The most serious form of the evil caused by a want of mental improvement,
is that which is exposed to us in its consequences with respect to the
most important concern of all, Religion. This has been briefly adverted to
in a former part of these descriptive observations. But the subject seems
to merit a more amplified illustration, and may be of sufficient interest
to excuse some appearance of repetition. The special view in which we wish
to place it, is that of _the inaptitude of uncultivated minds for
receiving religious instruction._--But first, a slight estimate may be
attempted of the actual state of religious notions among our uneducated
population.
_Some_ notion of such a concern, something different in their
consciousness from the absolute negation of the idea, something that
faintly responds to the terms which would be used by a person conversing
with them, in the way of questioning them on the subject, may be presumed
to exist in the minds of all who are advanced a considerable way into
youth, or come to mature age, in a country where all are familiar with
several of the principal terms of theology, and have the monitory
spectacle of edifices for religious use, on spots appointed also for the
interment of the dead. If this sort of measured caution in the assumption
seem bordering on the ridiculous, we would recommend those who would smile
at it to make some little experiments. Let them insinuate themselves into
the company of some of the innumerable rustics who have grown up destitute
of everything worth calling education; or of the equally ill-fated beings
in the alleys, precincts, and lower employments of towns. With due
management to avoid the abruptness and judicial formality, which, would
preclude a communicative disposition, they might take occasion to
introduce remarks tending, without the express form of questions in the
first instance, to draw out the thoughts of some of these persons
respecting God, Jesus Christ, the human soul, the invisible world. And the
answers would often put them to a stand to conceive, under what suspension
of the laws of rational existence the utterers could have been passing so
many years in the world. These answers might dispel, as by a sudden shock,
the easy and contented assurance, if so unknowing a notion had been
entertained, that almost all the people _must_, in one way or another,
have become decently apprized of a few first principles of religion; that
this _could_ not have failed to be the case in what was expressly
constituted a great Christian community, with an obligation upon it, that
none of its members should be left destitute of the most essential
requisite to their well-being. This agreeable assurance would vanish, like
a dream interrupted, at the spectacle thus presented, of persons only not
quite as devoid of those first principles, after living eighteen, thirty,
forty, or twice forty years, under the superintendence of that community,
as if they had been the aboriginal rovers of the American forests, or
natives of unvisited coral-built spots in the ocean. If these examiners
were to prosecute the investigation widely, and with an effect on their
sentiments correspondent to the enlarging disclosure of facts, they could
find themselves fallen into a very altered estimate of this our Christian
tract of the earth. A fancied sunshine, spread over it before, would have
faded away. From appearing to them, according to an accustomed notion,
peculiarly auspicious, as if almost by some virtue of its climate, to the
growth of religious intelligence in the minds of the people, it might come
to be regarded as favorable to the development of _all things rather than
that_. Plants and trees, the diversity of animal forms and powers, the
human frame, the features enlarging or enlarged to manhood in the younger
persons looked at by the supposed examiner while answering his questions,
with their passions also, and prevailing dispositions,--see how all things
can unfold themselves in our territory, and grow and enlarge to their
completeness,--except the ideas of the human soul relating to the
Almighty, and to the grand purpose of its own existence!
The supposed answers would in many instances betray, that any thought of
God at all was of very rare occurrence, the idea having never become
strongly associated with anything beheld in the whole creation. We should
think it probable, as we have said before, that with many, while in
health, weeks or months often pass away without this idea being once so
presented as to fix the mind in attention to it for one moment of time. If
they could be set to any such task as that of retracing, at the end of the
days or the weeks, the course of their thoughts, to recollect what
particulars in the series had struck the most forcibly and stayed the
longest, it may be suspected that _this_ idea, thus impressively
apprehended, would be as rare a recollection as that of having seen a
splendid meteor. Yet during that space of time, their thoughts, such as
they were, shall have run through thousands of changes; and even the name
of God may have been pronounced by them a multitude of times, in
jocularity or imprecation. Thus there is a broad easy way to atheism
through thoughtless ignorance, as well as a narrow and difficult one
through subtle speculation.
But that idea of God which has, by some means, found its way into their
understandings, to abide there so nearly in silence and oblivion,--what is
it, when some direct call does really evoke it? It is generally a gross
approximation of the conception of the Infinite Being to the likeness of
man. If what they have heard of his being a Spirit, has indeed some little
effect in prevention of the total debasement of the idea, it prevents it
rather by confusion than by magnificence. It may somewhat restrain and
baffle the tendency of the imagination to a direct degrading definition;
but it does so by a dissolution of the idea as into an attenuated cloud.
And ever and anon, this cloudy diffusion is again drawing in, and shaping
itself toward an image, vast perhaps, and spectral, portentous across the
firmament, but in some near analogy to the human mode of personality.
The divine attribute which is apprehended by them with most of an
impression of reality, is a certain vastness of power. But, through the
grossness of their intellectual atmosphere, this appears to them in the
character of something prodigiously huge, rather than sublimely
glorious.--As considered in his quality of moral judicial Governor, God is
regarded by some of them as more disposed, than there is any reasonable
cause, to be displeased with what is done in this world. But the far
greater number have no prevailing sentiment that he takes any very
vigilant account or concern. [Footnote: Some have no very distinct
impression the one way or the other. Not very long since, a friend of the
writer, in one of the midland counties, fell into talk, on a Sunday, with
a man who had been in some very plain violation of the consecrated
character of the day. He seriously animadverted on this, adding, Don't you
think God will be displeased at and punish such conduct? or words to that
effect. The man, after a moment's consideration, answered, with unaffected
cool simplicity, exactly thus: "That's according as how a takes it."
