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twelve or fourteen lectures on the Elements of Mechanics or Pneumatics, and permission to ride out to Shotover with the Professor of Geology. I do not know the specialties of the system pursued in the academies of the Continent; but their practical result is, that unless a man’s natural instincts urge him to the pursuit of the physical sciences too strongly to be resisted, he enters into life utterly ignorant of them. I cannot, within my present limits, even so much as count the various directions in which this ignorance does evil. But the main mischief of it is, that it leaves the greater number of men without the natural food which God intended for their intellects. For one man who is fitted for the study of words, fifty are fitted for the study of things, and were intended to have a perpetual, simple, and religious delight in watching the processes, or admiring the creatures, of the natural universe. Deprived of this source of pleasure, nothing is left to them but ambition or dissipation; and the vices of the upper classes of Europe are, I believe, chiefly to be attributed to this single cause.

Secondly, It dispises Religion.-I do not say it despises “Theology,” that is to say, Talk about God. But it despises “Religion;” that is to say, the “binding” or training to God’s service. There is much talk and much teaching in all our academies, of which the effect is not to bind, but to loosen, the elements of religious faith. Of the ten or twelve young men who, at Oxford, were my especial friends, who sat with me under the same lectures on Divinity, or were punished with me for missing lecture by being sent to evening prayers,* four are now zealous Romanists,-a large average out of twelve;¹ and while thus our own universities profess to teach Protestantism, and do not, the universities on the Continent profess to teach Romanism, and do not,-sending forth only rebels and infidels. During long residence on the Continent, I do not remember meeting with above two or three young men who either believed in revelation, or had the grace to hesitate in the assertion of their infidelity.²

Whence, it seems to me, we may gather one of two things: either that there is nothing in any European form of religion so reasonable or ascertained, as that it can be taught securely to our youth, or fastened in their minds by any rivets of proof which they shall not be able to loosen the moment they begin to think; or else, that no means are taken to train them in such demonstrable creeds.

It seems to me the duty of a rational nation to ascertain (and to be at some pains in the matter) which of these suppositions is true; and, if indeed no proof can be given of any supernatural fact, or Divine doctrine, stronger than a youth just out of his teens can overthrow in the first stirrings of serious

* A Mohammedan youth is punished, I believe, for such misdemeanours, by being kept away from prayers.

¹ [Another case came under Ruskin’s notice at Venice when he was writing this book. He went to call, in response to an invitation, upon a Christ Church man who was wintering in that city. “I thought he was far away in England at his rectory,” he wrote to his father (Nov. 1, 1851). He found he had become a Roman Catholic. “You ask,” he writes again (Nov. 19), “if--is an Oxford-made Roman. No; only ‘prepared’ at Oxford. The finishing touches given after he had taken duty at some English rectory.”]

² [See Ruskin’s report of a conversation in a café at Amiens, Vol. VIII. p. 262 n.]

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