20 APRIL 1895, Page 13

MR. GLADSTONE ON SECULAR STUDIES.

AFEDERATION of Liberal Clubs, having their centre in Leeds, delivered to Mr. Gladstone on Monday a present of three hundred books intended to enrich the library of the hostel which he is establishing at Hawarden for the rest and instruction of the clergy. In acknowledgment of the gift, Mr. Gladstone made a somewhat discursive speech about himself, and the classes which in future will rule in Britain, and public libraries, and other things, which included the the following very definite sentences :—" Stores of divine 'learning ought, in my judgment, to be associated with stores of human learning. Christianity is a religion adapted to the elevation and development of the entire nature of man, and so far from seeing any antagonism between the prosecution of divine knowledge and of knowledge which is human and secular, in my opinion, they never can be separated without dis- advantage." The younger men of this generation will read that sentence with a smile, and say that the old orator has begun to condescend to platitudes, but on older men it will leave a dif- ferent impression. Mr. Gladstone, like most men of his age, when he lets himself go in speech often recalls the controversies as well as the events of his earlier manhood, and pronounces a kind of final judgment on them. At that period the con- troversy to which the words we have quoted refer, though now almost forgotten, was more than burning,—it was positively flaming. The serious people of to-day will hardly believe hew grave the doubt of serious men in the Thirties and Forties was, whether secular knowledge had not in it something of the nature of sin, whether men who knew nothing outside of the Scriptures would not have a better chance of heaven than those who understood any science or had studied any literature. An exception was made in favour of Hebrew and Greek because the Testaments were written in those tongues— though we have known a Nonconformist clergyman gravely distrusted because he could quote Isaiah in the original—and of medicine because of its obvious utility in saving life ; and curiously enough, of astronomy because knowledge of the heavenly bodies must conduce to piety—probably true, but we suspect a survival from the old faith in astrology—but no other knowledge was considered in many grades of serious society more than tolerable. When in 1819 John Foster, the Baptist Essayist, published his tractate on " The Evils of Popular Ignorance," he was assailing a belief which for twenty years afterwards hampered every friend of education, and worried some divines at least as much as the suspicion of unorthodoxy now worries Broad Church clergymen. It was not, be it observed, a mere fancy of reactionaries. It was the result of a grave theory as to the purpose of the Creator, and was maintained by men of whose sympathy with the masses of mankind there could be no substantial doubt. It was held that as the majority of mankind could never be educated, education could be of no importance to their religious welfare; and as that was the only welfare worth considering, it could not be of any importance at all. There was a suspicion too, derived, we fancy, from the incidents of the French Revolution, that poor men who studied would always be sceptical ; and as scepticism was fatal to religious emotion, study itself should be dis- couraged. Many of the Evangelical clergy, as Mr. Gladstone, we doubt not, clearly remembers, were fully convinced of this view ; the Presbyterian Elders, in spite of the Scotch admira- tion of learning, were always repeating it, and the Noncon- formist deacons as a body held it with something of the tenacity with which they held the Christian dogmas. The writer has heard people whose lives were devoted to their fellow-creatures, honestly assert that education diminished goodness, and has read through a whole literature in which it is gravely affirmed that the best servants, the best villagers, and the best soldiers, are those who can neither read nor write. Human learning was, in fact, in all grades considered a " snare," and in the lower grades a positive source of mis- chief. Men of to-day will hardly believe it, but even fifty years ago the sentence which we have quoted from Mr. Gladstone's speech would have been considered by the respectable classes a most grave deliverance, probably on the wrong side of a most difficult and doubtful question.

