MEANS AND ENDS
OF EDUCATION

BY

J. L. SPALDING

Bishop of Peoria

WHO BRINGETH MANY THINGS,
FOR EACH ONE SOMETHING BRINGS

CHICAGO
A. C. McCLURG AND COMPANY
1895

COPYRIGHT
BY A. C. MCCLURG £ Co.
A.D. 1895

By Bishop Spalding
EDUCATION AND THE HIGHER LIFE. 12mo. $1.00.
THINGS OF THE MIND. 12mo. $1.00.
MEANS AND ENDS OF EDUCATION. 12mo. $1.00.
A. C. McCLURG AND CO.
CHICAGO.

CONTENTS.

MEANS AND ENDS OF EDUCATION.

CHAPTER I.

TRUTH AND LOVE.

None of us yet know, for none of us have yet been taught in early youth, what fairy palaces we may build of beautiful thought—proof against all adversity;—bright fancies, satisfied memories, noble histories, faithful sayings, treasure-houses of precious and restful thoughts; which care cannot disturb, nor pain make gloomy, nor poverty take away from us—houses built without hands for our souls to live in.—RUSKIN.

Stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men and worthy patriots, dear to God and famous to all ages.—MILTON.

A great man's house is filled chiefly with menials and creatures of ceremony; and great libraries contain, for the most part, books as dry and lifeless as the dust that gathers on them: but from amidst these dead leaves an immortal mind here and there looks forth with light and love.

From the point of view of the bank president, Emerson tells us, books are merely so much rubbish. But in his eyes the flowers also, the flowing water, the fresh air, the floating clouds, children's voices, the thrill of love, the fancy's play, the mountains, and the stars are worthless.

Not one in a hundred who buy Shakspere, or Milton, or a work of any other great mind, feels a genuine longing to get at the secret of its power and truth; but to those alone who feel this longing is the secret revealed. We must love the man of genius, if we would have him speak to us. We learn to know ourselves, not by studying the behavior of matter, but through experience of life and intimate acquaintance with literature. Our spiritual as well as our physical being springs from that of our ancestors. Freedom, however, gives the soul the power not only to develop what it inherits, but to grow into conscious communion with the thought and love, the hope and faith of the noble dead, and, in thus enlarging itself, to become the inspiration and source of richer and wider life for those who follow. As parents are consoled by the thought of surviving in their descendants, great minds are upheld and strengthened in their ceaseless labors by the hope of entering as an added impulse to better things, from generation to generation, into the lives of thousands. The greatest misfortune which can befall genius is to be sold to the advocacy of what is not truth and love and goodness and beauty. The proper translation of timeo hominem unius libri is not, "I fear a man of one book," but "I dread a man of one book:" for he is sure to be narrow, one-sided, and unreasonable. The right phrase enters at once into our spiritual world, and its power becomes as real as that of material objects. The truth to which it gives body is borne in upon us as a star or a mountain is borne in upon us. Kings and rich men live in history when genius happens to throw the light of abiding worlds upon their ephemeral estate. Carthage is the typical city of merchants and traders. Why is it remembered? Because Hannibal was a warrior and Virgil a poet.

The strong man is he who knows how and is able to become and be himself; the magnanimous man is he who, being strong, knows how and is able to issue forth from himself, as from a fortress, to guide, protect, encourage, and save others. Life's current flows pure and unimpeded within him, and on its wave his thought and love are borne to bless his fellowmen. If he who gives a cup of water in the right spirit does God's work, so does he who sows or reaps, or builds or sweeps, or utters helpful truth or plays with children or cheers the lonely, or does any other fair or useful thing. Take not seriously one who treats with derision men or books that have been deemed worthy of attention by the best minds. He is false or foolish. As we cherish a human being for the courage and love he inspires, so books are dear to us for the noble thoughts and generous moods they call into being. To drink the spirit of a great author is worth more than a knowledge of his teaching.

He who desires to grow wise should bring his reason to bear habitually upon what he sees and hears not less than upon what he reads; for thus he soon comes to understand that whatever he thinks or feels, says or does, whatever happens within the sphere of his conscious life, may be made the means of self-improvement. "He is not born for glory," says Vauvenargues, "who knows not the worth of time." The educational value of books lies in their power to set the intellectual atmosphere in vibration, thereby rousing the mind to self-activity; and those which have not this power lack vitality.

