Though actual schools, or colleges, or written lore, might
not originally have had much to do with it, the continued practice of
old, well-formed customs held them in "the ways their fathers walked
in" and they found them those of "pleasantness" and true honor. But
the time came when literary dictation was to take the place of oral
tradition, and of habitual imitative reverence of the past. Schools
and colleges were instituted, teaching for doctrines the prevailing
sentiments of the endowers, or of the instructors employed. During
the reigns of the later sovereigns of the Jagellon dynasty, Sigismund
I. and II., and that of their predecessor, John Sobieski, the
principles of these seminaries might be considered sound. But soon
after the death of the last-named monarch, when the latent mischief
contained in the Utopian idea of the perfection of an always elective
monarchy began to shake the stability of even the monarchy itself,
certain of the public teachers evinced correspondent signs of this
destructive species of freemasonry; and about the same period the
Voltaire venom of infidelity against all the laws of God and man
being poured throughout the whole civilized world, the general effect
had so banefully reached the seats of national instruction in Poland,
that several of the most venerated personages, whose names have
already been, commemorated in the preceding biographical story,
congregated together to stem, by a counteracting current, the torrent
where they saw it likely to overflow; to sap up its introduced
sources, by obtaining the abolition of some of the most subtle and
dangerous of the scholastic institutions, and the establishment of
others in their room, on the sound foundation of moral and religious
polity between men and nations.
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