SIR A. ALISON ON EDUCATION.

Marlborough Express, Volume IV, Issue 183, 10 July 1869, Page 6

SIR A. ALISON ON EDUCATION.

The following are the extracts quoted by Mr. Ward, at the meeting last week : “ Knowledge, it is often said, is “ power.” No one has yet ventured to say it is either wisdom or virtue. Bulwer says it is a “ trust,’’ which may be used or abused. In this respect a capital mistake has been committed, both by the speculative and active part of mankind of late years ; and, what is very remarkable, by the religious teachers, whose principles should have led them most do distrust the efficacy of intellectual cultivation in arresting the corruption of the species. They forgot that it was eating of tthe fruit of the tree of knowledge which expelled our first parents from Paradise—that •the precept of our Saviour was to preach •the gospel to all nations, not to educate all nations ; that its propagation was entrusted to ignorantfishermen, not the sages of Egypt, Greece, or India. Experience has now abundantly verified the melancholy truth so .often enforced in scripture, so constantly forgotten by mankind, that intellectual cultivation has no effect in arresting the sources of evil in the human heart; that it alters the direction of crime, but docs not diminish its amount. Education and civilisation generally diffused have a powerful effect in softening the savage passions of the human heart, and checking the crimes of violence which originate in their indulgence; but they tend rather to increase than diminish those of fraud and gain, because they add strength to the desires, by multiplying the pleasures which can be obtained oniy by the acquisition of property. Then, indeed, is experienced the truth of the saying of the wise man, that “ the love of money is the root of all evil.” In the whole of the New Testament, there is not to be found one word in favor of learning as a purifier of morals, or a passport to heaven, though there is much on self-denial and love of our neighbor. In the beatitudes in the sermon on the mount, the learned are not included among the blessed : it is the pure in heart, not the instructed, that shall see God. This is a melancholy truth; so melancholy, in-

deed, that it is far from being acknowledged even by the best informed persons ; and it is so mortifying to the pride of human intellect, that it is probably the last one which will be generally admitted by mankind. Nevertheless, there is none which is supported by a more wide-spread and unvarying mass of proofs, or which, when rightly considered, might more naturally be anticipated from the structure of the human mind. Education has been made matter of state policy in Prussia, and every child is, by the compulsion of Government, sent to school; but so far has this universal spread of instruction been from eradicating the seeds of evil, that serious crime is fourteen times as prevalent in proportion to the population in Prussia as it is in France, where about twothirds of the whole inhabitants can neither read nor write. In Scotland, the educated criminals are to the uneducated as 4L to 1 ; in England, as 2 to 1 ; in Ireland about equal. But of 10,3G1 inmates of our principal penitentiaries, 6,572 have received instruction in the Sabbath schools. In America, the educated criminals arc in most of the States of the Union three times the uneducated, and some double only ; in all greatly superior in number. These facts to all persons capable of yielding assent to evidence in opposition to prejudice, completely settle the question ; but the conclusion to which they lead is so adverse to general opinion, that probably more than one generation must descend to their graves before they are generally admitted.” “ Bulwer says : So far from considering that we do all that is needful to accomplish ourselves as men when we cultivate only the intellect, we should remember that we thereby continually increase the range of our desires, and therefore of our temptations. ' Wo should endeavor, therefore, simultaneously to cultivate both those affections of the heart which prove the ignorant to bo God’s children no less than the wise, and those moral qualities which have made man great and good when reading and writing were scarcely known —viz., patience and fortitude under poverty and distress; humility and benificence amidst grandeur and wealth ; justice, the father of all the more solid virtues, softened by charity, their loving mother. Thus accompanied, knowledge becomes indeed the magnificent crown of humanity, not the imperious despot, but the checked and tempered sovereign of the soul.”