That first sentence contain? the pith of the whole matter.  “Reading and writing are mere increase of power,” and they may be turned to a good or a bad purpose.  Here enters the ethical consideration which the zealots of sheer knowledge so persistently ignored.  The language about fencing the Altar and guarding the Throne might, no doubt, strike the Judge who tried the school-teachers as unduly idealistic; but the sentiment is sound, and knowledge is either a blessing or a curse, according as it is used.

Sydney Smith was speaking of the Elementary School, and, indeed, was urging the claims of the working classes to better education.  But his doctrine applies with at least equal force to the higher and wider ranges of knowledge.  During the Victorian Age physical science came into its own, and a good deal more than its own.  Any discovery in mechanics or chemistry was hailed as a fresh boon, and the discoverer was ranged, with Wilberforce and Shaftesbury, among our national heroes.  As long ago as 1865 a scientific soldier perceived the possibilities of aerial navigation.  His vision has been translated into fact; but Count Zeppelin has shown us quite clearly that the discovery is not an unmixed blessing.  Chemistry is, to some minds, the most interesting of studies, just because it is, as Lord Salisbury once said of it, the science of things as they are.  Yet aconitine, strychnine, and antimony have played their part in murders, and chloroform has been used for destruction as well as for salvation.  Dr. Lardner was one of the most conspicuous figures in that March of Mind which Brougham and his congeners led; and his researches into chemistry resulted in the production of an effluvium which was calculated to destroy all human life within five miles of the spot where it was discharged.  This was an enlargement of knowledge; but if there had been Nihilists in the reign of William IV. they would have found in Dr. Lardner’s discovery a weapon ready to their hand.  Someone must have discovered alcohol; and my teetotal friends would probably say, invented it, for they cannot attribute so diabolical an agency to the action of purely natural causes.  But even those who least sympathize with “the lean and sallow abstinence” would scarcely maintain that alcohol has been an unmixed blessing to the race.

To turn from material to mental discoveries, I hold that a great many additions which have been made to our philosophical knowledge have diminished alike the happiness and the usefulness of those who made them.  “To live a life of the deepest pessimism tempered only by the highest mathematics” is a sad result of sheer knowledge.  An historian, toiling terribly in the muniment-rooms of colleges or country houses, makes definite additions to our knowledge of Henry VIII. or Charles I.; learns cruelty from the one and perfidy from the other, and emerges with a theory of government as odious as Carlyle’s or Froude’s.  A young student of religion