ut which you seem to consider as coming to us through
channels apart from knowledge?"

_Parson._--"If you mean by the word knowledge something very different
from what you express in your essay, and which those contending for
mental instruction, irrespective of religion and ethics, appear also to
convey by the word ---- you are right; but, remember, we have already
agreed that by the word knowledge we mean culture purely intellectual."

_Leonard._--"That is true--we so understood it."

_Parson._--"Thus, when this great Lord Bacon erred, you may say that he
erred from want of knowledge--the knowledge that moralists and preachers
would convey. But Lord Bacon had read all that moralists and preachers
could say on such matters; and he certainly did not err from want of
intellectual cultivation. Let me here, my child, invite you to observe,
that He who knew most of our human hearts and our immortal destinies,
did not _insist_ on this intellectual culture as essential to the
virtues that form our well-being here, and conduce to our salvation
hereafter. Had it been essential, the Allwise One would not have
selected humble fishermen for the teachers of his doctrine, instead of
culling his disciples from Roman portico or Athenian academy. And this,
which distinguishes so remarkably the Gospel from the ethics of heathen
philosophy, wherein knowledge is declared to be necessary to virtue, is
a proof how slight was the heathen sage's insight into the nature of
mankind, when compared with the Saviour's; for hard indeed would it be
to men, whether high or low, rich or poor, if science and learning, or
contemplative philosophy, were the sole avenues to peace and redemption;
since, in this state of ordeal, requiring active duties, very few in any
age, whether they be high or low, rich or poor, ever are or can be
devoted to pursuits merely mental. Christ does not represent heaven as a
college for the learned. Therefore the rules of the Celestial Legislator
are rendered clear to the simplest understanding as to the deepest."

_Riccabocca._--"And that which Plato and Zeno, Pythagoras and Socrates,
could not do, was done by men whose ignorance would have been a by-word
in the schools of the Greek. The gods of the vulgar were dethroned; the
face of the world was changed! This thought may make us allow, indeed,
that there are agencies more powerful than mere knowledge, and ask,
after all, what is the mission which knowledge should achieve?