Perhaps ten thousand boys have passed through the school since I bade
farewell to its cloisters, but I am unable to say whether the system
of non-religious teaching has been changed. Our reverend classical
masters manifested no religious tastes; it may be due to their not having
imbibed any when they were pupils like ourselves in the school. I do
recollect Mr. Lynam, of whom I was a pupil for several years, correcting
my pronunciation of _Jōb_, which I called _Jŏb_. If we were reading
something from Scripture before him, I have wholly forgotten it; the
occasion must have been so rare.
What the effect of religious ignorance may have been on so many before
and after me, it is difficult to surmise. I have no recollection of any
boy, in after-life, becoming a bishop or a millionaire. Nature was open
to them; she is constantly carrying on revelations, and all must begin
with these before entertaining Divine ones. The greater our acquaintance
is with natural teaching, the better we are able to judge of religious.
A well-educated scientific man would decide a religious question in
five minutes which would take five hundred years for all the doctors
of divinity to get to the bottom of. A large knowledge of Nature is
requisite even to find a meaning for any inspired passage, and it is
doubtful if any divine ever had training enough to understand fully
any one important passage of Holy Writ. Those men who are recognized
as having undergone inspiration were never able to state lucidly what
they heard, but recorded it in such shape as must for ever puzzle the
brains of the priesthood. If such men as the Herschels had been made the
vehicles of a revelation, it would have been expressed to the world in
such tangible language as shuts out all dispute.
The advantages of knowledge derived from observations made within the
sacred precincts of Nature is that there is always a revelation going
on, made by a silent, invisible power that we can question without
offence. But the custodes of the holy archives greatly disapprove of such
proceeding. The Catholic forbids the perusal of Scripture; the Protestant
the perusal of Nature; and that reverend gorilla, the agnostic,
inculcates the wisdom of studying all things and learning nothing. Surely
he is the missing link!
I admire the clergy as gentlemen and men of education, but the fault is
that they proceed from the university to the Church, and drop science
and literature out of their daily life, returning to ignorance at the
same pace as they quitted it as children. The cultivated class find it
impossible to converse with them on any profitable grounds.