Now, we no more expect to find any such idea of a presiding purpose of life, than we do the profoundest philosophical reflection, in the minds of the uneducated children and youth. They think nothing at all about their existence and life in any moral or abstracted or generalizing reference whatever. They know not any good that it is to have been endowed with a rational rather than a brute nature, excepting that it affords more diversity of action, and gives the privilege of tyrannizing over brutes. They think nothing about what they shall become, and very little about what shall become of them. There is nothing that tells them of the relations for good and evil, of present things with future and remote ones. The whole energy of their moral and intellectual nature goes out as in brute instinct on present objects, to make the most they can of them for the moment, taking the chance for whatever may be next. They are left totally devoid even of the thought, that what they are doing is the beginning of a life as an important adventure for good or evil; their whole faculty is engrossed in the doing of it; and whether it signify anything to the next ensuing stage of life, or to the last, is as foreign to any calculation of theirs, as the idea of reading their destiny in the stars. Not only, therefore, is there an entire preclusion from their minds of the faintest hint of a monition, that they should live for the grand final object pointed to by religion, but also, for the most part, of all consideration of the attainment of a reputable condition and character in life. The creature endowed with faculties for "large discourse, looking before and after," capable of so much design, respectability, and happiness, even in its present short stage, and entering on an endless career, is seen in the abasement of snatching, as its utmost reach of purpose, at the low amusements, blended with vices, of each passing day; and cursing its privations and tasks, and often also the sharers of those privations, and the exactors of those tasks.
When these are grown up into the mass of mature population, what will it be, as far as their quality shall go toward constituting the quality of the whole? Alas! it will be, to that extent, just a continuation of the ignorance, debasement, and misery, so conspicuous in the bulk of the people now. And to _what_ extent? Calculate _that_ from the unquestionable fact that hundreds of thousands of the human beings in our land, between the ages, say of six and sixteen, are at this hour thus abandoned to go forward into life at random, as to the use they shall make of it,--if, indeed, it can be said to be at random, when there is strong tendency and temptation to evil, and no discipline to good. Looking at this proportion, does any one think there will be, on the whole, wisdom and virtue enough in the community to render this black infusion imperceptible or innoxious?