XXII.

The Goodness which may be taught.

JOB XXXii. 8.

"There is a spirit in man, and the inspiration of the Lord hath given him understanding."

FOUR centuries before the nativity of Christ, the most enlightened city of the world put to death, as a blasphemer against the gods, a philosopher who supported the tenet that virtue could be taught. Twenty-two centuries have since elapsed; but the spirit of that heathen community still survives in this Christian land, and to this hour denounces it as a heresy, if we say that moral goodness can find entrance or security through the intellect. We are frequently warned against the danger of trusting for the improvement of a people to the mere advancement of their intelligence : we are reminded of the efficacy of a simple unquestioning faith to produce a life of holy order and humility ; and invited to compare with this the innumerable instances of acute wickedness and polite demoralisation. It was no dulness, no want of accomplished faculty, it

is said, that corrupted the character and dissolved the life of ancient Athens. When Roman literature began to flourish, her pristine virtues were on the decline. And the brilliant centres of modern civilization are distinguished by no corresponding refinement of conscience. Nor is it consistent, it is added, with what we know of human nature, to expect reformation of manners from fertility of ideas. The passions, not being the accidental product of ignorance, are not likely to be cast out by instruction: their force, like that of gravitation, persistent by night or day, will make itself felt alike through mental spaces solid with darkness or gorgeous with the sun. It is hardly surprising then if there is as large a proportion of lazy, fraudulent, selfish, and dissipated men among the educated as among the uneducated classes. The law and the love of God being no matter for sharp-sighted discovery, but for simple acceptance, it is contended that the understanding should keep at a distance from them, and let them come in direct upon the word of scripture or the church. Happily, we have an historical and documentary religion, which, embodied as it is in a Bible, cannot be approached except through the alphabet, or apprehended without some effort of thought to reproduce the distant and the past: and this circumstance alone suffices to enlist a certain amount of Christian zeal in the service of elementary instruction. But beyond this it must be confessed that all active

direction of thought on the great principles of faith and duty, and therefore the very impulse of wonder and curiosity itself, in its higher applications, have been prevailingly discouraged by the recognized guardians of European Christendom. They have professedly addressed themselves, in their educational efforts, to the noblest wants and capacities of human nature,—those which place us in relation to divine things; but, from low and technical conceptions of religion, have demanded for its sake only the poorest beginnings of knowledge, and have applied it rather as a narrowing limit than as a generous inspiration, to the mental culture of their disciples. In short, no more humiliating descent is to be found, than from the lofty principle to the poor performance of the ecclesiastical part of the English school system. Starting from the sublimest ambition to make the soul at home with holy things, it often terminates without mastering the elements of earthly knowledge; and Religion, which includes all truth, as God includes the universe,—which brings to us its form shaped by the pressure of three thousand years, and its spirit in the problems and aspirations of the hour, which takes the tone of poetry, of law, of philosophy, of love, of art,—which is the inner colour of all our earnest work and the blossom of all our thought, within which the largest science may build its nest, as the bird within the forest depths,-which gives the meaning and the soul to life, making the

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present the focus of the past and future, and turning evil and sorrow into faith and hope and charity;—this august influence, which should set our nature on fire, is made the plea for damping down its noblest faculties, for enfeebling their action by a formal discipline, shaving the crown of their aspirations to the monkish tonsure, and putting on their limbs the prison-dress of the parish catechism.

The natural consequence has been, a reaction into the inverted doctrine of mere secularism in education; which, for the sake of gaining what is higher in immediate result, takes up with what is lower in fundamental principle. Looking aside from the diviner relations of man, and professing to regard him only in his industrial and political aspect, the advocates of this scheme measure his intellectual wants by the standard of his visible social necessities; and by this rule, it must be admitted, they spring at once ahead of the most liberal demands for knowledge made by the sects in the name of their religion. Thus far they do well, and shame their predecessors; but not so well when they adopt, and carry out to the extremest consequences, the misleading distinction between the secular and the Christian, between this world and the other, and organize a system of sharp separation, which shall forbid the holy, the ideal, the divine, from ever mingling with the useful, the real, the human ; which consigns all the substantive work to one set of guardians,-all the spirit

VOL. II.

Y

ate it to another; which builds one lect and another for the conscience; with an air only clear and dry, and e only solemn and dull. It is a fatal re and reality thus to pick the soul out of knowledge and the body out of faith; pledging the one to unconsecrated reason, and the other to an unreasonable God. We are not made upon this pattern, to be children of nature at ten o'clock, and children of grace at four; nor is religion a separate business, a branch of study, a program lesson, that can be emptied out into an hour; but a life of every time, a spirit of all work, a secret wonder in the thought, a manly duty in the will, a noble sweetness in the temper, which spreads from the eye of an earnest teacher, though seldom coming from his lips; but which would cease to lurk in his silent looks, were there not sacred things represented by him of which at any moment he might speak. · In short, religion is the very respiration of all faithful and loving toil; and to detach it for minutes specially reserved, is like proposing to take your walk in the morning, and do your breathing in the afternoon.

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If so, however, it would seem that we cannot approve the saying of Socrates, that virtue is capable of being taught. Yet this does not follow, when we understand aright, or at least understand in his sense, what teaching really is. There are, I think, three different pro