The controversy has passed away completely, so completely that there has been a reaction which is not without consider- able dangers of its own. Knowledge is now considered to be a guarantee of goodness, just as ignorance once was. Nobody asserts, of course, that knowledge is equivalent to virtue, or that a great mathematician, for example, must necessarily be good ; but the underlying assumption is that the original source of moral evil is ignorance, and that if mankind could only be instructed, evil would disappear. That idea lies behind the whole argument in favour of non- religious instruction, and completely governs the excel- lent men who, as regards India, Africa, and Polynesia, plead that if only there are schools enough, savagery will disappear at once, and immorality a little later on. Entire bodies of religious men are spending hundreds of thousands a year under that conviction, and the few who still murmur that knowledge will not alter human nature, and that crime has sources wholly apart from ignorance, are regarded either as reactionaries or as men who, though they mean well, cannot rid themselves of illusions acquired in a different condition of society. An educated world, it is con- tended, will not only be a happy world, but a good world, all evidence to the contrary arising from the fact that the world is not sufficiently educated yet. We wish we could believe it, but we do not. We have not the slightest sympathy with the praise of ignorance, and hold the diffusion of sound knowledge to be not only beneficial to those who receive it, but a positive duty in all who possess it, just as much a duty as it is to enforce sound sanitary laws or sound rules for the maintenance of civil order ; but we expect from knowledge nothing but its in- evitable fruit, an increase in the power of man, both for good and evil. He is bound to become as strong as he can, just as he is bound not to cut his limbs off, and the exercises of the mental gymnasium strengthen him ; but that is all they can do. Even when the education is fairly thorough, the bookman is seldom the superior in character of the man of action who hardly opens a book, and in the classes which can never be thoroughly educated, the moral result of instruction is, and will remain, almost nil. They fear unpleasant conse- quences more, because they perceive them better; but that is all. The cultivated are just as passionate, just as greedy, just as lustful, as the uncultivated. Numbers for numbers, we suspect as many educated persons are convicted of murder in every decade as uneducated, while the refined swindlers are as common as the thieves. There is, in fact, nothing in reading or scientific experiment—and education after a certain point must mean one of those two things—to make men morally better, or even to improve the character, except by inducing a certain tolerance, the fruit of great experience, which is very often a tolerance of the intolerable. A man is not the less furious with an enemy because he has read many books, or the less greedy of unearned luxury because he comprehends the laws of numbers or the methods of chemical combinations. Mr. Gladstone says, or implies, that a clergyman should be educated in secular know- ledge, and we heartily agree with him, because the clergy s'aould be efficient teachers as well as pious men ; but he, with his historical knowledge, would be the last to deny that there have been moments in the history of the Church when goodness in the clergy was in almost inverse proportion to education, when the apostle was to be sought among the mendicant friars and not among the abbots. Other things being equal, the educated clergyman is much to be preferred; but then the education will not of itself make the other things equal. The popular notion that an educated world will be a good world, is as much without foundation as the other notion that it will be a happy world. The eternal causes of unhappi- ness are, with a slight exception as to a few forms of physical pain, not removed or removable by knowledge, nor are the eternal provocations to wrong-doing. If we were all Newtons in attainment, neither death nor accident nor decay would cease from among us, nor would the tendency to the majority of the forms of crime. Rough violence, perhaps, would grow less frequent, but that would be nearly all on which Judges could reckon with any approach to confidence. It takes an educated man to swindle decently ; and many of the dangerous teachers of Anarchy, in its technical modern sense, are men of the highest cultivation. The reaction against the old idea which Mr. Gladstone so well remembers, that it moves him even now to wise deprecatory speech, has gone too far ; and the illusion current at the end of the century is as futile, though not perhaps as mischievous, as that which was dominant when the century began. Man, whether clerical or lay, gains from knowledge just what the Japanese have gained,—namely, ability ; but ability is not the secret of virtue, or its source. The ability derived from reading, in particular, profits the character but little, for it cannot increase either self-control, or self-suppression, or the desire for moral advance ; and it is on the development of those qualities that the improvement of character depends. There have been saints who could not read ; and reading, though so nearly invaluable for other reasons, never yet made, or will make, a saintly man.