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It is not that Combeferre was not capable of fighting, he did not refuse a hand-to-hand combat with the obstacle, and to attack it by main force and explosively; but it suited him better to bring the human race into accord with its destiny gradually, by means of education, the inculcation of axioms, the promulgation of positive laws; and, between two lights, his preference was rather for illumination than for conflagration.
Judge then my surprise, Gentlemen, when I found the fourth was the very head selected by the writer of the Report in question, as the special receptacle of religious topics. “The inculcation of sentiment,” he says, “embraces reading in its higher sense, poetry, music, together with moral and religious Education.” I am far from introducing this writer for his own sake, because I have no wish to hurt the feelings of a gentleman, who is but exerting himself zealously in the discharge of anxious duties; but, taking him as an illustration of the wide-spreading school of thought to which he belongs, I ask what can more clearly prove than a candid avowal like this, that, in the view of his school, Religion is not knowledge, has nothing whatever to do with knowledge, and is excluded from a University course of instruction, not simply because the exclusion cannot be helped, from political or social obstacles, but because it has no business there at all, because it is to be considered a taste, sentiment, opinion, and nothing more?
Formed in character by this teaching, as a steady inculcation throughout his youth, he comes to manhood strong of body, determined of mind, practicing rigidly and intolerantly his petty virtues of abstinence from the use of tobacco, tea and coffee, proclaiming with fanatical zeal the gospel as it has been proclaimed to him, and self-justified in all that he says or does by the large measure of sincerity in his delusions.
Euclid is here very appropriately used as a type of geometry, that science of which he was so eminent a teacher, and the myth or legend then symbolizes the fact that there was in Egypt a close connection between that science and the great moral and religious system, which was among the Egyptians, as well as other ancient nations, what Freemasonry is in the present day a secret institution, established for the inculcation of the same principles, and inculcating them in the same symbolic manner.
But, if we must be quantitative, one great creative poet probably exerts a nobler, deeper, more permanent ethical influence than a dozen generations of professed moral teachers. It is a commonplace to the wise, and an everlasting puzzle to the foolish, that direct inculcation of morals should invariably prove so powerless an instrument, so futile a method.
The pivots of all the prophetical teaching are the incessant inculcation of justice and mercy; justice which requires us to recognise the rights of others side by side with our own; mercy which demands our sympathy with the feelings of other creatures that can feel.
Long may they continue in this situation!" Such was Franklin's conception of a free and happy people. Such was his political philosophy. The moral philosophy of Franklin consisted almost exclusively in the inculcation of certain very practical and unimaginative virtues, such as temperance, frugality, industry, moderation, cleanliness, and tranquillity.
Emerson, then, is one of the few moral reformers whose mission lay in calming men rather than in rousing them, and in the inculcation of serenity rather than in the spread of excitement.
There were to be priests for the performance of these sacraments and for the inculcation of the doctrines of positivism. There were to be temples of humanity, affording opportunity for and reminder of this worship. In each temple there was to be set up the symbol of the positivist religion, a woman of thirty years with her little son in her arms.
It is possible that the schools are not exclusively to blame for this state of things, and that our political harangues, and even our political institutions, have something to do with it. What we greatly need in this country is the inculcation of soberer views of life. Boys and girls are bred to discontent.
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