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Are we apprehensive lest those social affections interfere, in a greater and more immediate degree than any other pursuits, with private utility, and cannot be gratified, without some important sacrifice of honour and advantage? If so, we are but ill-instructed in the nature of the human passions, and are more influenced by verbal distinctions than by real differences.
Christ is not for the whole only, but also for them that are sick, for the ill-instructed and what we are pleased to call 'dangerous' classes, as well as for the more sober thinkers. In Matthew we find, 'Blessed are the poor in spirit: for their's is the kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.
Unprincipled flatterers, adventurers, and speculators gained a surprising influence with him. His native obstinacy showed itself especially in insistence upon his personal, ill-instructed will. He became intractable to counsels of wisdom, and seemed to be a radically different man from the sincere, modest soldier of the civil war.
He said: "I must painfully record my opinion, that grave injury has been done to religion in many minds not in instructed minds, but in those which are ill-instructed or partially instructed in consequence of things which ought never to have occurred.
For what if there were hundreds, yes, thousands of books, triumphantly settling every question which an over-seething and ill-instructed brain might by any chance suggest, what could it boot? how was a poor finite mortal, with much the ordinary faculty and capacity, and but a very small stock already stored, to set about reading, studying, understanding, mastering, appropriating the contents of those thousands of volumes necessary to the arming of him who, without pretending himself the mighty champion to seek the dragon in his den, might yet hope not to let the loathly worm swallow him, armour and all, at one gulp in the highway?
And there are many good but ill-instructed men among ourselves who have just this taint of that old heresy cleaving to them still this taint, namely, that they are tempted to carry over the suretyship and substitutionary work of Christ into such regions, and to carry it to such lengths in those regions, as, practically, to make Christ to minister to their soft and sinful living, and to their excuse and indulgence of themselves.
You all know, most probably, the errand which has brought the Signor Viti and myself to this house, to-night?" The men looked at each other, as the ill-instructed are apt to do, when it becomes necessary to answer a question that concerns many; assisting the workings of their minds, as it might be, with the aid of the senses; and then Daniele Bruno took on himself the office of spokesman.
From what has been said, I think it does appear, that Ill, that is to say, Irrational Instruction concerning Religion, as well as want of Instruction, disposes to Scepticism: And this being so, what wonder can it be that Scepticism having once become fashionable, should continue so? the un-instructed, and the ill-instructed, making by so great odds, the Majority.
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