Gazette Of The United States, & Philadelphia Daily Advertiser

LEARNING and JACOBINISM.

Amidst the rapid progress of their terrible arms and still more terrible principles, the modern Goths have found in the various eminaries of learning, which previous to their inroads illuminated Europe, the most insurmountable obstacles to their views: Hence the annihilation of those institutions, as their arms have progressed. The celebrated university of Pavia early fell before them: That of Louvain it appears has just experienced the same fate. An empire founded on dullness and ignorance must needs be at odds with genius, learning, and improvement in every form; and they have accordingly been persecuted with a zeal proportioned to the character and principles of jacobinis. The faithful devotees of the original school, have tenaciously imitated in this country her worthy example. But as ignorance does not here prevail so generally as to prepare the public for their poisonous and unqualified potions of equality and fraternity, their labours have not been attended with the same destructive success. The colleges and their professors, with the great body of the American clergy, still retain their just rank in the public esteem, though they have been the continual objects of the most rancorous, and determined malignity—and have been unremittingly assailed by all the infernal arts of the whole hell of jacobinis. "The University of Louvain, (says the Barbarian who recites the story of its abolition) was the principal asylum of fanaticism, and of those principles which were most opposite to the new regime! Fanaticism, in Sansculottish language, means religion. The new regime describes the principles of modern liberty, equality and fraternity. What higher eulogium could he have passed. He informs us that the destroyers did not lay waste the library, garden, &c. as we might have supposed. The Gothicism of their dispositions would have led them to burn up the library, like Omar of old, their worthy predecessor, and root up the garden—but avarice is a propensity which restrains them of destruction and the sale and confiscation of these valuables, will create new means of mischief. From the fate of learning in those countries which have fallen under the dominions of the French, may we learn to foster our own institutions with a jealous and unceasing care, as the most formidable and effectual barrier against principles calculated and designed to root up all the foundations of society. Let this barrier be once broken down and

"The hour quick hastens when, on equal feet,
Exalted virtue and low vice shall meet;
When envy, faction, indolence, Shall rage
In one wild tempest thro' the troubled age;
When human dignity shall meet its doom,
Devon perish, reason, worth, a tomb
In the wide waste of ignorance shall find
And dire equality curse mankind
Then shall no pedant priest with learned pride
Point out the sacred volume for our guide,
No more the civil law or moral page,
The mind shall fetter or the soul encage;
But fire on fire the pile of arts shall raise.
And the vast alcove of creation blaze."