If in a whole volume we find one passage in which truth is expressed in a noble and striking manner, we have not read in vain. To read with profit, we should read as a serious student reads, with the mind all alive and held to the subject; for reading is thinking, and it is valuable in proportion to the stimulus it gives to the exercise of faculty. The conversation of high and ingenuous minds is doubtless as instructive as it is delightful, but it is seldom in our power to call around us those with whom we should wish to hold discourse; and hence we go back to the emancipated spirits, who having transcended the bounds of time and space, are wherever they are desired and are always ready to entertain whoever seeks their company. Genius neither can nor will discover its secret. Why his thought has such a mould and such a tinge he no more knows than why the flowers have such a tint and such a perfume; and if he knew he would not care to tell. Nothing is wholly manifest. In the most trivial object, as in the simplest word, there lies a world of meaning which does not reveal itself to a passing glance. If therefore thou wouldst come to right understanding, consider all things with an awakened and interested curiosity.

When the mind at last finds itself rightly at home in its world, it is as delighted as children making escape from restraining walls, as full of spirit as colts newly turned upon the greensward.

In the realm of truth each one is king, and what he knows is as much his own as though he were its first discoverer. However firmly thou holdest to thy opinions, if truth appears on the opposite side, throw down thy arms at once. A book has the power almost of a human being to inspire admiration or disgust, love or hatred. To be useful is a noble thing, to be necessary is not desirable. The youth has not enough ambition unless he has too much. It is difficult to give lessons in the art of pleasing without teaching that of lying. The discouraged are already vanquished. In judging the deed let not the character of the doer influence thy opinion, for good is good, evil evil, by whomsoever done. When the author is rightly inspired his words need not interpretation. They are as natural and as beautiful as the faces of children or as new-blown flowers, and their meaning is plain. The spirit and love of dogmatism is characteristic of the imperfectly educated. As there is a communion of saints, there is a communion of noble minds, living and dead. To speak of love which is not felt, of piety which is not a living sentiment within us, is to weaken both in ourselves and in those who hear us the power of faith and affection. The best that has been known and experienced by minds and hearts lies asleep in books, ready to awaken for whoever holds the magician's wand. Books which at their first appearance create a breeze of excitement, are forgotten when the wind falls.

A human soul rightly uttering itself, in whatever age or country, ceases to belong to any age or country, and becomes part of the universal life of man. A sprightly wit may serve only to lead us astray, and to enmesh us more hopelessly in error. Deeper knowledge is the remedy for the foolishness of sciolism: like cures like. In the books in which men worth knowing have put some of the vital quality which makes them worth knowing, there is perennial inspiration. They are the form and substance of an immortal spirit which, in creating them, became itself. "I have not made my book," says Montaigne, "more than my book has made me."

Were one to ask an acquaintance who knows men to point out the individuals whom he should make his friends, his request would probably receive an unsatisfactory reply: for how, except by trial, is it possible to say who will suit whom? Those whose friendship would be valuable might, for whatever cause, be disagreeable to him, as the greatest and noblest may be unpleasant companions. Many a one whom we admire as he stands forth in history, whose words and deeds thrill and uplift us, we should detest had we known him in life; and others to whom we might have been drawn would have cared nothing for us. Between men and books there is doubtless a wide difference, though a good book contains the best of the life of some true man. But when we are asked to point out the books one should learn to love, we are confronted with much the same difficulty as had we been asked to name the persons whom he should make his friends. A book can have worth for us only when we have learned to love it; and since a real book, like a real man, has its proper character, it is not easy to determine whom it will please or displease. Once it has taken a safe place in literature, it will, of course, be praised by everybody; but this, like the praise of men, is often meaningless. All who read know something about the great books, but their knowledge, unless it leads them to intimate acquaintance with some one or several of these books, has little worth. Books are, indeed, a world which each one must discover for himself. Another may tell us about them, but the truth and beauty there is in them for each one, each one must find. The value of a book, like that of a man, lies not in its freedom from fault, but in its qualities, in the good it contains. Words which inspire the love of spiritual beauty and noble action cannot be false: the consent of the wise places them in the canon. The imperishable goods are truth, freedom, love, and beauty. Valuable alone is that which enriches and ennobles life. There are natures for whom the lack of knowledge is as painful as the lack of food. They are ahungered and athirst for it, and their suffering impels them to ceaseless meditation and study, as the only means of relief.

