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    examining facts , and trying opinions by the surer tests of reason , had arrived . But these evils ; though they attached to the mythology of Homer , and had atheized and demoralized the public mind , betraying it to flatterers , scepticism , and sensuality ; and though these evil 3 are even now attaching themselves to the mysticisms of Wesley ,, and are preparing the public mind to recoil from superstition and fanaticism , into atheism and apathy ; yet is it plain that these evils belong-, not to power of imagination , but to the confusion of truth and falsehood . The initial

    discipline we are proposing , would attain the good without the evil . Thus , whilst we trace the workings of unprincipled ambition in Macbeth , and shudder at the terrors of a guilty conscience , we may be allowed to develope the deceits of witchcraft and necromancy , without throwing a sin gle doubt on the moral truth of the fable . In Macbeth' we contemplate a personification

    of the principle of evil in barbarous periods ; and the moral is not weakened by the fiction . In * Othello' we behold a developement of the metajihysics of the principle of evil without any aid of fiction , but the moral is not for that reason more convincing . In a word , truth is not compromised by being allied with fiction , so long as we are not required to believe in the reality of the fiction .

    Let it be granted that a good reader could draw an audience in a country town to his readings of Shakspeare and Scott , of Edgeworth and Martineau . An objection likely to be made may at once be obviated by the fact , that the mind may be led forward from these beautiful fictions to historical illustrations and philosophical discussions about every question on which imagination

    and feeling might , if unchecked by facts and principles , have led the mind astray . The attention being once roused , the mind being once ' harped aright , ' may very easily be led on ,, nay , will of itself pass on , to investigations of truth , and justice , and expediency ; and will find a relish and a digestion for historic

    facts and for philosophical principles , from which it would before have turned away for want of interest , and with which therefore it could not have been disciplined to any good effect . Those readers who have tried to bring their knowledge of Paley , and Smith , and Stewart , of Hume , and Mackintosh , and Hallam , to

    explain and illustrate the fictions of Shakspeare and Scott , of Edgeworth and Martineau , must feel how easy it would be to lead an imagination soundly excited , and feelings wholesomely moved , to a conviction of the great leading facts of history , and a comprehension of the great leading principles of philosophy . *

    * Having spolcen of the qualifications of a reader , let me say something abent a commentator of Shakspeare and Scott . What a field fat historical , moral , and political illustration ! What exemplifications of the effects , what disquisitions about the causes , of priestly hypocrisy and aristocratic tyntnny , might be attached to the monks and the baroas of 'Ivauhoe !* How might the beau ideal of thete evils be

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    The Diffusion of Knowledge amongst the People . 16

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  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1834, page 15, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2629/page/15/