scottish school, fully agrees, assert that the whole field of science is restricted to positive facts and the induction of their laws, and that their principles and causes, the ontological truths, if such there be, belong to the unknowable, thus reducing, with Sir William Hamilton, science to nescience. But though Dr. Porter probably holds that there is an ontological reality, and knows perfectly well that it cannot be concluded from psychical phenomena, either by way of induction or of deduction, he yet seems unable or unwilling to say that the mind has in intuition direct and immediate apprehension of it. The first and necessary truths, or the necessary assumptions, as he calls them, which the mind is compelled to make in knowing particulars, such as "what is, is," "the same thing cannot both be and not be at the same time," "whatever begins to exist must have a cause," etc., are, in his doctrine, abstract ideas, which, though they may represent a reality beyond themselves--and he tries to prove that they do--are yet not that reality itself. These ideas he states, indeed, in an abstract form, in which they are not real; but they are all identified in the ideal formula, or divine judgment, which is not an abstract but a real, concrete judgment. He holds them to be intuitions, indeed; but intuition, in his view, simply stands opposed to discursion, and he makes it an act of the soul immediately affirming the object, not the act of the object immediately affirming itself by its own creative act. Till being, in its creative act, affirms itself, the soul does not exist; and the intuitive act is that which creates it, and creates it intelligent. The intuition cannot, then, be the act of the soul, unless you suppose the soul can act without existing, or know without intelligence. If we make intuition the act of the soul, and suppose the necessary truths intuitively given are abstractions or representative ideas, how can we know that there is any reality represented by them? The old question again: How pass from the subjective to the objective?--from the scientific to the real?

{683}

The doctrine of representative ideas comes from the scholastics, and most probably from the misapprehension of their philosophy. Plato maintained that we know by similitude, which similitude he called _idea_. No doubt, Plato often means by _idea_ something else; but this is one of the senses in which he uses the term. This idea, with the peripatetics, becomes in sensibles the phantasm, in intelligibles the intelligible _species_. The intelligible _species_ was assumed as something mediating between the soul and the intelligible object. But though they asserted it as a medium, they never made it the object cognized. In their language, it was the objectum _quo_, not the objectum _quod_; and St. Thomas teaches expressly that the mind does not terminate in the _species_, but attains the intelligible object itself. In this magazine for May, 1867, in an article entitled "An Old Quarrel," we showed that what the scholastics probably had in mind when they spoke of the intelligible _species_, is adequately expressed by what we, after the analogy of external vision, call the light, which illuminates at once the subject and object, and renders the one cognitive and the other cognizable. This light is not furnished by the mind, but by being itself light, and the source of all light, present in every fact of knowledge in the creative act.

The Scottish school has made away with the phantasms, and proved that, in what our author calls sense-perception, we perceive not a phantasm, but the real external object itself; but in the intelligible or supersensible world, this direct apprehension of the object Dr. Porter appears not to admit. He consciously or unconsciously interposes a _mundus logicus_ between the mind and the _mundus physicus_. The categories are with him abstract relations, and logic is a mere formal science. This is evident from Part III., in which he treats of what he calls "thought-knowledge." But the categories are not abstract forms of thought, but real relations of things; logic is founded in the principle and constitution of things, not simply in the constitution and laws of the human mind. Its type and origin are in being itself, in the Most Holy Trinity. The creative act is the copula of every strictly logical judgment. The Creator is logic, the [Greek text], or, as Plato would say, logic in itself, and therefore all the works of God are strictly logical, and form, _mediante_ his creative act, a dialectic whole with himself. Whatever does not conform to the truth and order of things is illogical, a sophism; and every sophism sins against the essence of God, as well as against the constitution of the human mind. Psychologism is a huge sophism; for it assumes that the soul is being, and can exist and act independently when it is only a created, dependent existence; that it is God, when it is only man. Satan was the first psychologist we read of. Ontologism is also a sophism of very much the same sort. Psychologism asserts that man is God; ontologism asserts that God is man. This is all the difference between them, and they terminate at the same point. Existences cannot be logically deduced from being, because being, sufficing for itself, cannot be constrained to create either by extrinsic or by intrinsic necessity. Existences are not necessarily involved in the very conception of being, but are contingent, and dependent on the free-will of the Creator. God cannot be concluded by induction from psychological facts; for the universal cannot be concluded from the particular, nor the necessary from the contingent.