Numerous anecdotes of the same cast have been more recently heard; and
among them that of a conversation with a thoughtless man, of worthless
character, not in the lowest condition in society, and then consciously
near death. The religious visitor represented to him the serious and
alarming situation of a man on the point of going from a sinful life into
the presence of God as a Judge. The man, with a sort of general
acknowledgment that it was so, yet hoped that God would not be severe with
him. But the visitor anxiously pressed upon him the consideration that God
is a just Being, and judges by a holy law: to which at last the answer
was, with little emotion, "Then God and I must fight it out as well as we
can." The phrase, in his use of it, did not mean anything of the nature of
a hostile contest, but simply the _settling of an affair_, which he
thought might be done without any great danger or trouble.] And even those
who entertain the more ungracious apprehension, have it not in sufficient
force to make them, once in whole months, deliberately think it worth
while to care what he may disapprove.]
The notions that should answer to the doctrine of a Providence, are a
confusion of some crude idea of a divine superintendence, with stronger
fancies and impressions of luck and chance; a confusion of them not
unaptly exemplified in a grave and well-meaning sentiment heard from a man
in a temporal condition to be envied by many of his neighbors, "Providence
must take its chance." And these are still further, and most uncouthly,
confounded by the admixture of the ancient heathen notion of fate, reduced
from its philosophy to its dregs. In many instances, however, this last
obtains such a predominance, as to lessen the confusion, and withal to
preclude, in a great measure, the sense of accountableness. In neither of
these rude states of the understanding, (that which confounds Providence
and chance, and that which sinks in dull acquiescence to something
obscurely imagined like fate,) is there any serious admission, at least
during the enjoyment of health, of the duty or advantage of prayer.
The supposed examiner may endeavor to possess himself of the notions
concerning the Redeemer of the world. They would be found, in numerous
instances, amounting literally to no more than, that Jesus Christ was a
worthy kind of person, (the word has actually been "gentleman," in more
than one instance that we have heard from unquestionable testimony,) who
once, somewhere, (these national Christians had never in their lives,
thought of inquiring when or where,) did a great deal of good, and was
very ill used by bad people. The people now, they think, bad as they may
be, would not do so in the like case. Some of these persons may
occasionally have been at church; and are just aware that his name often
recurs in its services; they never considered why; but they have a vague
impression of its repetition having some kind of virtue, perhaps rather in
the nature of a spell.--The names of the four evangelists are by some held
literally and technically available for such a use.
A few steps withdrawn from this thickest of the mental fog, there are many
who are not entirely uninformed of something having been usually affirmed,
by religious formularies and teachers, of Jesus Christ's being more than a
man, and of his having done some thing of great importance toward
preventing our being punished for our sins. This combination of a majestic
superiority to the human nature, with a subsistence yet confessedly human,
just passes their minds like a shape formed of a shadow, as one of the
unaccountable things that may be as it is said, for what they know, but
which they need not trouble themselves to think about. As to the great
things said to be done by him, to save men from being punished, they see
indeed no necessity for such an expedient, but if it is so, very right,
and so much the better; for between that circumstance in our favor, and
God's being too good, after all that is said of his holiness and wrath, to
be severe on such poor creatures, we must have a good chance of coming off
safely at last. But multitudes of the miserably poor, however wicked, have
a settled assurance of this coming off well at last, independently of
anything effected for men by the Mediator: they shall be exempted, they
believe, from any future suffering in consideration of their having
suffered so much here. There is nothing, in the scanty creed of great
numbers, more firmly held than this.
It is true, they believe that the most atrociously wicked must go to a
state of punishment after death. They consider murderers, especially, as
under this doom. But the offences so adjudged, according to any settled
estimate they have of the demerit of bad actions, are comprised in a very
short catalogue. At least it is short if we could take it exclusively of
the additions made to it by the resentments of individuals. For each one
is apt to make his own particular addition to it, of some offence which he
would never have accounted so heinous, but that it has happened to be
committed against _him_. We can recollect the exultation of sincere faith,
seen mingling with the anger, of an offended man, while _predicting_, as
well as imprecating, this retribution of some injury he had suffered; a
real injury, indeed, yet of a kind which he would have held in small
account had he only seen it done to another person.--As to the nature of
that future punishment, the ideas of these neglected minds go scarcely at
all beyond the images of corporal anguish, conveyed by the well-known
metaphors. They have no impressive idea of the pain of remorse, and
scarcely the faintest conception of an infelicity inflicted by the
conscious loss of the Divine favor.
It is most striking to observe how almost wholly negative are their
conceptions of that future happiness which must be _something_--but
what?--as the necessary alternative of the evil they so easily assure
themselves of escaping. The abstracted, contemplative, and elevated ideas
of the celestial happiness are far above their apprehension; and indeed,
though they were not, would be little attractive. And the more ordinary
modes of representing it in religious discourse, (if they should ever have
heard enough of such discourse to be acquainted with them,) are too
uncongenial with their notions of pleasure to have a welcome, or abiding
place, in their imagination or affections. Thus the soul, as to this great
subject, is vacant and cold. And here the reflection again returns, what
an inexpressible poverty of the mind there is, when the people have no
longer a mythology, and yet have not obtained in its place any knowledge
of the true religion. The martial vagrants of Scandinavia glowed with the
vivid anticipations of Valhalla; the savages of the western continent had
their animating visions of the "land of souls;" the modern Christian
barbarians of England, who also expect to live after death, do not know
what they mean by the! phrase of "going to heaven."
