Northern Times.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1859-07-02 00:00:00

is an

track their way through life as well without as with
knowledge. It is therefore a valuable acquisition to
every possessor. But in much of the knowledge

which continues to be diffused as popular instruction,
it seems difficult to discover its practical application
to the condition of those for whom it is benevolently
intended. Where it is not confined to the exposition
of abstract or material science, it is chiefly addressed
to the imagination, leaving to others the risk and
the drudgery of inculcating useful and perhaps
unpalatable truths. Human misery results not more
from physical want than the absence of that
intellectual wisdom which discipline§ the passions,
destroys prejudice, and trains the mind to habits
of forethought and retrospection. It is not by
economic enlargements only, but moral culture,
that our chief calamities can be surmounted.
Can physical knowledge alone, I Would ask,
supply this element of social well-being ? Look
back upOn history and what a contradiction of this
does it..not present to us. The Egyptians, the
earliest cultivators of the sciences, were a people
plunged in the basest, and most degrading sUper-
stitions, and have left us no reason to think highly
of their morals. The Greeks, a far more interesting
people,Tamid a blaze of intellectual splendou.
yet but a nation of refined sensualists, utterly re
gardless of those virtues on which the well-being of
society principally depends. Their monstrous in-
gratitude to those who had rendered eminent services
to the state, the levity with which they transferred
their affections from one leader to another, the factions
and venality. that were.ahnost universal, prove that
the public virtues existed not among thein • and it is
singular that the only part of Greece in which they
were found- was that from whence the arts and
sciences were rigorouSly excluded. In Rome the
age' that was consecrated by genius was profaned by
crime. During many years a severe standard

morals had prevailed hilt precisely, at that period,
when the capital of the world had attained
the summit of • intellectual improvement, virtue
ceased to be a feature of the Roman character.
Licentious indulgence, indeed, became so universal,
that private vice ceased to be infamous. The
same •• page of a historian that exhibits to our
admiration a Horace, a Virgil, and a Tully, records
the degrading -excesses of a Clodius, and the wild
enormities of a Caligula. A halo of intellectual
splendour irraddiated the period of the commence-
ment of Rome's decline, but the poison of moral
corruption was daily gaining strength and activity ;
and while her poets and her orators were seeking to
invest her with the bright semblance of health and
beauty, .disease had assailed the very seat of vitality,
and death was circulating through every vein.
Quitting the ample.volume of ancient history,' let us
see whether in the. nations of modern times the
moral improvement of mankind has kept pace with
their intellectual advancement, and France and our
vu country are naturally suggested as the two
nations in which the inquiry may be most. properly
instituted. In the former country, the age of Louis
XIV. dethands attention, and in that age we find
both genius and vice triumphant. -The Court was
notoriously profligate, and profligacy pervaded every
class of society. Virtue was known only by name.
Advancing our eye towards the close of the
eighteenth century, what sort of a spectacle does
France present,—a nation, be .it remembered, which
had almost appropriated every department of the
physical sciences to itself :. a nation which had
recently made discoveries that had changed the
whole • system of chemical scienc

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