If
a man of education, who has health, eyes, hands, and leisure, wants
an object, it is only because God Almighty has bestowed all those
blessings upon a man who does not deserve them."
Another way in which education may be prostituted is by employing
it as a mere means of intellectual dissipation and amusement. Many
are the ministers to this taste in our time. There is almost a
mania for frivolity and excitement, which exhibits itself in many
forms in our popular literature. To meet the public taste, our
books and periodicals must now be highly spiced, amusing, and
comic, not disdaining slang, and illustrative of breaches of all
laws, human and divine. Douglas Jerrold once observed of this
tendency, "I am convinced the world will get tired (at least I hope
so) of this eternal guffaw about all things. After all, life has
something serious in it. It cannot be all a comic history of
humanity. Some men would, I believe, write a Comic Sermon on the
Mount. Think of a Comic History of England, the drollery of
Alfred, the fun of Sir Thomas More, the farce of his daughter
begging the dead head and clasping it in her coffin on her bosom.
Surely the world will be sick of this blasphemy." John Sterling,
in a like spirit, said:- "Periodicals and novels are to all in this
generation, but more especially to those whose minds are still
unformed and in the process of formation, a new and more effectual
substitute for the plagues of Egypt, vermin that corrupt the
wholesome waters and infest our chambers.
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