This gentleman, with a few others, has been doing much up-hill work of this kind for years past, establishing schools, and trying to make head against the opposition of the priests and the indifference of the people, as yet with but small success.
It seems hard to be always attacking the Roman Catholic clergy, but of one thing we cannot remain in doubt,--that their influence has had more to do than anything else with the doleful ignorance which reigns supreme in Mexico.

For centuries they had the education of the country in their hands, and even at this day they retain the greater share of it.

The training which the priests themselves receive will therefore give one some idea of what they teach their scholars.

Unluckily, their course of instruction was stereotyped ages ago, when learned men devoted themselves to writing huge books on divinity, casuistry, logic, and metaphysics; concealing their ignorance of facts under an affectation of wisdom and clouds of long words; demonstrating how many millions of angels could dance on a needle's point; writing treatises "_de omni re scibili_," and on a good many things unknowable also; and teaching their admiring scholars the art of building up sham arguments on any subject, whether they know anything about it or not.

This is a very vicious system of training for a man's mind, the more especially when it is supposed to set him up with a stock of superior knowledge; and this is what the Roman Catholic clergy have been learning, generation after generation, in Mexico and elsewhere.