ng school of thought to
which he belongs, I ask what can more clearly prove than a candid avowal
like this, that, in the view of his school, Religion is not knowledge, has
nothing whatever to do with knowledge, and is excluded from a University
course of instruction, not simply because the exclusion cannot be helped,
from political or social obstacles, but because it has no business there
at all, because it is to be considered a taste, sentiment, opinion, and
nothing more?

The writer avows this conclusion himself, in the explanation into which he
presently enters, in which he says: "According to the classification
proposed, the _essential idea_ of all religious Education will consist in
the direct cultivation of the _feelings_." What we contemplate, then, what
we aim at, when we give a religious Education, is, it seems, not to impart
any knowledge whatever, but to satisfy anyhow desires after the Unseen
which will arise in our minds in spite of ourselves, to provide the mind
with a means of self-command, to impress on it the beautiful ideas which
saints and sages have struck out, to embellish it with the bright hues of
a celestial piety, to teach it the poetry of devotion, the music of
well-ordered affections, and the luxury of doing good. As for the
intellect, its exercise happens to be unavoidable, whenever moral
impressions are made, from the constitution of the human mind, but it
varies in the results of that exercise, in the conclusions which it draws
from our impressions, according to the peculiarities of the individual.

Something like this seems to be the writer's meaning, but we need not pry
into its finer issues in order to gain a distinct view of its general
bearing; and taking it, as I think we fairly may take it, as a specimen of
the philosophy of the day, as adopted by those who are not conscious
unbelievers, or open scoffers, I consider it amply explains how it comes
to pass that this day's philosophy sets up a system of universal
knowledge, and teaches of plants, and earths, and creeping things, and
beasts, and gases, about the crust of the earth and the changes of the
atmosphere, about sun, moon, and stars, about man and his doings, about
the history of the world, about sensation, memory, and the passions, about
duty, about cause and effect, about all things imaginable, except one--and
that is, about Him that made all these things, about God. I say the reason
is plain because they consider knowledge, a