The self-educator's first and simplest aim should be to learn to know and do well whatever he knows and does; and to this end let him often observe and consider how rare are they who know anything thoroughly or do well any of the hundred things which are part of daily life: who talk well, or write well, or behave well. Herbert Spencer affirms that it is better to learn the meanings of things than the meanings of words; but he loses sight of the fact that the meanings of things become plain only when things are clothed in words, which, in truth, are things, being nothing else than the very form and body of nature as it reveals itself within the mind of man. The world is chiefly a mental fact. From mind it receives the forms of time and space, the principle of causality, color, warmth, and beauty. Were there no mind, there would be no world. The end of man is the pursuit of perfection, through communion with God, his fellows, and nature, by means of knowledge and conduct, of faith, hope, admiration, and love. It is easy to praise work overmuch. Like money, it is a means, not an end, and it is good or evil as it is made to help or harm the worker, for man is an end, not a means. The work which millions are still forced to do is a curse,—the trail of the serpent is over it all, and no people has the right to call itself civilized, while work which dehumanizes is not merely permitted, but encouraged.

Let us not teach the young to believe they are born into a world of delights and pleasures, but let us strive to enable them to realize that, upon this earth, only the wise and good and strong can make themselves really at home; that for the wicked and the weak its very delights and pleasures turn to sorrow and suffering. We pity the hard-driven beast of burden. How then is it possible to look with complacency on a world in which multitudes of human beings are condemned to the work of the ox and the ass? For the healthy man, wealth and happiness would seem to be identical, if his desires are confined to the things of which money is the equivalent. But this is a delusion, for the plenary possession of these things has never satisfied a human being. Man needs virtue, knowledge, love, and to take the obvious view, he needs the power to enjoy the things money buys; and of this money deprives him.

When we consider the many unworthy means men take to gain wealth and office, we are forced to believe that to reach their ends they are ready to profess to hold opinions and beliefs about which they care nothing or which they really do not accept at all. By this following of time-servers and place-hunters every noble cause is weakened and the purest faith is corrupted.

To labor for those we love, to sit in the hours of rest, with wife and children about us, smiling in the blaze of the fire we have lighted, sheltered by the roof we have built, secure in the sense of protection our presence inspires, is to feel that life is good. But is it not a higher thing to turn away, in disrespect of all this peace and comfort, and to strive alone, by thought and deed, to find the way which leads to God and to be a pioneer therein for those who wander helpless and astray? The more we dwell with truth and love, the more conscious we become that they are the best, and are everlasting; and thus our immortality is revealed to us. Visibly we float on the boundless stream and disappear; but inasmuch as we are truth-loving and love-cherishing, we dwell in an abiding city, and may behold our bodies carried forth by the flood, as a man sees his house swept away, while he himself remains. Our thoughtlessness and indifference, our indolence and frivolousness, blind us to the infinite worth and significance of life; and they who call themselves religious often take it as lightly as worldlings and unbelievers.

In the Universe there is nothing which exists separate and apart from other things. The satellites hold to the planets, the planets to the suns, the suns to one another, all in obedience to the same laws which bind the body to earth, and cause the water to flow and the vapor to rise. For the senses there is separateness, but for the mind there is union and unity. Communion is the law of souls as of bodies. Both are immersed in a boundless world, from which if they could be drawn forth they would cease to be. The principle of this infinite harmony is love, is God.

The right human bond is that which unites soul with soul; and only they are truly akin who consciously live in the same world, who think, believe, and love alike, who hope for the same things, aspire to the same ends.

