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Show 1836- 1837I Ffagg's F* r West 205 ligious freedom, all will admit; that it is the only requisite, the sole constituent, may be questioned. " Knowledge," in the celebrated language of Francis Bacon, " is power;" ay I POWER; an engine of tremendous, incalculable energy, but blind in its operations. Applied to the cause of wisdom and virtue, the richest of blessings; to that of infidelity and vice, the greatest of curses. A lever to move the world, its influence cannot be over- estimated; as the bulwark of liberty and human happiness, its effect has been fearfully miscalculated. Were man inclined as fully to good as to evil, then might knowledge become the sovereign panacea of every civil and moral ill; as man by nature unhappily is, ." the fruit of the tree " is oftener the stimulant to evil than to good. Unfold the sacred record of the past. Why did not intelligence save Greece? Greece 1 the land of intellect and of thought; the birthspot of eloquence, philosophy, and song! whose very populace were critics and bards! Greece, in her early day of pastoral ignorance, was free; but from the loftiest pinnacle of intellectual glory she fell; and science, genius, intelligence, all could not save her. The buoyant bark bounded beautifully over the blue- breasted billows; but the helm, the helm of [ 184] moral culture was not there, and her broad- spread pinions hurried her away only to a speedier and more terrible destruction. Ancient Rome: in the day of her rough simplicity, she was free; but from her proudest point of intellectual development - the era of Augustus - we date her decline. France: who will aver that it was popular ignorance that rolled over revolutionary France the ocean- wave of blood? When have the French, as a people, exhibited a prouder era of mind than that of their sixteenth Louis? The encyclopedists, the most powerful men of the age, concentrated all their vast energies to the diffusion of science among the people. Then, as now, the press groaned in constant parturition |