{684}

Both the ontological _primum_ and the psychological must be given intuitively and in their real synthesis, or no science of either is possible. The mind must take its starting-point and principle of science from neither separately, but from the real synthesis of the two, as in the ideal formula. The attempt to construct an exclusively ontological or an exclusively psychological science is as absurd and as sophistical as the attempt to express a judgment without the copula, or to construct a syllogism without the middle term. The real copula of the judgment, the real _medius terminus_ that unites the two extremes of the syllogism, is the creative act of being.

All Gentile philosophy failed, because it failed to recognize the creative act. Outside of Judaism, the tradition of creation was lost in the ancient world. In vain will you seek a recognition of it in Plato or Aristotle, or in any of the old Gentile philosophers. In its place you find only emanation, generation, or formation. The error of the Gentiles reappears in our modern philosophers, who--since Descartes detached philosophy from theology, of which it is simply the rational element--are endeavoring to construct science and the sciences without the creative act, and if they escape pantheism or atheism, it is by the strength of their faith in revelation, not by the force of their logic. Dr. Porter really attempts to construct the philosophy of the human intellect, unconsciously certainly, on purely atheistic or nihilistic principles; that is, without any principles at all. He, of course, believes in God, believes that God made the world; but most likely he believes he made it as the watch-maker makes a watch, so that when wound up and started it will go of itself--till it runs down. This is a very wide-spread error, and an error that originates with so-called philosophers, not with the people. Hence we find scientific men in large numbers who look upon the world God has made as a huge machine; and now that it is made, as independent of him, capable of going ahead on its own hook, and even able to bind him by its laws, and deprive him of his freedom of action, as if it were or could be anything but what he at each moment makes it. He ought, as a doctor of divinity, to understand that there can be no science without the efficacious presence of God, who created the soul, and none without his presence creating it now, and by his light rendering it intelligent. To construct science without God in his creative act as the principle, is to begin in sophism and end in nihilism.

We need hardly say that, in asserting the divine judgment or ideal formula as the principle of all science, and as the necessary and apodictic element of every fact of knowledge, we do not pretend that the mind is able in the first moment of intellectual life to say to itself, or to others, God creates existences. This is the real formula which expresses in principle the entire real order, but it is the formula to which the principles given in intuition are reduced by reflection. There are a large number of minds, and among them our illustrious Yale Professor of Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics, who do not recognize the identity of being with God, or are aware that the intuition is of that which is God. A still larger number do not distinguish the so-called necessary ideas from the contingent objects of experience cognizable only by them, and very few, even among professors of philosophy, ever identify these ideas--the necessary, the universal, the eternal, and the immutable--with real being, or reflect that they cannot subsist as abstractions, and that the universal, the eternal, the immutable, the necessary, of which we have intuition in all our mental acts, is and must be real, necessary, universal, eternal, and immutable being, that is to say, God himself. {685} Few reflect far enough to perceive that in intuition the object is real being; and the number of men who distinctly recognize all the terms of the formula in their real relation is a very small minority, and every day growing smaller.

But the intuition is not, as Dr. Porter supposes, of ideas which lie latent or dormant in the mind till occasion wakes them up and calls them into action; but they are the first principles, or rather the principles from which the mind proceeds in all its intellectual acts. They are intuitively affirmed to the mind in the creative act, and are ever present and operative; but we become aware of them, distinguish them, and what they imply or connote, only by reflection, by contemplating them as they are held up before the mind, or sensibly represented to it, in language. Though the formula is really the _primum philosophicum_, we attain to it, or are masters of what is really presented in intuition, and are able to say, being is God, and God creates existences, only at the end of philosophy, or as its last and highest achievement.

The principles are given in the very constitution of the mind, and are present to it from its birth, or, if you will, from the first instant of its conception; but they are by no means what Descartes and others have called _innate ideas_. Descartes never understood by _idea_ the intelligible object itself, but a certain mental representation of it. The idea was held to be rather the image of the thing than the thing itself. It was a _tertium quid_ somewhere between real and unreal, and was regarded as the medium through which the mind attained to the object. In this sense we recognize no ideas. In the fact of knowledge, what we know is the object itself, not its mental representation. We take _idea_ or the ideal in the objective sense, and understand by it the immediate and the necessary, permanent, immutable object of intuition, and it is identical with what we have called the _primum philosophicum_, or divine judgment, which precedes the mind's own activity. Hence we call that judgment the "ideal formula." With this view of idea or the ideal, analogous, at least, to one of the senses of Plato, from whom we have the word, it is evident that the Cartesian doctrine of innate ideas, which was afterward changed to that of innate faculties, cannot find in us an advocate.

