enthusiasm and zeal spent in a single presidential election, were all turned to devise better means of educating the people—we cannot help thinking matters would soon wear a very different aspect.
One of two conclusions we must accept. Either God
made man with desires that cannot be gratified on earth,
and which yet are his best and most Godlike desires, and
then man stands in frightful contradiction with all the rest
of nature; or else it is possible for all the men and women of
every class to receive a complete education of the faculties
God gave them, and then the present institutions and
opinions of society on this matter of education are all
wrong, contrary to reason and the law of God. There are
some good men, and religious men, doubtless, who think
that in this respect matters can never be much mended,
that the senses must always overlay the soul, the strong
crush the weak, and the mass of men, who do all the work
of the world, must ever be dirty and ignorant, and find
little but toil and animal comfort, till they go where the
servant is free from his master, and the wicked cease from
troubling, and the weary are at rest. These men represent
the despair and the selfishness of society. If the same
thing that has been must be; if the future must be just
like the past; if falsehood and sin are eternal, and truth
and goodness ephemeral creatures of to-day—then these
men are right, and the sooner we renounce all hope of
liberty, give up all love of wisdom, and call Christianity a
lie—a hideous lie—why, the sooner the better. Let us
never fear to look things in the face, and call them by
their true names. But there are other men, who say the
past did its work, and we will do ours. We will not bow to
its idols, though they fell from the clouds; nor accept its
limitations, though Lycurgus made poor provision, and
Numa none at all, for the education of the people; we will
not stop at its landmarks, nor construct ourselves in its
image, for we also are men. While we take gratefully
whatever past times bring us, we will get what we can
grasp, and never be satisfied. These men represent the
hope and the benevolence there is in man. If they are
right, the truths of reason are not a whim; aspiration after
perfection is more than a dream; Christianity not a lie, but
