Can you not eat, and drink, and sleep, without wisdom? Can you not, by diligent prudence, leave your children, who shall come after you in the same craft, to eat more daintily, and drink in greater excess, and have more leisure, and sleep with more delicateness, and all this with no wisdom at all? Why, then, waste so much time and labour in this monstrous bugbear of an ‘education?’ Do you not know there is something better, both for yourself and your children, than a mind, heart, and soul, perfectly cultivated as God designed them to be? Think you an instructed soul is better than a well-fed body, or that the latter is not worth the most without the former? Besides, do you not know that all wisdom needed in the professions comes by nature, like hands and feet? Sir, you rebel against Providence, you are a fool, and we pity you.” Suppose they sought out the wisdom of all the ancients, and demonstrated by proof irrefragable that professional men had always been the most ignorant in the land, and it had come to be a proverb that “Dunces and fools made the best lawyers, physicians, and clergymen;” that, reasoning as some always do, they declared “what has been must be for ever,” and so accused the reformers of violating the fundamental article of God's constitution, which was, that an error, or a sin, which had once got foot-hold of the earth, should never be dislodged, or even molested.
Imagine, on the other hand, that while these three classes were sunk in the most desperate ignorance, the farmers, the butchers, the mechanics, the traders, the haberdashers of all sorts, were instructed men, who thought for themselves. That they had free schools for all ages, and that in abundance; academies and colleges, where learning lit her gentle flame, and genius shed down the light of her God-given inspiration to guide the young to wisdom and virtue. That, besides these general institutions, all supported at the public expense, they had specific establishments for each particular art or science. That the farmers had schools for agriculture, and the mechanics for the science of their art, and the merchants for commerce, and that all classes of the people, from the cooper to the king—except the drones of those three professions—were intelligent and instructed men; had minds well accomplished, good manners, refined amusements, and met together for the