The formula is ideal and apodictic, but it is not the entire object of the cognitive act. It is that which precedes and renders possible experience, or what Kant calls synthetic judgments _a posteriori_. We have said the soul can know only as she exists, and that whatever object she depends on for her existence must she depend on for her acts, and it enters into all her thoughts or facts of knowledge. The soul depends for existence on God, on humanity and nature. In the formula, we have only the ideal principle of man and nature, and therefore the ideal formula, while it furnishes the principle and light which render knowledge possible, does not supersede experience, or actual knowledge acquired by the exercise of the soul and her faculties. Here the soul proceeds by analysis and synthesis, by observation and induction, or deduction, according to the nature of the subject. We do not quarrel with the inductive sciences, nor question their utility; we only maintain that they are not sciences till carried up to the principles of all real science presented to the mind in intuition. Induction is proper in constructing the physical sciences, though frequently improperly applied; but it is inapplicable, as my Lord Bacon held, in the construction of philosophy; for in that we must start from the ideal formula, and study things in their principles and in their real synthesis.

{686}

We have got through only the author's Introduction, yet that has brought up nearly all the salient points of his entire volume. Here we might stop, and assuredly should stop, if we had no higher object in view than to criticise its author, or simply to refute his psychological method. We believe one of the first steps toward arresting the atheistical or pantheistical tendency of the age, and of bringing the mind back to truth and the logic of things, is to set forth and vindicate sound philosophy, the philosophy which in substance has always been preserved in the Christian church. To use up an author or to denounce a false system is a small affair. The only solid refutation of error is in presenting the truth it impugns. As there are several questions of importance raised by the author on which we have hardly touched, we propose to return to the book and consider them at our earliest convenience.

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The Catholic View Of Public Education
In The United States.

[We republish the following article from _The American Educational Monthly_, with the permission of the editor, on account of the importance of the subject, the intrinsic value of the article, and to aid in giving it a wide circulation. ED. C. W.]

