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Year by year the obscurantism of the ruling powers became more glaring, and the most gifted thinkers, towards the middle of the century, began to concentrate their brains on the problems of social science and to turn the light of reason on the nature of man and the roots of society. They wrought with unscrupulous resolution and with far-reaching effects.
Moreover, we know that the humanistic knowledge of his youth was not exclusively his own, in spite of all he afterwards said about Dutch ignorance and obscurantism. Cornelius Aurelius and William Hermans likewise possessed it.
Lord Eldon was always before him as the typical representative of obstruction and obscurantism. In his Indications respecting Lord Eldon he goes into details which it must have required some courage to publish.
I hardly know whether I dare trust myself to speak of Robb, for I confess that he has become to me an abstraction rather than a human being an embodiment of all the vicious routine, the foul obscurantism, the stupid prejudice, which an enlightened Liberalism has to struggle against. There he sits, a satire on our parliamentary system.
He may find himself often in company with some supposed enemies. He will surely need in his sincere attitude to life a freedom of mind that is not a name merely but a positive virtue that demands of him more than denunciation of obscurantism, the recognition of a personal duty and the justification of personal works. The religious prejudice will be no less hard to kill.
This cheerful doctrine now strikes on the ear as a commonplace and a truism. A hundred years ago in France it was a wonderful gospel, and the beginning of a new dispensation. It was the great counter-principle to asceticism in life and morals, to formalism in art, to absolutism in the social ordering, to obscurantism in thought.
The most substantial product of this movement was the Neo-Hebraic literary renaissance which had already appeared in faint outlines on the sombre background of external oppression and internal obscurantism during the preceding period. The Haskalah, formerly anathematized, was now able to unfold all its creative powers.
The Hebrew periodicals, and partly also those in Yiddish which addressed themselves to the masses, preached Haskalah in the narrower sense. They advocated the necessity of a Russian elementary education and of secular culture in general; they emphasized the uselessness of the traditional Jewish school training, and exposed superstition and obscurantism.
It is now well recognized by educators and physicians and all clear-thinking individuals that it is extremely harmful for men, women, and children to be kept in artificial ignorance of the facts relating to sexual affairs. The obscurantism placed upon sexual matters has caused more physical and mental distress than most of our organic diseases.
No sane person can suppose that these cults succeed because of the ethical insight, the spiritual sensitiveness, the intellectual integrity of such a message. It does not possess these things. They succeed, in spite of their obscurantism, because they do confess and meet man's central need, his need to be saved.
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