Most of this class of persons think very little in any way whatever of the
invisible spiritual economy. And some of them would be pleased with a
still more complete exemption from such thought. For there are among them
those who are liable to be occasionally affected with certain ghostly
recognitions of something out of the common world. But it is remarkable
how little these may contribute to enforce the salutary impressions of
religion. For instance, a man subject to the terror of apparitions shall
not therefore be in the smallest degree the less profane, except just at
the time that this terror is upon him. A number of persons, not one of
whom durst walk, alone, at midnight, round a lonely church, encompassed
with graves, to which has perhaps lately been added that of a notoriously
wicked man, will nevertheless, on a fine Sunday morning, form a row of
rude idlers, standing in the road to this very church, to vent their jokes
on the persons going thither to attend the offices of religion, and on the
performers of those offices.
Such, as regarding religion, is the state out of which it is desired to
redeem a multitude of the people of this land. Or rather, we should say,
it is sought to save a multitude from being consigned to it. For consider,
in the next place, (what we wished especially to point at, in this most
important article in the enumeration of the evils of ignorance,) consider
what a fatal inaptitude for receiving the truths of religion is created by
the neglect of training minds to the exercise of their faculties, and the
possession of the elements of knowledge.
How inevitably it must be so, from the nature of the case!--There is a
sublime economy of invisible realities. There is the Supreme Existence, an
infinite and eternal Spirit. There are spiritual existences, that have
kindled into brightness and power, from nothing, at his creating will,
There is an universal government, omnipotent, all-wise, and righteous, of
that Supreme Being over the creation. There is the immense tribe of human
spirits, in a most peculiar and alarming predicament, held under eternal
obligation of conformity to a law proceeding from the holiness of that
Being, but perverted to a state of disconformity to it, and opposition to
him. Next, there is a signal anomaly of moral government, the constitution
of a new state of relation between the Supreme Governor and this alienated
race, through a Mediator, who makes an atonement for human iniquity, and
stands representative before Almighty Justice, for those who in grateful
accordance to the mysterious appointment consign themselves to this
charge. There are the several doctrines declaratory of this new
constitution through all its parts. There is the view of religion in its
operative character, or the doctrine of the application of its truths and
precepts by a divine agency to transform the mind and rectify the life.
And this solemn array of all the sublimest reality, and most important
intelligence, is extending infinitely away beyond the sensible horizon of
our present state to an invisible world, to which the spirits of men
proceed at death for judgment and retribution, and with the prospect of
living forever.
Look at this scene of faith, so distinct, and stretching to such
remoteness, from the field of ordinary things; of a subsistence which it
is for intellect alone to apprehend; presenting objects with which
intellect alone can hold converse. Look at this scene; and then consider,
what manner of beings you are calling upon to enter into it by
contemplation. Beings who have never learned to think at all. Beings who
have hardly ever once, in their whole lives, made a real effort to direct
and concentrate the action of their faculties on anything abstracted from
the objects palpable to the senses; whose entire attention has been
engrossed, from their infancy, with the common business, the low
amusements and gratifications, the idle talk, the local occurrences, which
formed the whole compass of the occupation, and practically acknowledged
interests, of their progenitors. Beings who have never been made in the
least familiar with even the matters of fact, those especially of the
scripture history, by which religious truths have been expressed and
illustrated in the substantial form of events, and personal characters.
Beings who, in natural consequence of this unexercised and unfurnished
condition of their understandings, will combine the utmost aversion to any
effort of purely intellectual labor, with the especial dislike which it is
in the human disposition to feel toward this class of subjects. What kind
of ideas should you imagine to be raised in their minds, by all the words
you might employ, to place within their intellectual vision some portion
of this spiritual order of things,--even should you be able, which you
often would not, to engage any effort of attention to the subject?--And
yet we have heard this disqualification for receiving religious knowledge,
in consequence of the want of early mental culture, made very light of by
men whose pretensions to judgment had no less a foundation than an
academical course and a consecrated profession. They would maintain, with
every appearance of thinking so, that a very little, that the barest
trifle, of regulated exercise of the mind in youth, would be enough for
the common people as a preparation for gaining as much knowledge of
religion as they could ever want; that any such thing as a practice of
reading, (a practice of hazardous tendency.) would be needless for the
purpose, since they might gain a competence of that knowledge by
attendance on the public ministration in the church. And there must have
been a very recent acquiescence in a new fashion of opinion, if numbers of
the same class of men would not, in honestly avowing their thoughts, say
something not far different at this hour.
But the pretended facility of gaining a competence of religious knowledge
by such persons on such terms, can only mean, that the smallest
conceivable portion of it may suffice. For we may appeal to those pious
and benevolent persons who have made the most numerous trials, for
testimony to the inaptitude of uneducated people to receive that kind of
instruction. You have visited, perhaps, some numerous family, or Sunday
assemblage of several related families; to which you had access without
awkward intrusion, in consequence of the acquaintance arising from near
neighborhood, or of little services you had rendered, or of the
circumstance of any of their younger children coming to your charity
schools. It was to you soon made sensible what a sterile, blighted spot
of rational nature you were in, by indications unequivocal to your
perception, though, it may be, not easily reducible to exact description.
And those indications were perhaps almost equally apparent in the young
persons, in those advanced to the middle of life, and in those who were
evidently destined not long to remain in it, the patriarch, perhaps, and
the eldest matron, of the kindred company. You attempted by degrees, with
all managements of art, as if you had been seeking to gain a favor for
yourselves, to train into the talk some topic bearing toward religion;
and which could be followed up into a more explicit reference to that
great subject, without the abruptness which causes instant silence and
recoil. We will suppose that the gloom of such a moral scene was not
augmented to you, by the mortification of observing impatience of this
suspension of their usual and favorite tenor of discourse, betrayed in
marks of suppressed irritation, or rather by the withdrawing of one, and
another, from the company. But it was quite enough to render the moments
and feelings some of the most disconsolate you had ever experienced, to
have thus immediately before you a number of rational beings as in a dark
prison-house, and to feel the impotence of your friendly efforts to bring
them out. Their darkness of ignorance infused into your spirit the
darkness of melancholy, when you perceived that the fittest words you
could think of, in every change and combination in which you could
dispose them, failed to impart to their understanding, in the meaning you
wanted to convey, the most elementary and essential ideas of the most
momentous subject.