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It would be wholly superfluous to address an argument to any portion of the American people upon the absolute necessity of popular education. Upon that point there is no diversity of opinion. The fundamental principles of our social system rest upon it as a corner-stone; such as, that government derives all of its authority, under God, from the consent of the governed; the people possess the sovereignty; public officers are only public servants; the multitude rules by representation; Congress, the President, and the Courts are the people--without the people they have no existence; constitutions and laws are but the well-ordered expression of the public will, at all times revocable, in an orderly manner, and binding upon each citizen as the will of all, unless the popular decree be against the law of God, when, of course, it bind's no man's conscience. Hereditary rights, class privileges, ancient social divisions, and distributions of power have all disappeared, or rather, have never existed here. Even in Colonial times, the Crown was almost a myth, and cast but a shadowy reflection into the deep waters of the Hudson and the Mississippi, as they rolled on to the sea from the illimitable forests where the moccasined hunter was then as free as the Red Indian had been for unrecorded centuries. The Revolution of '76 changed the government, but really left the cardinal points of our American civilization very much as it found them. In fact, our political education is traceable back to the days of Alfred and Edward the Confessor; for the Norman king gave us no concession in Magna Charta which was unknown to Saxon liberty. In our Republic we have only drawn out these principles to their extreme conclusions. We have gone back to the original hypothesis, that society is an association of equal rights for mutual protection; and that power, under God, belongs to the whole body of corporators--that is, the multitude. From this postulate we are obliged to pass immediately to the axiom that there can be no fit administration of power without knowledge. Knowledge may be acquired in several ways. The most direct and impressive is experience. Alcuin was master of books; but Charlemagne was master of men. The great emperor could not read, but he possessed the wisdom to govern. Who shall say that he was not "educated" in the highest sense of that vague term? And yet, it is very clear that knowledge gained only by the slow accretions of experience will not answer the wants and rapid movements of such a republic as ours in the age of steam and electricity. Each generation must be trained from the cradle, and made to possess, enlarge, and transmit to its successor all the accumulated knowledge of its predecessor. As no atom of matter perishes, but is for ever recombining and reproducing; so every true idea and sound moral sentiment must be made the inheritance of society, and never cease to exert its power for good among men. Not that moral truth can ever change; for it is now precisely what it has been from all eternity; nor is it better understood by the divine to-day, than it was by Moses when he came down from the mountain; but the multitude may be made more fully to comprehend and reverence it. Christianity, although specially revealed and miraculously propagated, did not suddenly conquer and civilize barbarous peoples. It has been eighteen hundred years struggling with the powers of darkness and the corruption of the human heart; and yet, alas! how very, very far removed are not even the most polished nations from the severe standard of Christian perfection! See the tyrannies, the oppressions, the cruelties, the wars, the pride, the luxury, the folly and deceit which fill the fairest parts of the earth with mourning, and drag mankind down into the slough of sin and sorrow! To be sure, there is a certain stereotyped class of saints and philosophers who cry aloud, "Compare our enlightened era with the rude times of the crusaders; or place the nineteenth alongside of the ninth century; and let the celestial light of our civilization shine down into the abysses of monkish superstition!" We shall, nevertheless, refuse to close our eyes to those stupendous sins which have supplanted the violent crimes of our ancestors. We shall see how their robber-sword has been put aside for our forger's pen; how their wild foray has given place to our gigantic stock speculation or bank swindle, which sweeps widows and orphans, by the ten thousand, into utter poverty and despair; how their fierce lust has been civilized into the decorous forms of the divorce courts; {688} how their bold grasping of power has been changed into the arts of the whining demagogue; how their undisguised plunder of the public treasure in times of civil commotion has been superseded by the adroit peculation and covert bribery of our times of peace; how their courageous, rude anger has vanished before the safer and more efficacious process of concealed hatred, nestling, like the scorpion, among the roses of adulation. We certainly shall be obliged to remember these things, to the great reproach of our times, and in serious dread of the future; and we shall feel anxious to go to work to find the cause and the remedy. We are all agreed that education, that is, knowledge and moral training, cannot be dispensed with for an hour--that no nation can be governed safely, much less govern itself at all, without a clear head and a sound heart--that, if governed as a dumb brute, it will kick against the pricks, fly in the face of its hard master, and dash out its foolish brains against the stone wall! It will sing the _Marseillaise_ and cover its garments with the blood of kings and aristocrats; until, having spent its fury, it will return to its crust and shout "Vive l'Empereur!" Should it attempt to govern itself, it will become the prey of the infamous men who are the spawn of its own passions. Without knowledge, the nation is either a silent sepulchre, where all hopes are buried, or a raging sea, where they are quickly wrecked. Knowledge, then, _it must have_. But _what_ knowledge? Shall we say, knowledge of the arts? Ask Phidias and Praxiteles if the arts saved Greece! Shall we say, polite literature? Ah! let the mournful chorus of Sophocles, AEschylus and Euripides give utterance to the sad cries of those old pagan hearts for a higher virtue than the sublimest tragedy could teach them! Shall it be the eloquence of the orator or the wisdom of the legislator? We shall hear in the Philippics how vainly the master of orators appealed to a degenerate race, and we shall read in the closing annals of Athens and Sparta how utterly the wisdom of Solon and Lycurgus had failed to save polished and warlike states from the penalty which God has affixed to the crimes of nations. Shall we take refuge in human philosophy? Socrates and the divine Plato had cast off the degrading superstitions of paganism, and had proclaimed to their intellectual countrymen the eternity and unity of God, and the immortality of the soul of man. They had most earnestly enjoined upon them the sanctity of all the natural virtues--temperance, industry, patience, courage, honesty, benevolence, patriotism, continence, filial duty, conjugal fidelity; but what did their philosophy avail? Why did it not save the Grecian states? They went down into the night upon which no sun ever again shone! Their Roman conquerors seized upon the rich treasures of their knowledge. The Senate listened with rapture to the wisdom of the old Hellenic sages translated by Cicero into the noble Latin tongue. Virgil and Livy sought to inspire the Roman heart with grand ideas borrowed from the Greek masters. What did it all avail? The Roman republic had practised the natural virtues as fully as unregenerated man is capable of doing by the power of vigorous and cultivated reason. What did it avail? They, too, went down into the tomb of dead nations; and a few broken columns remain to mark the seat of their world-wide empire! {689} It is very manifest, then, that intellectual culture, even when carried to the highest development of which men are capable, can never subdue their passions, nor enable them to uphold the civilization to which they may have attained in the freshness of their national life. If this were not so, then we could not clearly perceive the necessity of the Christian revelation. If man was self-sustaining, he would not require the arm of God to lean upon. The apothegm of the Greek sage, "_Know thyself_," was a dead letter. It was precisely to teach a man how to know himself that our Saviour came. And this is the whole knowledge! No poetry, oratory, history, philosophy, arts, or sciences could teach that, else the world would have learned it four thousand years ago, and the primitive races would not have perished. Even under the Christian dispensation, and in very modern times, men and nations have failed to know themselves, because they turned their backs on Christ and placed their hopes in human science and natural virtue. And so we have seen an enlightened nation in our day deify humanity, refuse to adore God, and prostrate itself before a harlot, as the high-priestess in the apotheosis of Reason! We have seen an antichristian conspiracy, formed of the most learned, eloquent, witty, and fascinating men of modern Europe, exerting the highest arts of genius to repaganize the world. We have seen science, rudely torn from religion, waging an insane war against the peace of society. That terrific phase of blasphemous infidelity has passed from our immediate view; but has it left nothing more dangerous behind? We think it has. The mass of mankind shrank with horror from the defiant blasphemy of Voltaire; and they recoiled with alarm from the ruin caused by his teachings. We love liberty; but we dread license, anarchy, chaos. Man is, also, naturally religious. Long after he had forgotten the traditions of the patriarchs and had lost God in the night of heathen idolatry, he still clung to

