Page:First impressions of England and its people.djvu/79

instructed people pressed outwards beyond the narrow bounds of their country, and rose into offices of trust and importance in all the nations of the world. There were no Societies for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in those days. But the Sabbath was kept holy: it was a day from which every dissipating frivolity was excluded by a stern sense of duty. The popular mind, with weight imparted to it by its religious earnestness, and direction by the pulpit addresses of the day, expatiated on matters of grave import, of which the tendency was to concentrate and strengthen, not scatter and weaken, the faculties; and the secular cogitations of the week came to bear, in consequence, a Sabbath-day stamp of depth and solidity. The one day in the seven struck the tone for the other six. Our modern apostles of popular instruction rear up no such men among the masses as were developed under the Sabbatarian system in Scotland. Their aptest pupils prove but the loquacious gabbers of their respective workshops,—shallow superficialists, that bear on the surface of their minds a thin diffusion of ill-remembered facts and crude theories; and rarely indeed do we see them rising in the scale of society: they become Socialists by hundreds, and Chartists by thousands, and get no higher. The disseminator of mere useful knowledge takes aim at the popular ignorance; but his inept and unscientific gunnery does not include in its calculations the parabolic curve of man's spiritual nature; and so, aiming direct at the mark, he aims too low, and the charge falls short.