You thought again, perhaps, and again, Surely _this_ mode of expression,
or _this_, as it is in words not out of common usage, will define the
thing to their apprehension. But you were forced to perceive that the
common phraseology of the language, those words which make the substance
of ordinary discourse on ordinary subjects, had not, for the
understandings of these persons, a general applicableness. It seemed as if
the mere elemental vehicle, (if we may so name it,) available
indifferently for conveying all sorts of sense, except science, had become
in its meaning special and exclusive for their own sort of topics. Their
narrow associations had rendered it incapable of conveying sense to them
on matters foreign to their habits. When used on a subject to which they
were quite unaccustomed, it became like a stream which, though one and the
same current, flows clear on the one side, and muddy (as we sometimes see
for a space) on the other; and to them it was clear only at their own
edge. And if thus even the plain popular language turned dark on their
understandings when employed in explanation of religion, it is easy to
imagine what had been the success of a more peculiarly theological
phraseology, though it were limited to such terms as are of frequent use
in the Bible.
You continued, however, the effort for a while. As desirous to show you
due civility, some of the persons, perhaps the oldest, would give assent
to what you said, with some sign of acknowledgment of the importance of
the concern. The assent would perhaps be expressed in a form meant and
believed to be equivalent to what you had said. And when it gave an
intelligible idea, it might probably betray the grossest possible
misconception of the first principles of Christianity. It might be a crude
formation from the very same substance of which some of the worst errors
of popery are constituted; and might strongly suggest to you, in a glance
of thought, how easily popery might have become the religion of ignorance;
how naturally ignorance and corrupt feeling mixing with a slight vague
notion of Christianity, would turn it into just such a thing as popery.
You tried, perhaps, with repeated modifications of your expression, and
attempts at illustration, to loosen the false notion, and to place the
true one contrasted with it in such a near obviousness to the
apprehension, that at least the difference should be seen, and (perhaps
you hoped) a little movement excited to think on the subject, and make a
serious question of it. But all in vain. The hoary subject of your too
late instruction, (a spectacle reminding you painfully of the words which
denominate the sign of old age "crown of glory,") either would still take
it that it came all to the same thing, or, if compelled to perceive that
you really were trying to make him _unthink_ his poor old notions, and
learn something new and contrary, would probably retreat, in a little
while, into a half sullen, half despondent silence, after observing, that
he was too old, "the worse was the luck," to be able to learn about such
things, which he never had, like you, the "scholarship" and the time for.
In several of the party you perceived the signs of almost a total blank.
They seemed but to be waiting for any trifling incident to take their
attention, and keep their minds alive. Some one with a little more of
listening curiosity, but without caring about the subject, might have to
observe, that it seemed to him the same kind of thing that the methodist
parson, (the term most likely to be used if any very serious and earnest
Christian instructor had appeared in the neighborhood,) was lately saying
in such a one's funeral-sermon. It is too possible that one or two of the
visages of the company, of the younger people especially, might wear,
during a good part of the time, somewhat of a derisive smile, meaning,
"What odd kind of stuff all this is;" as if they could not help thinking
it ludicrously strange that any one should be talking of God, of the
Saviour of mankind, the facts of the Bible, the welfare of the soul, the
shortness and value of life, and a future account, when he might be
talking of the neighboring fair, past or expected, or the local quarrels,
or the last laughable incident or adventure of the hamlet. It is
particularly observable, that grossly ignorant persons are very apt to
take a ludicrous impression from high and solemn subjects; at least when
introduced in any other time or way than in the ceremonial of public
religious service; when brought forward as a personal concern, demanding
consideration everywhere, and which may be urged by individual on
individual. You have commonly enough seen this provoke the grin of
stupidity and folly. And if you asked yourselves, (for it were in vain to
ask _them_,) why it produced this so perverse effect, you had only to
consider that, to minds abandoned through ignorance to be totally
engrossed by the immediate objects of sense, the grave assumption, and
emphatic enforcement, of the transcendent importance of a wholly unseen
and spiritual economy, has much the appearance and effect of a great lie
attempted to be passed on them. You might indeed recollect also, that the
most which some of them are likely to have learnt about religion, is the
circumstance, that the persons professing to make it an earnest concern
are actually regarded as fit objects of derision by multitudes, not of the
vulgar order only, but including many of the wealthy, the genteel, the
magisterial, and the dignified in point of rank.
Individuals of the most ignorant class may stroll into a place of worship,
bearing their character so conspicuously in their appearance and manner as
to draw the particular notice of the preacher, while addressing the
congregation. It may be, that having taken their stare round the place,
they go out, just, it may happen, when he is in the midst of a marked,
prominent, and even picturesque illustration, perhaps from some of the
striking facts or characters of the Scripture history, which had not made
the slightest ingress on their thoughts or imagination. Or they are
pleased to stay through the service; during which his eye is frequently
led to where several of them may be seated together. Without an appearance
of addressing them personally, he shall be excited to direct a special
effort toward what he surmises to be the state of their minds. He may in
this effort acquire an additional force, emphasis, and pointedness of
delivery; but especially his utmost mental force shall be brought into
action to strike upon their faculties with vivid, rousing ideas, plainly
and briefly expressed. And he fancies, perhaps, that he has at least
arrested their attention; that what is going from his mind is in some
manner or other taking a place in theirs; when some inexpressibly trivial
occurring circumstance shows him, that the hold he has on them is not of
the strength of a spider's web. Those thoughts, those intellects, those
souls, are instantly and wholly gone--from a representation of one of the
awful visitations of divine judgment in the ancient world--a description
of sublime angelic agency, as in some recorded fact in the Bible--an
illustration of the discourse, miracles, or expiatory sorrows of the
Redeemer of the world--a strong appeal to conscience on past sin--a
statement, perhaps in the form of example, of an important duty in given
circumstances--a cogent enforcement of some specific point as of most
essential moment in respect to eternal safety;--from the attempted grasp,
or supposed seizure, of any such subject, these rational spirits started
away, with infinite facility, to the movements occasioned by the falling
of a hat from a peg.
