American journal of education - v. 2 Author:William Russell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: KE VIEWS. An Introductory addi-ess delivered at the Opening of the Wesleyan Academy in Wilbraham, Mass. Nov. 8, 1825. By Rev. Wilbur Fisk, A. M. Principal of ... more »llie Academy. Second Edition. Boston: 1826. 8vo. pp. 23. The friends of polite learning and of sound philosophy join with the pious professors of religion, in looking back with grateful recollections to the period when the spirit of inquiry went forth, which disenthralled the one from the trammels of superstition, and opened the path to the others, to conduct them from a state of ignorance, and mental degradation, towards the fountains of truth, and the purest sources of moral refinement. We may commence at the days of Luther, and trace the progress of tho revival of learning and the reformation of religion, steadily travelling side by side from that time to the present. And it is one of the glories of which the gospel can boast, that while it may not number among its converts many of the mighty or the wise of this world, it never has had cause to shrink from the scrutiny of the latter, or to dread the ultimate exercise of the power of the former; but that, on the contrary, as the light of learning has shone with increasing brilliancy on every subject of man's research, and the deeper it has penetrated into the arcana of matter and of mind, the effect of its discoveries has only been to add argument to conviction, till the proofs of the reality of religion, and the certainty that ours is a revelation from heaven, have amounted to demonstration, to which reason cannot but yield, and from which sophistry and sin endeavor in vain to escape. This subserviency of human learning to the furtherance of religious knowledge has not at all times been so evidently manifest to all classes of christians, as it has come in our day ...« less