Yorkville enquirer. [volume] (Yorkville, S.C.) 1855-2006, 1878-10-17
religious element, can result in the highest de-
yeloDnaent either of nations or Individuals

Greece was literally "the land Of scholars
and the nurse of arms" and rose to as SUBJ
lime height of intellectual eminence as any
of the nations of antiquity. The early sys-
tenn of Greek education was purely physical
and intellectual. Under Lycurgus, children
we're regarded as the property of the State,
and fed at a common tab le; and we may
Judge of the want of moral culture, when we
remember that the Code of Sparta's most Gel
ebrated law-gver encouraged them to steal,
and punished only the detection of the theft.
Solon and Pythagoras and Plato and Socrates
did certainly labor to give the training Of the
mind prominence over the qualification Of
bodily propensities. They even saw and
taught the necessity Of what they termed "pu-
rifying the soul by selfknowledge and devo-
tion,"-but all these philosophers walked by
the faint light of reason alone. They offered
their pupils nothing to oppose to the baser
luste in ths human bosom, but the faint, feeble
efforts of the human will. The consequence
was, that while Greece scaled the heights Of
intellectual eminence, and evinced even high
aesthetic culture, while under the inspiration
of art, she worshipped at the shrine of the
beautiful, and sculpture and painting and po-
etry embalmed the products of her genius,
yet for want of the true religious element, she
gathered her only knowledge Of the future
from the ambiguous responses Of crafty
priestess; her affairs we're reeking with the
sacrifices to unknown Gods" and her great
est wonder was heather temple. What
would not the light Of Revelation have done
for this people, furnishing its motives to NOR
ality by means Of grace! Homer, the &C.
>knowledged "father of song," would then have
risen in his conception of the spiritual world,
to the sublime height of Milton Pythagoras
would have ranked with Newton and if Soc
rates, under the persecution of his age, had
been called to drink the fatal hemlock, he
would have been associated to-day with Wick
life, Cranmer and Ridley, in the great array
of Christian martyrs.
The absence of the moral and religious ele-
ment in her system of education, was the
prime cause of the decline and fall of the
Roman Empire. Her high physical and in.
tellectual training produced Scipios and Ce.
sars who bore her standard, in imperial tri-
umpb, to every quarter of the known world.
The. eloquence of her Cicero, the spirited
stanzas of her Horace, and the soft, sweet
Strains Of her Virgil, are enjoyed wherever
there is written language Yet, though she
boasted through her Tacitus that Roman arts
and Roman arms had penetrated sea, be.
yond which it was forbidden to mortals to 60,
no ingredients of a sound morality or saving
faith we're mingled with the ailments of her
youthful culture Her people sank into moral
obliquity, and became the serfs of slaves; her
proud armies ANAL gamated with the Northern
Scum, and she plunged to an everlasting over.
throu- uhA.a tho Goth and Vandal nnra aeatad
on her thrones
AS with nations, so with individuals. Take
up distinguished biography-such volumes as
might be labelled "Shipwrecks of Great
ness" You find the lives of men, who with
towering intellect from want of early moral
and religious culture, were the victims of
groveling propensities. In all ages Of the
world, high intellectual attainment, unre-
strained by moral motives, has been product
i've of the grossest crimes. Pity weeps over
God.given genius, lashing, like the Gagged bird,
its proud pinions against the prison bars of
earthly passion, when it might have bidden
defiance to storm and tempest, winged its flight
to empyrean regions, and bathed it's golden
plumage in the mellow sunlight of its native
heaven. A host of sad examples, with whose
history even children are familiar, now pass
before me. Look at Alexander, with an in
tellect early developed, affections neglected,
and the demon of a selfish ambition nursed
in his soul. We see him, with consummate
strategy and skill, sweeping, at the head oftwo
millions of steel-clad warriors, over the fairest
portion of Asia, carrying fire and sword and
desolation and death. A moral scourge,
soulless despot, bis very successes palling upon
his taste, weeping, fend-like, that there were
no more worlds for him to deluge in blood
he sank into debAuchery and died in disgrace.
Mark the career of Napoleon. Graded in
the midst of revolution, trained from child
hood in the heartless school of war, with all
the better impulses of bis nature stiAed in
their very infancy, let the ocean storm tell the
warning tale, as it lashed with angry wave
the granite wall of his bound prison, and
poured its pitiless death-dirge in the ears of
his once proud spirit. See Rousseau and VOL
taire, and Tom Payne. Did France remem-
ber, when but few years ago she sat clothed
in sack.cloth garments of desoation, a help.
less suppliant at the feet of q foreign foe, with
her vine-clad hills smoking with the ashes Of
once happy homes did France remember
that period in her earlier history, when under
the in6del teachings of her so-called philoso-
pliers, she set aside the time-honored customs
of Christianity, abolished the Sabbath, inau-
gurated an "Age of Reason" and wrote on
the tombs of her murdered slain, "Death Is an
Eternal Sleepf" Did Paris remember, when
under the fearful reign of the Commune, her
cutters flowed with the blood of women and
children, at the hands of a ruthless soldiery-
pillaged and plundered, and bleeding from
suicidal wounds-did Paris remember when
the Goddess of Liberty was personated by
miserable prostitute, crowned and worshipped
in her streets? Who will say that the men
who have, for nearly century, controlled the
destinies of France the men who have swayed
the passions of her populace, led her armies,