Protestantism in Poland and Bohemia - James Aitken Wylie

that should they slip their fetters, they would turn
and rend them. The art they studied was not how to
educate, but how not to educate. They intrigued to
shut up the Protestant schools, and when they had
succeeded, they collected the youth into their own,
that they might keep them out of the way of that
most dangerous of all things, knowledge. They
taught them words, not things. They shut the page
of history, they barred the avenues of science and
philosophy, and they drilled their pupils
exclusively in the subtleties of a scholastic
theology. Is it wonderful that the eye kept
perpetually poring on such objects should at last
lose its power of vision; that the intellect confined
to food like this should pine and die; and that the
foot-prints of Poland ceased to be visible in the
fields of literature, in the world of commerce, and
on the arena of politics? The men who had taken in
hand to educate the nation, taught it to forget all
that other men strive to remember, and to
remember all that other men strive to forget; in
short, the education given to Poland by the Jesuits
was a most ingenious and successful plan of
teaching them not how to think right, but how to
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