By the time that any semblance of attention returns, the preacher's
address may have taken the form of pointed interrogation, with very
defined supposed facts, or even real ones, to give the question and its
principle as it were a tangible substance. Well; just at the moment when
his questions converge to a point, which was to have been a dart of
conviction striking the understanding, and compelling the common sense
and conscience of the auditors to answer for themselves,--at that moment,
he perceives two or three of the persons he had particularly in view
begin an active whispering, prolonged with the accompaniment of the
appropriate vulgar smiles. They may possibly relapse at length, through
sheer dulness, into tolerable decorum; and the instructor, not quite
losing sight of them, tries yet again, to impel some serious ideas
through the obtuseness of their mental being. But he can clearly
perceive, after the animal spirits have thus been a little quieted by the
necessity of sitting still awhile, the signs of a stupid vacancy, which
is hardly sensible that anything is actually saying, and probably makes,
in the case of some of the individuals, what is mentally but a slight
transition to yawning and sleep.
Utter ignorance is a most effectual fortification to a bad state of the
mind. Prejudice may perhaps, be removed; unbelief may be reasoned with;
even demoniacs have been compelled to bear witness to the truth; but the
stupidity of confirmed ignorance not only defeats the ultimate efficacy of
the means for making men wiser and better, but stands in preliminary
defiance to the very act of their application. It reminds us of an
account, in one of the relations of the French Egyptian campaigns, of the
attempt to reduce a garrison posted in a bulky fort of mud. Had the
defences been of timber, the besiegers might have set fire to and burned
them; had they been of stone, they might have shaken and ultimately
breached them by the battery of their cannon; or they might have
undermined and blown them up. But the huge mound of mud had nothing
susceptible of fire or any other force; the missiles from the artillery
were discharged but to be buried in the dull mass; and all the means of
demolition were baffled.
The most melancholy of the exemplifications of the effect of ignorance, as
constituting an incapacity for receiving religious instruction, have been
presented to those who have visited persons thus devoid of knowledge in
sickness and the approach to death. Supposing them to manifest alarm and
solicitude, it is deplorable to see how powerless their understandings
are, for any distinct conception of what, or why, it is that they fear, or
regret, or desire. The objects of their apprehension come round them as
vague forms of darkness, instead of distinctly exhibited dangers and foes,
which they might steadily contemplate, and think how to escape or
encounter. And how little does the benevolent instructor find it possible
for him to do, when he applies his mind to the painful task of reducing
this gloomy confused vision to the plain defined truth of their unhappy
situation, set in order before their eyes.
He deems it necessary to speak of the most elementary principles--the
perfect holiness and justice of God--the corresponding holiness and the
all-comprehending extent of his law, appointed to his creatures--the
absolute duty of conformity to it in every act, word, and thought--the
necessary condemnation consequent on failure--the dreadful evil,
therefore, of sin, both in its principle and consequences. God--perfect
holiness--justice--law--universal conformity--sin--condemnation! Alas!
the hapless auditor has no such sense of the force of terms, and no such
analogical ideas, as to furnish the medium for conveying these
representations to his understanding. He never had, at any time; and now
there may be in his mind all the additional confusion, and incapacity of
fixed attention, arising from pain, debility, and sleeplessness. All this
therefore passes before him with a tenebrious glimmer; like lightning
faintly penetrating to a man behind a thick black curtain.
The instructor attempts a personal application, endeavoring to give the
disturbed conscience a rational direction, and a distinct cognizance. But
he finds, as he might expect to find, that a conscience without knowledge
has never taken but a very small portion of the man's habits of life under
its jurisdiction; and that it is a most hopeless thing to attempt to send
it back reinforced, to reclaim and conquer, through all the past, the
whole extent of its rightful but never assumed dominion. So feeble and
confined in the function of judgment through which it must see and act, it
is especially incapable of admitting the monitor's estimate of the measure
of guilt involved in omission, and in an irreligious state of the mind, as
an exceedingly grave addition to the account of criminal action. The man
is totally and honestly unable to conceive of the substantial guilt of
anything of which he can ask, what injury it has done to anybody. This
single point--whether positive harm has been done to any one--comprehends
the whole essence and sum of the conscious accountableness of very
ignorant people. Material wrong, _very_ material wrong, to their fellow
mortals, they have a conscience that they should not do; a conscience,
however, which they would deem it hard to be obliged to maintain entire
even to this confined extent; and which therefore admits some compromise
and gives some license, with respect especially to any kind of wrong which
has the extenuation, as they deem it, of being commonly practised in their
class; and against which there is a sort of understanding that each one
must take the best care he can of himself. At this confine, so undecidedly
marked, of practical, tangible wrong, these very ignorant persons lose the
sense of obligation, and feel absolved from any further jurisdiction. So
coarse and narrow a conscience as to what they _do_, is not likely to be
refined and extended into a cognizance of what they _are_. As for a duty
absolute in the nature of things, or as owing to themselves, in respect to
their own nature, or as imposed by the Almighty--_that their minds should
be in a certain prescribed state_--there does really require a perfectly
new manner of the action of intellect to enable them to apprehend its
existence. And this habitual insensibility to any jurisdiction over their
internal state, now meets, in its consequences, the supposed instructor.