"The instinct of old reverence!"

and his wretched soul yearned after its Creator.

The false worship of Greece and Rome was the inarticulate cry of a lost people for that true worship which was promised to the Gentile at the appointed time. False and hideous as it was, who will not say that it was far preferable to atheism? It was only when the Epicurean philosophy had destroyed the faith of those people, that they cast off all moral restraint, and were swept away in the torrent of their vices. Man is naturally religious; and therefore the world will not long patiently tolerate the presence of blatant infidelity. _The danger is not there_. He who goes about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour, knows very well that mankind is more easily seduced under the forms of virtue than by gross sin. His incarnate agents on earth know this too. Hence we find all the world covered over with gossamer nets of seduction! The press teems with books and journals, not confessedly infidel, yet working in the interests of infidelity; fanning the passions and exciting the morbid sensibilities of youth; teaching religious indifference under the pleasing garb of liberality; holding up the discipline of the church as hostile to personal freedom; depicting the doctrines and ceremonies of the Christian religion as trammels upon mental activity and intellectual progress; arraying the laity against their pastors; insisting that to be a humane man, an honest and industrious worker, a faithful friend, a good husband and father, a patriotic citizen, is to be all and to do all that the highest Christian morality can require or the welfare of the human race demand; asserting that the specific dogmas of the Christian faith, with perhaps one or two exceptions, are not essential, and may be rejected without concern; receiving with indifference and polite complacency either the divinity or the humanity of Christ; and accepting him as a God-Saviour, a man-prophet, or a harmless, self-deluded impostor, as your fancy may please to dictate; in a word, deifying man, and making this world, with its wealth, its pleasures, its pride and pomp, its power and magnificence, its civilization and nationalities, the sole object of his anxiety and love. {690} Such, we say, is the growing evil of this nineteenth century, which is so scornful of the "dark ages;" an evil infinitely more subtile and destructive than the rage or gibes of Voltaire. This poison has gone through the chilled blood of renegade old men, destroying the religious vitality which had sustained their faith from the baptismal font to the very edge of the grave; how must it not, therefore, affect the hot veins of inexperienced youth, whose generous impulses are their greatest peril! See how, in those European revolutions gotten up by avowed enemies of religion, the students of the universities flock to the standards of infidelity, with the seductive cry of "_Liberty, Equality, Fraternity!_" They enlist, with enthusiasm, under what they believe to be the consecrated banner of inalienable human rights--their young, sympathetic hearts are justly moved by the sufferings of the toiling millions caused by unequal laws--their sense of justice and human brotherhood is outraged at the sight of domineering classes who monopolize the blessings of government--they see very clearly all the existing wrongs, but they do not see the practicable and wise remedies; and when they hear prudent voices counselling patience, and reminding them that the evil works of centuries, like old forest trees, have deep roots, and cannot be rudely torn out of the bosom of society without endangering its life, they cry out in their enthusiasm, "These are the voices of the enemies of the people, the voices of priests and aristocrats, away with them to the guillotine!" Only too late do they experience the retribution which God invariably visits upon those who presumptuously seek to drive the chariot of his Providence!

