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forcibly constrained, and the knowledge of God’s truth must be 
handed down. Hence Christ's command to His first Apostles “ to 
go and teach all nations." Hence the paramount importance of 
education. Hence the imperative obligation, upon all who have 
received the truth to teach the Truth. Hence the shameful dis- 
grace to those who might have prevented it, when a people are 
either taught error, or left to “ perish through lack of knowledge." 
“ The times of men's ignorance " God now no longer winks at. 
And in days like these, when “knowledge is increased." when 
“ men run to and fro," and the printing press speaks silently to 
millions through the eye, when the ear cannot be reached ; all 
ignorance and all false teaching become doubly culpable, if we might 
have prevented the one or may have disseminated the other. 
53. And yet, as we too well know, though Christ came and 
sowed the good seed of truth and purity in the world once more, 
an enemy hath also sowed tares. Evil and essential savagery 
cannot quite be rooted out from among us, with all our superior 
knowledge and all our modern civilization. We need not go to 
Africa, Australia, New Zealand or the Andaman Islands, for 
instances of human degradation. We need not to go far back in 
history or to pre-historic times, to hunt for the probable origin of 
human debasement. It is round about us here in England, and in 
our own day. We need not refer to Troppman and France, or 
to modern Greece, for recent instances of savage brutality. Nor 
even to pretentious Rome for a still more sickening picture of 
general moral corruption, so shocking that the writer in the 
Guardian newspaper who lately portrayed it, could not venture 
to write his account in plain English for the general eye, but veiled 
it in the sadly appropriate language of the Roman Church. We 
need but to look at home, — to Middlesex, to Buckinghamshire, to 
Westminster Hall, to Bow Street, — and to the English newspapers 
for a year or a single month, to understand how man can corrupt 
and debase himself, and to know what is the probable origin of 
human barbarism and savagery. Facilis descensus Averni ! Even 
the heathen knew how easy it is for man to degenerate. 
54. What, on the other hand, is the remedy, that can alone 
prevent the general debasement of society ? The revival of better 
things ; the recalling of man to duty, aided by timely education, 
and by the protection of wise laws, founded upon Christian Truth ; 
for that is “the salt of the earth," which preserves it from utter 
corruption. But if Christianity is mainly concerned with the 
teaching of the higher truths which are of the essence of moral 
civilization, it is an utter mistake to suppose that it is in the least 
degree inimical to civilization in its outward material development. 
There have been fanatical interpreters of Scripture who, with a text 
and a doctrine misunderstood and exaggerated, have taught that 