In consideration of the vast importance of this part of a rational
creature's accountableness, and partly, too, from a desire to avoid the
invidiousness of appearing as a judicial censor of the sick man's
practical conduct, he insists in an especial manner on this subject of the
state within, endeavoring to expose that dark world by the light of
religion to the sick man's conscience. But to give in an hour the
_understanding_ which it requires the discipline of many years to render
competent! How vain the attempt! The man's sense of guilt fixes almost
exclusively on something that has been improper in his practical courses.
He professes to acknowledge the evil of this; and perhaps with a certain
stress of expression; intended, by an apparent respondence to the serious
emphasis which the monitor is laying on another part of the
accountableness and guilt, to take him off from thus endeavoring, as it
appears to the ignorant sufferer, to make him more of a sinner than there
is any reason, so little can he conceive that it should much signify what
his thoughts, tempers, affections, motives, and so forth, may have been.
By continuing to press the subject, the instructor may find himself in
danger of being regarded as having taken upon him the unkind office of
inquisitor and accuser in his own name, and of his own will and authority.
When inculcating the necessity of repentance, he will perceive the
indistinctness of apprehension of the difference between the horror of
sin merely from dread of impending consequences, and an antipathy to its
essential nature. And even if this distinction, which admits of easy
forms of exemplification, should thus be rendered in a degree
intelligible, the man cannot make the application. The instructor
observes, as one of the most striking results of a want of disciplined
mental exercise, an utter inability for self-inspection. There is before
his eyes, looking at him, but a stranger to himself, a man on whose mind
no other mind, except One, can shed a light of self-manifestation, to
save him from the most fatal mistakes.
If the monitor would turn, (rather from an impulse to relieve the gloom of
the scene, than from anything he sees of a hopeful approach toward a right
apprehension of the austerer truths of religion,) if he would turn his
efforts, to the effect of directing on this dark spirit the benign rays of
the Christian redemption, what is he to do for terms,--yes, for very
terms? Mediator, sacrifice, atonement, satisfaction, faith; even the
expression, believing in Christ; merit of the death of Christ, acquittal,
acceptance, justification;--he knows, or soon will find, that he is
talking the language of an occult science. And he is forced down to such
expedients of grovelling paraphrase, and humiliating analogy, that he
becomes conscious that his method of endeavoring to make a divine subject
comprehensible, is to divest it of its dignity, and reduce it, in order
that it may not confound, to the rank of things which have not majesty
enough to impress with awe. And after this has been done, to the utmost of
his ability, and to the unavoidable weariness of his suffering auditor, he
is distressed to think of the proportion between the insignificance of any
ideas which this man's mind now possesses of the economy of redemption,
and the magnitude of the interest in which he stands dependent on it. A
symptom or assurance which should impart to the sick man a confidence of
his recovery, would appear to him a far greater good than all he can
comprehend as offered to him from the Physician of the soul. Some crude
sentiment, as that he "hopes Jesus Christ will stand his friend;" that it
was very good of the Saviour to think of us; that he wishes he knew what
to do to get his help; that Jesus Christ has done him good in other
things, and he hopes he will now again at the last; [Footnote: Such an
expression as this would hardly have occurred but from recollection of
fact, in the instance of an aged farmer, (the owner of the farm,) in his
last illness. In the way of reassuring his somewhat doubtful hope that
Christ would not fail him when now had recourse to, at his extreme need,
he said, (to the writer,) "Jesus Christ has sent me a deal of good
crops."]--such expressions will afford little to alleviate the gloomy
feelings, with which the serious visitor descends from the chamber in
which, perhaps, he may hear, a few days after, that the man he conversed
with lies a dead body.
But such benevolent visitors have to tell of still more melancholy
exemplifications of the effects of ignorance in the close of life. They
have seen the neglect of early cultivation, and the subsequent
estrangement from all knowledge and thinking, except about business and
folly, result in such a stupefaction of mind, that irreligious and immoral
persons, expecting no more than a few days of life, and not in a state of
physical lethargy, were absolutely incapable of being alarmed at the near
approach of death. They might not deny, nor in the infidel sense
disbelieve, what was said to them of the awfulness of that event and its
consequences; but they had actually never thought enough of death to have
any solemn associations with the idea. And their faculties were become so
rigidly shrunk up, that they could not now admit them; no, not while the
portentous spectre was unveiling his visage to them, in near and still
nearer approach; not when the element of another world was beginning to
penetrate through the rents of their mortal tabernacle. It appeared that
literally their thoughts _could not_ go out from what they had been
through life immersed in, to contemplate, with any realizing feeling, a
grand change of being, expected so soon to come on them. They could not go
to the fearful brink to look off. It was a stupor of the soul not to be
awaked but by the actual plunge into the realities of eternity. In such a
case the instinctive repugnance to death might be visible and
acknowledged. But the feeling was, If it must be so, there is no help for
it; and as to what may come after, we must take our chance. In this temper
and manner, we recollect a sick man, of this untaught class, answering the
inquiry how he felt himself, "Getting worse; I suppose I shall make a die
of it." And some pious neighbors, earnestly exhorting him to solemn
concern and preparation, could not make him understand, we repeat with
emphasis, _understand_ why there was occasion for any extraordinary
disturbance of mind. Yet this man was not inferior to those around him in
sense for the common business of life.
After a tedious length of suffering, and when death is plainly
inevitable, it is not very uncommon for persons under this infatuation to
express a wish for its arrival, simply as a deliverance from what they
are enduring, without disturbing themselves with a thought of what may
follow. "I know it will please God soon to release me," was the
expression to his religious medical attendant, of such an ignorant and
insensible mortal, within an hour of his death, which was evidently and
directly brought on by his vices. And he uttered it without a word, or
the smallest indicated emotion, of penitence or solicitude; though he had
passed his life in a neighborhood abounding with the public means of
religious instruction and warning.
