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Untitled Article
other aim than beating that particular road into smoothness ? Wedded to prejudice , they were selfish guides oftentimes ; bigoted in a creed , they were interested finger-posts . As you see in going into a town , c the shortest way by the Stag / that is the landlord of the Stag e s creed . ' The nearest way to the Strand through the Lowther Arcade . ' How kind , how considerate is that notice , the
good-natured pedestrian thinks ! so I thought one day when I was very much fatigued . Pooh ! pooh ! the shopkeepers in the Arcade put up that board . The highest endeavour of these intellectual guide-posts has been directed to prevent your looking for any other , or to show you theirs was the best , safest , and most beautiful . And you never dreamed of making an experimental survey yourself , or you might have been convinced out of your credulity . Is not this true ? Is there one in a thousand who breaks out into the
infidelity of thinking that what he was taught is not all truth ? Dare one in a thousand become sceptical on those matters which he believed in his childhood and boyhood ? No , no , he dreads the obloquy of such heresy , as he fears it on more sacred matters . That dread ^ and that dread only , binds him in both : and what a concentration of influences , what masses of established power
combine against every effort to induce people to think out of the covenanted track ! And daring indeed is that man , who , bursting the shackles of convention , effects his freedom at the expense of his reputation for sanity . The question considered by the mass , i . e . every body , except such darers , never is , * What is right ?* but * What is the custom ? ' decides the ' order of the course . '
With few exceptions , and these are yet rarer among the great ones , the principle taught , the motive to action , and the stimulant to exertion through life , which are most carefully implanted in our seminaries of education , are in direct contravention to the most valuable injunction in the Christian doctrine ; which though told to the pupil over and over again leaves no mark except an almost invisible scratch that suggests an occasional joke . Ob ,
but the teaching is very impressive . This teaching is everlasting contention for superiority . Here is the foundation stone , here are the steps and pinnacle-top of their system . Selfishness in germ , fruit , and essence . Acquisition of knowledge , or , more closely to speak ^ learning , ( for learning , however its possessors may be self-elevated in supremacy , is not always knowledge , ) is made , not for the love of knowledge , not as a source of happiness to ourselves , nor as a treasure-house from which we can
dispense happiness to others , ( papa and mamma ' s gratified vanity excepted , ) but for the superiority it yields—the word superiority having altogether a genuine Tory sense , via . rule , authority , domination , power over those who chance to be less endowed . * * They have neither the courage to proclaim it , nor the honesty to whisper it in their confessions , but this ia the secret source of the objection of the privileged wealthy , the ' higher orders . to the education of the ' lower classes . They feel that * know-
Untitled Article
Autobiography of Pel . Verjuice . 533
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1833, page 533, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2620/page/21/
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