see how entirely the development of public
ignorance is in conformity with the principles of the Church, and how
favourable it is to the maintenance of priestly government.

Religions are founded, not upon knowledge, or science, but upon faith,
or, as some term it, credulity. People have agreed to describe as an
"act of faith" the operation of closing one's eyes in order to see
better. It is by walking with faith,--in other words, with one's eyes
shut,--that the gates of Paradise are reached. If we could take from
afar the census of that locality, we should find there more of the
illiterate than of the learned. A child that knows the catechism by
heart is more pleasing in the sight of Heaven than all the five
classes of the Institute. The Church will never hesitate between an
astronomer and a Capuchin friar. Knowledge is full of dangers. Not
only does it puff up the heart of man, but it often shatters by the
force of reasoning the best-constructed fables. Knowledge has made
terrible havoc in the Roman Catholic Church during the last two or
three hundred years. Who can tell how many souls have been cast into
hell through the invention of printing.

Applied to the industrial pursuits of this sublunary sphere, science
engenders riches, luxury, pleasure, health, and a thousand similar
scourges, which tend to draw us away from salvation. Science cures
even those irreligious maladies wherein religion used to recognize the
finger of God. It no longer permits the sinner to make himself a
purgatory here below. There is danger lest it should one of these days
render man's terrestrial abode so blessed, that he may conceive an
antipathy to Heaven. The Church, having the mission to conduct us to
that eternal felicity which is the sole end of human existence, is
bound to discourage our dealings with science. The utmost she can
venture to do is to let a select number of her most trustworthy
servants have free access to it, in order that the enemies of the
faith may find somebody whom they can speak to.

This is why I undertake to show you in Rome a dozen men of high
literary and scientific acquirements, to a hundred thousand who don't
know their ABC.

The Church is but the more flourishing for it, and the State by no
means the less so. The true shepherds of peoples, they who feed the
sheep for the sake of selling the wool and the skins, do not want them
to know too much. The mere fact of a man's being able to read makes
him wish