![]() ![]() ![]() Burke’s pearls are learning, and the swine are the uneducated masses. But, in Burke’s polemic, the pearls are not crumbs of communion bread. Classicists and theologians dispute the meaning of Matthew’s pearls, margarites, which in the New Testament Greek may imply crumbs from the rite of the Eucharist. ![]() To fan the flames of moral panic about the consequences of mass education, Burke here invokes the King James Bible’s translation of a famous passage of Matthew’s Gospel (7:6): ‘Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you’. In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke laments that all is lost if the aristocracy and the church lose their authority: ‘Along with its natural protectors and guardians, learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude’. ![]()
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