Читать книгу The Story of a Working Man's Life - Francis Mason - Страница 9

Table of Contents

MY experience shows that while in the earliest years of childhood, the faculties are sharp, like the impress from a new seal, and the desire for knowledge as spontaneous as the breath; yet when this desire is not gratified, and the faculties are allowed to remain in disuse, the love of knowledge dies out, and the mental faculties become obtuse. This goes altogether against the theory of modern times that man has risen from a brute, and rather proves that he was created a man and brutalized himself afterwards.

I know not at what age, but when I had lost my appetite for useful knowledge, I was sent to the school of a young man, who was a strict disciplinarian, and my troubles in life commenced from that date. He succeeded in making everything he taught me, not merely uninteresting, but absolutely hateful. I hated writing, and having to show every two lines, for he was likely to follow his criticisms with a blow of the ferule, and I had to go back to the desk to improve my penmanship, with my hands smarting from the blow of his board. I hated arithmetic through the repelling aspect in which he represented it, and, above all, I hated the teacher himself. He was the first and only human being I ever cordially hated, and I made no secret of my hatred. How often, after the school was out, have I vowed to my school-fellows: "I'll lick him when I get to be a man!"

Reading, writing and arithmetic were the grand trio of working men's schools in those days. That was considered quite enough for a poor man to know. No geography, no history, no philosophy, no anything. Nothing was thought necessary for a working man to know, above ability to read on the warning boards of the grounds of the rich, "Spring-guns and man-traps set in these grounds," that they might not steal their master's rabbits or rob orchards.

A little knowledge of anatomy might, however, have been useful. I knew a boy who got a cherry-stone into his ear, and his school-fellows put him under the pump, and pumped a powerful stream of water into his ear, to drive the cherry-stone through his head and out of the other ear. They succeeded in making it necessary to call in a surgeon, who showed them that the obstruction must come out the way it went in.

Our school was in advance of the times, and we were favored with a little grammar, as a kind of dessert; but I never heard of any one getting beyond naming his tools. I could define a noun or a verb as accurately as Lindley Murray himself, but the words failed to convey any ideas to my mind. The catechism said: "What is your name? Who gave you that name? Our godfathers and godmothers." And I thought that some mythical personages, like "our godfathers and godmothers," had called certain words nouns, adjectives and verbs, and that when those names were committed to memory, there was an end to grammar. I knew that a buttercup, for some reason unknown, was also a ranunculus; and I thought that for some such occult reason, my dog was a noun and his barking a verb.

My emotional nature, like my intellectual faculties, lay dormant and undeveloped. Man has emotional powers within him to pray, praise and exercise adoring gratitude, which can turn a prison into paradise, and make him happy under any circumstances; but they need to be educated out of him, just like his mental powers. They lay curled up in the recesses of his soul like the wings of the butterfly in the chrysalis state, and there they will lie forever, unless something is done to bring them out.

The powers of my moral nature were plastic and impressible at my earliest recollections, but became callous and apathetic, as I grew older. From the time I was four or five years of age, till I passed my eighteenth year, there was rarely a Sunday passed in which I was not taken to meeting twice. I must have heard within that time more than 1500 sermons, 3000 prayers, 4500 hymns, and a distressing number of exhortations; and yet not a single one of the whole ever made the slightest impression on my heart. They were all to me as if I had never heard them, but to sit under the delivery of the sermons was the greatest agony I have ever been called to endure in the three-score years and ten of my existence. Fever and ague were nothing to it.

To keep little children elbowed down on hard seats, bound to keep perfect silence for what appears to them an interminable period, and condemned to listen to moral essays adapted to adults, and theological disquisitions that Gabriel could not understand, is one of the great mistakes of Christian parents. As well might the children be taken to college and set down in the lecture-room to listen to lectures on fluxions, or functions, or the squaring of the circle. The effect produced is exactly the opposite to the one sought. Instead of a good habit of attending church being acquired, no sooner is the compulsory force removed, than there is a rebound, like a bended spring being set free, and the religious assembly is avoided. After fourteen years of intensely wearisome Sabbaths, without a single bright spot on any one of them, I found myself at liberty; and I enjoyed it like the dove that never came back to the ark again, or like a colt freed from the halter, that runs and kicks up its heels. Let children be taught at home something that they can understand, by some one they love; and then it will be a pleasure for them to go to church occasionally.

For many years I was constrained to attend Sabbath-schools, but they were as unprofitable to me as the preaching of the sanctuary. I committed to memory, during those years, an untold amount of Scripture texts; but they were like water poured into a sieve. They all ran away and left nothing behind. My moral nature was untouched.

This seems remarkable, but it is a fact; and a fact that occurs oftener than Christians are willing to believe. Some will dispose of the matter by attributing it to human depravity and original sin, but while believing in the existence of both, I think they had very little to do with the case in hand. At that time I was quite indifferent to religious doctrines, because I did not view them as a personal matter.

I read the Bible much as I read Rollin's Ancient History. Daniel was to me one of the most interesting books in the Bible, because it contained the most stirring and remarkable historical incidents. There was no personal application of the Word of God, and hence, "the Word preached did not profit, not being mixed with faith in them that heard."

We read glowing eulogies on Raikes' Sunday-schools, but nothing could surpass the vapidness and inanity of English Sabbath-schools in the days of my boyhood. One year I attended a Sunday-school in York, taught exclusively by the students of the "Presbyterian Seminary" there—all Unitarians by the way. At the close of the term, prizes were awarded to the most advanced pupils, and the prizes consisted of three books, the two principal of which, were Robinson Crusoe and AEsop's Fables. Had we been examined in Robinson Crusoe, and the prize had been a Bible, I should have borne away the palm; for Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday were familiar acquaintances, and I knew all their history, as well as I knew the streets of my native town. As it was, I was far behind the victors, and the boy at the head of the list chose Robinson Crusoe. It struck me then as being not a little incongruous, to reward boys for their biblical attainments, with such books as Robinson Crusoe and AEsop's Fables.

It may be supposed by some, that the reason the Word of God was so inoperative, was owing to the heterodoxy of the teachers; but when I was several years older, I attended an orthodox Sunday-school connected with the Independents or Congregationalists, in Leeds; and the mode of teaching was precisely the same as in the Unitarian school, and equally barren in results.

The exercises were the same, everlastingly committing the Scriptures to memory, without note or comment, and neither teacher nor superintendent, in either school, ever spoke a word to me personally, so that it was all the same to me whether they were orthodox or heterodox, Christian or heathen. I have never found any divine influences in names, or brick walls, or sermons, or prayers, or texts, without the communication of ideas.