of religion diligently
adds to his stock of learning, and plunges into the complicated
errors of Manicheans, and Sabellians, and Pelagians, with the result
that he absorbs the heresies and forgets the Gospel. In each of
these cases knowledge has been increased, but mankind has not been
benefited. We come back to what Sydney Smith said. Increase of
knowledge is merely increase of power. Whether it is to be a boon
or a curse to humanity depends absolutely on the spirit in which
it is applied. Just now we find ourselves engaged in a desperate
conflict between materialism and morality--between consummate knowledge
organized for evil ends, and the sublime ideal of public right.
Education has done for Germany all that Education, divorced from
Morality, can do; and the result has been a defeat of civilization
and a destruction of human happiness such as Europe has not seen
since the Middle Age closed in blood. What shall it profit a nation
if it "gain the whole world" and lose its own soul?

II

_THE GOLDEN LADDER_

Education is an excellent thing, but the word has a deterrent sound.
It breathes pedantry and dogmatism, and "all that is at enmity with
joy." To people of my age it recalls the dread spirits of Pinnock
and Colenso and Hamblin Smith, and that even more terrible Smith who
edited Dictionaries of everything. So, though this chapter is to be
concerned with the substance, I eschew the word, and choose for my
title a figurative phrase. I might, with perfect justice, have chosen
another figure, and have headed my paper "The Peg and the Hole"; for,
after nearly a century of patient expectation, we have at last got
a Square Peg in the Square Hole of Public Instruction. In simpler
speech, England has at length got a Minister of Education who has
a genuine enthusiasm for knowledge, and will do his appointed work
with a single eye to the intellectual advancement of the country,
neither giving heed to the pribbles and prabbles of theological
disputants, nor modifying his plans to suit the convenience of the
manufacturer or the squire. He is, in my judgment, exactly the
right man for the office which he fills; and is therefore strikingly
differentiated not only from some Ministers of Education whom we
have known, but also from the swarm of Controllers and Directors
and salaried busybodies who have so long been misdirecting us and
contradicting one another.

When I say that Mr. Fisher will not give heed to theological