Page:Zawis and Kunigunde (1895).djvu/150

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146
MARRIAGE OF ZAWIS AND KUNIGUNDE

are permitted to remain open, are devoted solely to the training of priests. Even herein the instruction conferred is entirely defective.

“Our doctrines are directed not to correct and purify morals and elevate character, but to sustain, exact and give pre-eminence to an alien authority; and the hearts of our youth are stolen both from their country, and the useful sciences, by a sentimental devotion to the assumed divine viceregency of an Italian intruder. We need neither his secular learning, and of that he has not much, nor his ethical instruction. Bohemia was ever as near to her Creator before this Italian intervened in our affairs,as at any moment since his agents have sown dissension.

“We loved, we prized, we cultivated good literature, in our native speech, before this Italian imposed his degraded and antiquated dregs of Latin upon our youth.

“We have been taught that if we instruct the young in verbose sentimentalism, and set before them a correct example, we shall have prepared their character by instilling very doubtful tastes and myths of assumed saints. But in practical life we shall have held up to them, as the manner now is, exhibitions of lordly pomps, of excessive covetousness, of remorseless exactions, of disregard of marriage, and universal promotion of concubinage among prelates and priests; and we shall have taught them to veil all this vice under a semblance of religious sentimentalism, and a most sensuous ritual.

“Even when we do instill what is good, and we are