Notes of a Sermon Preached by the Rev. C. E. Darwent in trary, I contend, that the average mental ability of man is marvellously high. Complaints are loud over want of education. China is ex-borted to improve her education, as if that would necessarily improve her natural ability; as if that was deficient. I do not think it is. It is very high. Compared with modern education, the barons, who made King John sign Magna Charta were uneducated men. Some of them could not sign their names. Yet they could think, as the Charta shows. We could do with them now, to straighten out the political confusions of Europe. They couldn't make a worse mess of it than our highly educated statesmen have done. I want to show, that whatever the cause of the world's unhappy state is, it not from want of brains. d has been lavish in the bestowment of them.
Further it can be shown by examples, that the worst possible environment, the most unfavourable circumstances, seem to have no power to diminish the high mental capacity of the race. Let races grow up for thousands of years in barbarism and savagery even, has no effect in lowering their innate mental power; a most remarkable proof of Job's statement, that "there is a spirit in man, and the breath of the Almighty give th him understanding." Again, it is most remarkable, that heredity seems impotent to diminish the stock of natural God-given mental power in men and women. Children of raw savages, whose an-cesters have been as ignorant as water-buffaloes for countless generations, take kindly to learning, as soon as they get the chance. There has been lately too much loading off our moral faults on the back of heredity. The fact is, that great ability is, as they say in mathematics a "'constant."" That all this is so, I think, the following facts will bear out.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.