gly disprove it. So far is it from being true that the mere
diffusion of knowledge has a tendency to make men knaves and infidels, I
believe the very opposite to be true. Knowledge is the natural ally of
religion. To hold otherwise, is to disparage and dishonor religion--to
imply, if not to say, that ignorance is the mother of devotion.

There is an inborn antagonism between the intellectual and the sensual
nature of man. If you give to the intellect no development, you leave
the senses as the ruling power. We see this strikingly illustrated in
the idiotic, who are for the most part disgustingly sensual. Among a
population grossly ignorant and uneducated, sensualism prevails in its
most appalling forms. The man is a sensualist, simply because he knows
no higher pleasures. He is degraded, because he has no motives to be
otherwise. He is barely above a brute. The amount of crime, of the
coarsest and most debasing character, among the uneducated peasantry of
England, is almost incredible. Here is a description of an English
peasant of the present day, given by a competent unimpeached witness,
himself an Englishman. I quote from a work on "The Social Condition and
Education of the People of England," by Joseph Kay, Esq., of Trinity
College, Cambridge, who was commissioned by the Senate of the University
to travel for the purpose of examining into the social condition of the
poorer classes. Says Mr. Kay: "You cannot address an English peasant,
without being struck with the intellectual darkness which surrounds him.
There is neither speculation in his eye nor intelligence in his
countenance. His whole expression is more that of an animal than of a
man. He is wanting too in the erect and independent bearing of a man. As
a class, our peasants have no amusements beyond the indulgence of sense.
In nine cases out of ten, recreation is associated in their minds with
nothing higher than sensuality. About one half of our poor can neither
read nor write, have never been in any school, and know little, or
positively nothing, of the doctrines of the Christian religion, of moral
duties, or of any higher pleasures than beer-drinking and
spirit-drinking, and the grossest sensual indulgence. They live
precisely like brutes, to gratify, so far as their means allow, the
appetites of their uncultivated bodies, and then die, to go they have
never thought, cared, or wondered whither. Brought up in the darkness of
barbarism, they have no idea that