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peculiar religious experience, and is driven as lie be¬ 
lieves into silent gravity and exclusiveness by liis faith, 
may think it is not true; but Zoroaster, thousands of 
years ago, travelled the same road and had the same 
experience ; but he, being wise, knew it to be universal, 
and treated his neighbors accordingly, and is even said 
to have invented and established worship among men. 
Let him humbly commune with Zoroaster then, and, 
through the liberalizing influence of all the worthies, 
with Jesus Christ himself, and let “our church” go by 
the board. 
We boast that we belong to the nineteenth century 
and are making the most rapid strides of any nation. 
But consider how little this village does for its own cul¬ 
ture. I do not wish to flatter my townsmen, nor to be 
flattered by them, for that will not advance either of us. 
We need to be provoked,—goaded like oxen, as we are, 
into a trot. We have a comparatively decent system 
of common schools, schools for infants only; but except¬ 
ing the half-starved Lyceum in the winter, and latterly 
the puny beginning of a library suggested by the state, 
no school for ourselves. We spend more on almost 
any article of bodily aliment or ailment than on our 
mental aliment. It is time that we had uncommon 
schools, that we did not leave off our education when 
we begin to be men and women. It is time that 
villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants 
the fellows of universities, with leisure — if they are 
indeed so well off — to pursue liberal studies the rest 
of their lives. Shall the world be confined to one Paris 
or one Oxford forever? Cannot students be boarded 
here and get a liberal education under the skies of 
Concord ? Can we not hire some Abelard to lecture to 