When earnest, persisting, and seriously menacing admonitions, of pious
visitors or friends, almost literally compel such unhappy persons to some
precise recognition of the subject, their answers will often be faithfully
representative, and a consistent completion, of their course through
mental darkness, from childhood to the mortal hour. We recollect the
instance of a wicked old man, who, within that very hour, replied to the
urgent admonitions by which a religious neighbor felt it a painful duty to
make a last effort to alarm him, "What! do you believe that God can think
of damning me because I may have been as bad as other folk? I am sure he
will do no such thing: he is far too good for that."
We cannot close this detailed illustration of so gloomy a subject, without
again adverting to a phenomenon as admirable as, unhappily, it is rare;
and for which the observers who cannot endure mystery in religion, or
religion itself, may go, if they choose, round the whole circle of their
philosophy, and begin again, to find any adequate cause, other than the
most immediate agency of the Almighty Spirit. Here and there an instance
occurs, to the delight of the Christian philanthropist, of a person
brought up in utter ignorance and barbarian rudeness, and so continuing
till late in life; and then at last, after such a length of time and habit
has completed its petrifying effect, suddenly seized upon by a mysterious
power, and taken, with an alarming and irresistible force, out of the dark
hold in which the spirit has lain imprisoned and torpid, into the sphere
of thought and feeling.
Occasion is taken this once more of adverting to such facts, not so much
for the purpose of magnifying the nature, as of simply exhibiting the
effect, of an influence that can breathe with such power on the obtuse
intellectual faculties; which it appears, in the most signal of these
instances, almost to create anew. It is exceedingly striking to observe
how the contracted, rigid soul seems to soften, and grow warm, and expand,
and quiver with life. With the new energy infused, it painfully struggles
to work itself into freedom, from the wretched contortion in which it has
so long been fixed as by the impressed spell of some infernal magic. It is
seen filled with a distressed and indignant emotion at its own ignorance;
actuated with a restless earnestness to be informed; acquiring an unwonted
pliancy of its faculties to thought; attaining a perception, combined of
intelligence and moral sensibility, to which numerous things are becoming
discernible and affecting, that were as non-existent before. It is not in
the very extreme strength of their import that we employ such terms of
description; the malice of irreligion may easily parody them into poetical
excess; but we have known instances in which the change, the intellectual
change, has been so conspicuous, within a brief space of time, that even
an infidel observer must have forfeited all claim to be esteemed a man of
sense, if he would not acknowledge,--This that you call divine grace,
whatever it may really be, is the strangest awakener of faculties after
all. And to a devout man, it is a spectacle of most enchanting beauty,
thus to see the immortal plant, which has been under a malignant blast
while sixty or seventy years have passed over it, coming out at length in
the bloom of life.
We cannot hesitate to draw the inference, that if religion is so
auspicious to the intellectual faculties, the cultivation and exercise of
those faculties must be of great advantage to religion.
These observations on ignorance, considered as an incapacitation for
receiving religious instruction, are pointed chiefly at that portion of
the people, unhappily the largest, who are little disposed to attend to
that kind of instruction. But we should notice its prejudicial effect on
those of them to whom religion has become a matter of serious and
inquisitive concern. The preceding assertions of the efficacy of a strong
religious interest to excite and enlarge the intellectual faculty will not
be contradicted by observing, nevertheless, that in a dark and crude state
of that facility those well-disposed persons, especially if of a warm
temperament withal, are unfortunately liable to receive delusive
impressions and absurd notions, blended with religious doctrine and
sentiment. It would be no less than plain miracle or inspiration, a more
entire and specific superseding of ordinary laws than that which we have
just been denominating "an immediate agency of the Almighty Spirit," if a
mind left uncultivated all up through the earlier age, and perhaps far on
in life, should not come to its new employment on a most important subject
with a sadly defective capacity for judgment and discrimination. The
situation reminds us of an old story of a tribe of Indians denominated
"moon-eyed," who, not being able to look at things by the light of the
sun, were reduced to look at them under the glimmering of the moon, by
which light it is an inevitable circumstance of human vision to receive
the images of things in perverted and deceptive forms.
Even in such an extremely rare instance as that above described, an
example of the superlative degree of the animating and invigorating
influence of religion on the uncultivated faculties, there would be
visible some of the unfortunate consequences of the inveterate rudeness; a
tendency, perhaps, to magnify some one thing beyond its proportionate
importance to adopt hasty conclusions; to entertain some questionable or
erroneous principle because it appears to solve a difficulty, or perhaps
falls in with an old prepossession; to make too much account of variable
and transitory feelings; or to carry zeal beyond the limits of discretion.
