that religion could not dispense with this
potent auxiliary.

"Religion herself," he said, "loses her beauty and influence when not
attended by education; and her power, splendour, and majesty are
never so exalted as when cultivated genius and refined taste become
her heralds and her handmaids. Many have become fools for Christ, and
by their simplicity and piety have exalted the glory of the Cross;
but Paul, not John, was the Apostle of the Nations; and doctors, even
more than prophets, have been sent to declare the truth before kings
and princes, and the nations of the earth."

One of the worst defects in our course of discipline in and out of school
(for a young man gives himself his most effectual education after he has
escaped from the hands of the schoolmaster) is that it is rarely
practical. We learn little thoroughly, and little of a useful and
reproductive character, and we commonly pay the penalty in a lower place
in the world. As far as I am able to judge Scotsmen are not gifted by
nature with qualities superior to those of Irishmen, but in more than one
country I have seen Irishmen performing some of the roughest and most
menial offices in gangs directed by Scotch overseers. And why? No
intelligent man has any doubt of the cause. For nearly two centuries
Scotland has had excellent parish schools, where the children of the
industrious population get a practical and religious education at the
cost of the State. In Dublin I have seen two of the most national
institutions in the country, a great Irish journal and a great Irish
publishing house, managed by Scotsmen. Again why? For no intelligible
reason except that the Scotch boy is taught mathematics and trained early
in business. This defect, like so many of our shortcomings, has an origin
which we must search for in history. Till 1833 there were no public
schools in Ireland which were not openly designed to proselytise the
people, and since there have been neutral schools, the principal condition
of their existence has been the exclusion from their teaching of the
history and religion of the people. I remember Mr. Bright saying to me
during some temporary repulse of the North in the American Civil War: "Be
assured the end is not at all doubtful; the States which have had three
generations of solid education must win against a mob of arrogant
self-indulgent slave-drivers." I felt bitterly that the converse of the
axiom mi