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186 children are gathered into their schools. If, then, we are to believe this concurrent testimony, our notion that the Roman Catholic priests are opposed to the education of the people, is an error. One thing, to be sure, is staggering, that it appears that these zealous exertions of the priests are never blessed with success. In the countries which I have mentioned, the people are marked, not as you would suppose, by knowledge, but by gross ignorance. In Italy, as every traveller knows, the peasantry are extremely illiterate. In Rome, not one man in a hundred can either read or write. In Naples, the case is worse; in Spain, worse still; and in France, till the present century, the peasantry were barbarously ignorant. And how do we explain these facts—these apparent contradictions? Quite easily. When the priests say—when Dr Wiseman and Dean Macnamara say—that they are zealous for popular education, let us observe what they mean by education. They do not mean what we do the developement of the faculties, the cultivation of the mind. They mean, gathering children into rooms, which they facetiously call schools, in which they are put under the charge of a priest or a monk; and the object of these saintly gentlemen is, to make them commit to memory catechisms and long prayers; to repeat the 'Hail Mary' and the doctrine; to impress on them an abject fear of the Church, and a heavy awe of the priest; and thus to develope in full force the passions of terror and superstition, &c. The Lancasterian mode of teaching was resisted by the priests as tending to excite a dangerous activity of intellect by mutual instruction."

Mr Colquhoun adds,

"If driven to the necessity of teaching something in their schools, the priests make a show of giving education by teaching arithmetic, with as little of reading as possible. A people quick in calculation may remain superstitious; but a people reading, thinking, questioning, would throw off the yoke of bigotry." Above all, the free perusal of the sacred Scriptures, in a correct translation, is carefully prevented, and even denounced as a grievous crime; for this obvious reason, that the perusal of the New Testament would "lay the axe to the root of the tree," by showing that the pretext that the Popish association are teachers of the religion of Jesus Christ, is palpably untrue; and that the idolatry which they sanction, is utterly offensive to the divinity they pretend to worship.

By the arts now described, the associated priesthood of Rome have been able in a great degree, and in many countries, to resist the effect of the invention of the art of printing. The danger from that invention was great and imminent; and it has cost them much toil and vigilance to defeat the effect of it. They have treated it as a most diabolical invention, and, in their malignity, they have represented John Faust, or Faustus, an early artist, if not the inventor of the art, as an associate of Satan; and have pretended to the vulgar of Germany and other countries, that he was finally carried off by the arch enemy of man.