Not one word of what we have said is inapplicable to our own land. We live, move, and have our whole being in the midst of these same perils. Steam, electricity, commerce, and emigration have made us a part of the great European family. Every throb of their heart is felt in our own bosom. We are of their blood and civilization. We have their laws and their religion. We are nurtured by their science and literature. From us they have received more thorough ideas of democratic freedom, but from them we have derived all else that constitutes the intellectual life of man. It would be the height of folly in us to despise the lessons of their experience. Our children should be carefully instructed in all of it. They have a difficult task to perform in perpetuating our institutions as they were shaped by the fathers of the Republic. They must be well trained in the knowledge necessary for that purpose. From what has already been said it will be at once understood that we do not mean human science alone, _nor principally_. The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.

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This brings us to the consideration of the immediate subject of this article; which can now, we think, be briefly stated; inasmuch as the foundation has been properly laid, if our views are correct as to the principles which we have presented.

Enlightened rulers all over Europe have been profoundly impressed with the lessons of this and the last century. It was once believed by monarchs that to enlighten their subjects would be to imperil their thrones. It is now very clearly seen that "the divinity which doth hedge a king" has long ceased to be an oracle to the people. The French emperor erects his dynasty upon popular suffrage. Hereditary right has come down from its ancient pedestal to accept from the people the confirmation of its authority. It is now too evident for further doubt that no ruler can rule modern nations by any appeal to the mausoleum of his ancestors. The garish light of the sun has penetrated every royal tomb, and has altogether annihilated the mystery which once filled the hearts of nations with awe and unquestioning obedience. Public opinion now rules the ruler. Kings and their ministers have now to elect between intelligent and virtuous opinion on the one hand, or revolutionary passions on the other. The wisest of them, therefore, are hastening to educate the people; and they are striving above all things to make such education distinctly _Christian_, and not simply _moral_; for they well remember the fate of all nations who have staked their salvation upon the sufficiency of the natural virtues. While kings are doing this to preserve the shadow of their royalty from the aggressive spirit of the age, we, in this chosen land, are doing or aiming to do the same thing, in order that we may rear successive generations of virtuous and enlightened heirs to the rich inheritance of our constitutional democratic freedom. Ours should be much the easier task; as we labor for no dynasty, but strive only to make a nation capable of self-preservation. We are no less in earnest than the kings; and we may surely examine their work and see what is good in it. The kings tried the pagan idea of intellectual culture adorned with the glittering generalities of moral philosophy; and they added to it the maxims of the Christian gospel, whenever that could be done without getting entangled in the conflicting creeds of the numerous sects. The school was like Plato's lecture-room, only that the sacred voice of the evangelist was heard occasionally in such passages as do not distinctly set forth faith and doctrine, about which the scholars could differ. Sectarianism, as it is called, had to be excluded, of course, in a mixed system of popular education, wherein freedom of conscience was conceded to be a sacred right and proselytism was disavowed. The result was twofold: first, tens of thousands of children were deprived of distinct religious instruction and doctrinal knowledge; and secondly, in countries where the Roman Catholic population was large, though in a minority, other tens of thousands were left without secular education, because their parents would not permit them to be brought up in habits of indifferentism, which means practical infidelity, or trained in knowledge hostile to their religious faith. Prussia, though she is the very embodiment and representative of Protestant Europe, soon came to the conclusion that this would not do--that education must be Christian--that it must be doctrinal and conducive to religious practices--that, as all could not or would not believe alike, each should have full opportunity to be reared in his own faith, to learn its doctrines and to fulfil its duties and discipline--and, therefore, that enlightened government established the denominational system, giving to each creed practical equality before the law, a separate school organization, (wherever numbers made it practicable,) and a ratable share of the public school-fund; reserving to the government only a general supervision, so as to secure a faithful application of the public money, and to enforce a proper compliance with the educational standard. The public schools are organized so that every citizen shall obtain the complete education of his child, in the faith and practice of his own church. All difficulties have disappeared, and perfect harmony prevails.

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In France, by the last census, the population was thirty-seven millions, divided about as follows: 480,000 Calvinists, 267,000 Lutherans, 30,000 of other Protestant sects, and 73,000 Jews; the remaining thirty-six millions being either practically or nominally Catholic. Although the dissenters from the national faith are less than one million, that government has provided for them, at the public expense, separate primary schools, where each sect is at full liberty to teach its own doctrines. There are likewise three seminaries for the higher education of Lutherans and Calvinists.

Austria also supports schools, colleges, and universities for a Protestant minority.

The British Government has likewise adopted the same principle of public education for the Catholics and the Protestant dissenters of England; while, with her traditional and malignant hatred of the Irish people, she still denies them the justice which she extends to all of her other subjects, at home or in the colonies, even to the Hindoos and Mohammedans of her Indian empire!