In examples of a lower order of the correction or reversal of the effects
of ignorance by the influence of religion, the remains will be still more
palpable. So that, while it is an unquestionable and gratifying fact, that
among the uneducated subjects of genuine religion many are remarkably
improved in the power and exercise of their reason; and while we may
assume that _some_ share of this improvement reaches to all who are really
under this most beneficent influence in the creation, [Footnote: _Really_
under this influence, we repeat, pointedly; for we justly put all others
out of the account. It is nothing (as against this asserted influence on
the intelligent faculty) that great numbers who may contribute to swell a
public bustle about religion; who may run together at the call of whim,
imposture, or insanity, assuming that name; who may acquire, instead of
any other folly, a turn for talking, disputing, or ranting, about that
subject: it is nothing, in short, that _any_ who are not in real,
conscientious seriousness the disciples of religion, can be shown to be no
better for it, in point of improved understanding.] it still is to be
acknowledged of too many, who are in a measure, we may candidly believe,
under the genuine efficacy of religion, that they have attained, through
its influence, but so inferior a proportion of the improvement of
intellect, that they can be well pleased with the great deal of absurdity
of religious notions and language. But while we confess and regret that it
is so, we should not overlook the causes and excuses that may be found for
it, in unfortunate super-addition to their lack of education; partly in
the natural turn of the mind, partly in extraneous circumstances. Many
whose attention is in honest earnestness drawn to religion, are endowed by
nature with so scanty an allotment of the thinking power, strictly so
denominated, that it would have required high cultivation to raise them to
the level of moderate understanding. There are some who appear to have
constitutionally an invincible tendency to an uncouth, fantastic mode of
forming their notions. It is in the nature of others, that whatever
cultivation they might have received, it would still have been by their
passions, rather than, in any due proportion, by their reason, that an
important concern would have taken and retained hold of them. It may have
happened to not a few, that circumstances unfavorable to the understanding
were connected with the causes or occasions of their first effectual
religious impressions. Some quaint cast in the exposition of the Christian
faith, not essentially vitiating, but very much distorting and cramping
it, or some peculiarity or narrow-mindedness of the teachers, may have
conveyed their effect, to enter, as it were, at the door at the same
moment that it was opened by the force of a solemn conviction, and to be
retained and cherished ever after on the strength of this association.
This may have tended to give an obliquity to the disciple's understanding,
or to arrest and dwarf its growth; to fix it in prejudices instead of
training it to judgments; or to dispense with its exercise by merging it
in a kind of quietism; so that the proper tendency of religion to excite
intellectual activity was partly overruled and frustrated. It is most
unfortunate that thus there may be, from things casually or
constitutionally associated with a man's piety, an influence operating to
disable his understanding; as if there had been mixed with the incense of
a devout service in the temple, a soporific ingredient which had the
effect of closing the worshipper's eyes in slumber.
Now suppose all these worthy persons, with so many things of a special
kind against them, to be also under the one great calamity of a neglected
education, and is it any wonder that they can admit religious truths in
shapes very strange and faintly enlightened; that they have an uncertain
and capricious test of what is genuine, and not much vigilance to
challenge plausible semblances; that they should be caught by some
fanciful exhibition of a truth which would be of too intellectual a
substance as presented in its pure simplicity; and should be ready to
receive with approbation not a little of what is a heavy disgrace to the
name of religious doctrine and ministration? Where is the wonder that
crudeness, incoherence, and inconsistency of notions, should not
disappoint and offend minds that have not, ten times since they came into
the world, been compelled to form two ideas with precision, and then
compare them discriminately or combine them strictly, on any subject
beyond the narrow scope of their ordinary pursuits? Where is the wonder,
if many such persons take noise and fustian for a glowing zeal and a lofty
elevation; if they mistake a wheedling cant for affectionate solicitude;
if they defer to pompous egotism and dogmatical assertion, when it is so
convenient a foundation for all their other faith to believe their teacher
is an oracle? No marvel if they are delighted with whimsical conceits as
strokes of discovery and surprise, and yet at the same time are pleased
with common-place, and endless repetition, as an exemption from mental
effort; and if they are gratified by vulgarity of diction and
illustration, as bringing religion to the level where they are at home?
Nay, if an artful pretender, or half-lunatic visionary, or some poor set
of dupes of their own inflated self-importance, should give out that they
are come into the world for the manifestation, at last, of true
Christianity, which the divine revelation has failed, till their advent,
to explain to any of the numberless devout and sagacious examiners of
it,--what is there in the minds of the most ignorant class of persons
desirous to secure the benefits of religion, that can be securely relied
on to certify them, that they shall not forego the greatest blessing ever
offered to them by setting at naught these pretensions?
It is grievous to think there should be an active extensive currency of a
language conveying crudities, extravagances, arrogant dictates of
ignorance, pompous nothings, vulgarities, catches of idle fantasy, and
impertinences of the speaker's vanity, as religious instruction to
assemblages of ignorant people. But then for the means of depreciating
that currency, so as to drive it at last out of circulation? The thing to
be wished is, that it were possible to put some strong coercion on the
_minds_ (we deprecate all other restraint) of the teachers; a compulsion
to feel the necessity of information, sound sense, disciplined thinking,
the correct use of words, and an honest, careful purpose to make the
people wiser. There are signs of amendment, certainly; but while the
passion of human beings for notoriety lasts, (which will be yet some
time,) there will not fail to be men, in any number required, ready to
exhibit in religion, in any manner in which the people are willing to be
pleased with them. Let us, then, try the inverted order, and endeavor to
secure that those who assemble to be taught, shall already have learnt so
much, _by other means_, that no professed teacher shall feel at liberty to
treat them as an unknowing herd. But by what other means, except the
discipline of the best education possible to be given to them, and the
subsequent voluntary self-improvement to which it may be hoped that such
an education would often lead?
We cannot dismiss this topic, of the unhappy effect of extreme ignorance
on persons religiously disposed, in rendering them both liable and
inclined to receive their ideas of the highest subject in a disorderly,
perverted, and debased form, mixed largely with other men's folly and
their own, without noticing with pleasure an additional testimony to the
connection between genuine religion and intelligence. It arises from the
fact, apparent to any discriminating observer, that as a _general_ rule
the most truly pious of the illiterate disciples of religion, those who
have the most of its devotional feeling and its humility, do certainly
manifest more of the operation of judgment in their religion than is
evinced by those of less solemn and devout sentiment. The former will
unquestionably be found, when on the same level as to the measure of
natural faculty and the want of previous cultivation, to show more
discernment, to be less captivated by noise and extravagance, and more
intent on obtaining a clear comprehension of that faith, which they feel
it is but a reasonable obligation that they should endeavor to understand,
if they are to repose on it their most important hopes.