IV. INFIDELITY II. ROMAN RENAISSANCE 133

body of Christians, legislates for them, moralises for them, reasons for them; and, though itself of course greatly and beneficently influenced by the association, and held much in check by its pretence to Christianity, yet undermines, in nearly the same degree, the sincerity and practical power of Christianity itself, until at last, in the very institutions of which the administration may be considered as the principal test of the genuineness of national religion-those devoted to education-the Pagan system is completely triumphant; and the entire body of the so-called Christian world has established a system of instruction for its youth, wherein neither the history of Christ’s Church, nor the language of God’s law, is considered a study of the smallest importance; wherein, of all subjects of human inquiry, his own religion is the one in which a youth’s ignorance is most easily forgiven;* and in which it is held a light matter that he should be daily guilty of lying, of debauchery, or of blasphemy, so only that he write Latin verses accurately, and with speed.

I believe that in a few years more† we shall wake from all these errors in astonishment, as from evil dreams; having been preserved, in the midst of their madness, by those hidden roots of active and earnest Christianity which God’s grace has bound in the English nation with iron and brass. But in the Venetian those roots themselves had withered; and, from the palace of their ancient religion, their pride cast them forth hopelessly to the pasture of the brute. From pride to infidelity, from infidelity to the unscrupulous

* I shall not forget the impression made upon me at Oxford, when, going up for my degree, and mentioning to one of the authorities that I had not had time enough to read the Epistles properly, I was told, that “the Epistles were separate sciences, and I need not trouble myself about them.”

The reader will find some farther notes on this subject in Appendix 7, “Modern Education”¹[p. 258].

† Carlyle allows two hundred or so; I hope, too liberally. [1881.]

¹ [In place of this note, the “Travellers’ Edition” has:-

“This paragraph is a very good one; but already superannuated. The enemy is now not Latin Verse, but Cockney Prose.”]

“This paragraph,” is the passage from “The fact is... speed,” of which, in the “Travellers’ Edition,” a separate paragraph was made.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]