Public School Education. Michael Müller
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Voltaire meet with the greatest support in all the lodges. There could not be two subscription-lists more in harmony with each other: Voltaire, the representative of the destruction of prejudices and superstition; the Educational League, the engine for building up a new society based solely upon learning and instruction. Our brethren understood it so.' In fine, that there may not remain upon our minds the least doubt as to the identity of the principles of this League with those of Voltaire, we find its founder in France proposing, at a great Masonic dinner, a toast to the memory of that arch-infidel; while the newspaper from which we have quoted so largely, informs its readers that at one of the 'professional schools,' described above, the prize for good conduct (le prix de morale) was awarded to 'the daughters of a free-thinker, who have never attended any place of religious worship.'"
We cannot better conclude our remarks on the efforts made in France to destroy religion in the masses by means of education, than in the following words of warning, not less applicable to good and sincere Catholics in Ireland nowadays, than to those to whom they were specially addressed:
"Good and sincere Catholics (continues the author of the pamphlet already quoted), who, deceived by the motto of the association, have given their names to this Educational League, take part, without knowing it, in a Masonic institution, and in building up this new state of society, from which religion is to be banished. Well may the Bishop of Metz say: 'These persons forget that, like Proteus in the fable, Freemasonry knows how to multiply ad infinitum its transformations and its names. Yesterday it called itself 'Les Solidaires,' or 'morality independent of religion,' or 'freedom of thought'; to-day it takes the title of an 'Educational League'; to-morrow it will find some other name by which to deceive the simple."
The efforts to corrupt the youth of unhappy France by means of bad education in its higher branches, have been not less energetic and wide-spread. The lectures of the School of Medicine of Paris were inaugurated in 1865, amid shouts of "Materialism forever,"[D] and on the thirtieth of December a candidate for degrees was permitted by the Medical Faculty to advance the following revolutionary doctrine, grounded on the materialistic principles he had been taught: "Who still speaks to us of free-will? As the stone which falls to the ground obeys the laws of weight, man obeys the laws which are proper to him. … Responsibility is the same for all, that is to say, none." And again: "Physicians must not be accomplices of the magistrates and judges, who punish men for acts for which they are not responsible"—pp. 32, 33. Here we have a sample of the teaching of the School of Medicine of Paris, not only the first medical school of France, but among the first schools of Europe. And this sample is, unfortunately, not a solitary one. The Medical Faculty of the University of Paris gave medals in 1866 for two dissertations, in one of which we find a denial of the act of creation and of God the Creator, and a rejection of every metaphysical idea, as useless and dangerous; while human thought is set down as produced by heat! In the other we read the following propositions: "Matter is eternal." "The action of a First Cause is useless and irrational—it is chimerical!" Again: "It is absolutely impossible to explain the existence of a creative power"; and "an immaterial being is not necessary for the production of life." And, "to attribute the phenomena of life to an immaterial soul, is to substitute a chimerical being for the hypothesis of machinists." "Materialists have done good service to physiology by eliminating metaphysical entities from this study. The idea of the soul, as an immaterial power, is a mere abstraction; in fact, nothing of the kind exists."
Unhappily these principles, subversive of all morality, are not advanced by the aspirants only to academical distinctions; most certainly the students would not advance these theories had they not learned them from their masters. Hence we find one of the Professors of the University of France, in Bordeaux, asserting, that "even among civilized nations moral ideas are so relative, contradictory, and dependent on exterior and individual relations, that it is impossible, and will always be impossible, to find an absolute definition of goodness."—p. 38, note. And the "Medical Review" published the discourse pronounced by one of the physicians of the Faculty of Paris, M. Verneuil, over the grave of a member of their learned body, Dr. Foucher, in which we find the following:
"'We are reproached with believing with the sages of old, that Fate is blind, and as such presides over our lot. And why should we not believe it? … Humbling and sad as is this admission, still we must make it: imperceptible elements of the great social organization appearing upon this earth as living beings, fragments of matter agitated by a spirit, we are born, we live, and we die, unconscious of our destiny, playing our part without any precise notion of the end, and in the midst of the darkness which covers our origin and our end, having only one consolation—the love of our fellow-man.
"'This simple philosophy alone,' M. Verneuil continues, 'assuages our grief and ends by drying our tears. By the side of the half-open tomb we ask, whether he whom it contains served the good cause without deceit. … If, by his intelligence or his kindness of heart, he labored in the great work, we say he has paid his part of the common debt, and whether he returns to his original nothing or not, whether he is destroyed or merely changes his form, whether he hears our words or not, we thank him in the name of the past and of the future.'"
Another distinguished Professor published, in 1866, Lectures on the Physiology of the Nervous System, in which we find the following passage:
"We admit,' he says, 'without any restriction, that intellectual phenomena in animals are of the same order as in man. … ' 'As for free-will, we comprehend a certain kind of free-will in the more intelligent animals; and, on the other hand, we may add, that perhaps man is not so free as he would fain persuade himself he is.' And 'as to feeling the distinction between good and evil, it is a grave question, which we must first study in man himself!'"
Let it not be supposed that these principles are merely announced as abstractions; conclusions are drawn from them which must fill every thinking mind with horror. Eighty students of the Normal School, the great training institution of teachers for the North of France, applauded such conclusions in a public letter. Several of the infidel Professors of the Faculty of Medicine received ovations from crowded class-rooms; millions of immoral and irreligious books were scattered throughout the country. Thus Freemasonry, under the pretext of combating ignorance, wages a deceitful and implacable war against religion. "We too," says the organ of Freemasons,[E] "we too expect our Messiah, the true Messiah, of the mind and reason—universal education!"
"It is scarcely necessary for us to remind you, dearly beloved brethren, that the seeds of irreligion and anarchy thus sown broadcast over the fair face of France, have already produced a too abundant harvest of evils, perhaps the most disastrous recorded on the page of history. All Europe has been horrified by the atrocities perpetrated within the last few months in the name of liberty in that city, which was looked on as the centre of the civilization of the world. National monuments have been destroyed, peaceable citizens robbed and murdered, the venerable Archbishop, many of the clergy, and leading members of the civil and military authorities, massacred in cold blood. In other cities of France, too, we have seen anarchy and irreligion proclaimed—miscreants in arms against the property, and liberty, and lives of their fellow-citizens, often of the helpless and unprotected; and all this at a moment when the country was invaded, and a part of it occupied, by its enemies. The storm had been sown, and in very truth unfortunate France has reaped the whirlwind.
"SPREAD OF INFIDELITY THROUGH BAD EDUCATION NOT CONFINED TO FRANCE.
"And unhappily, dearly beloved brethren, the spread of infidel principles by means of bad education is not confined to France. A few years ago a congress of students was held in Liège, in Belgium, where infidel and anti-social principles in their worst form were proclaimed amidst the plaudits of the assembly. In England irreligion and socialism are publicly taught. Even in our own country it is a matter of notoriety, that a Chair in one of the Queen's Colleges has been occupied since their foundation by a gentleman, who, in a published work, extolled the first French revolution, and, in another place of the same book, compared our Saviour, whose name be praised forever, to Luther