Our mental view never reaches the ultimate nature of being, and hence our knowledge, whether of material or of spiritual things, is incomplete. Faith is the effort to supply the defect which inheres in all our knowing. Knowledge springs from faith, faith from knowledge, as rivers from clouds, clouds from rivers. The more we know, the more we believe; and our growing consciousness does not make us content to rest in a mechanical view of nature, but it brings home to us with increasing power the awfulness of the infinite mystery, which we more and more clearly perceive to be a spiritual rather than a material fact. If at present there is a certain failure of will and consequent discouragement in the pursuit of moral and intellectual perfection, this is a result of our passing bewilderment in the presence of the revelations of science and of the mighty forces it places in the hands of man, and not of any new knowledge which tends to inspire misgivings concerning the being of God and our kinship with Him:—-

From nature up to law, from law to love:
This is the ascendant path in which we move,
Impelled by God in ways that lighten still,
Till all things meet in one eternal thrill.

As the Universe revealed by the Copernican astronomy and the other natural sciences is infinitely more sublime and marvellous than such a world as the Israelites, the Greeks, or the Romans imagined, so they who see rightly in the luminous ether of modern intelligence understand better than the ancients that human life is not an ephemeral and superficial, but an immortal and central power, enrooted in God, and drawing its substance and sustenance from Him.

The appeal to shame is a poor argument. The fact that men of great intellectual power and learning have held an opinion to be true does not make it so. New knowledge may have shown it to be false, or the general advance of the race may have changed the point of view. The presumption of the larger wisdom of the Ancients we cannot accept: for we, not they, are the true ancients. The purest and the holiest prayer men speak is this: "Thy will be done." They who utter it from the inmost soul, find peace, even as a fretful child sinks to rest upon the mother's bosom. In learning to love the will of God they come at last not merely to believe, but to feel that His will guides the Universe, and that all will be well. When an utterance comes forth from the depths of our spiritual being, men cannot but hearken. It is as though we should bring to exiles tidings of a long-lost home and country.

To what a weight he stoops who addresses himself with fixed resolve to the life of thought! The burden indeed is heavy, but the pathway lies through pleasant fields where great souls move to and fro in freedom and at peace. And as he grows accustomed to his labor, the world widens, the heavens break open, the dead live again, and with them he rises into the high regions where the petty cares and passions of mortals do not reach.

He who would educate himself must make use of his own powers. He must observe, think, examine, read, argue, ponder; he must learn when to hold judgment in suspense, and when to give the wings of the soul free sweep through the high and serene realms of truth and beauty. The farther we dwell from the crowd, with its current opinion, the better and truer shall we and our thoughts become. They who write for multitudinous readers rise with difficulty above the dignity of mountebanks.

There is a radical defect in the character of whoever works in the spirit of a trifler, however blameless his conduct. The power to inspire faith in the seriousness and goodness of life is a sufficient test of the worth of a scheme of education.

No one should fill an office which he is unable to hold without hindrance to the play of mind and heart that makes him a man. The dignities we possess at the cost of knowledge and virtue are like jewels for the sake of which one goes hungry and naked; mere glittering baubles for which we barter the soul's prosperity.

Experience is personal, and it is largely incommunicable; but genius—and in this lies its power and charm—renders it communicable. What the poet or the painter has felt and seen, he makes all men feel and see. The difference between man and man, between the child and the youth, the youth and the adult, is chiefly a difference in feeling, in the manner in which they are impressed; and it is our nature to be drawn in admiration or reverence to those who by their words or deeds give us deeper impressions of the worth of life, and thus open for us new sources of feeling.

Fair thoughts rise in the heart and mind of genius, like the fragrant breath which the dewy flowers exhale in the face of the rising sun, and they utter themselves as simply as matin songs warbled by sweet-throated birds.

Faith in the infinite nature and worth of truth, goodness, and love, is the dawn which shall merge into the fulness of day, when, in other worlds, God looks upon the soul, reborn from out this seemingness.

Our position, our reputation, our wealth, our comforts, are but a vesture like the body itself. They shall fall away, and we shall remain with God. There is no liberty but obedience to the impulse of the higher nature which urges us to think nobly, to act rightly, and to love constantly. The dominion of appetite is slavery; the dominion of reason and conscience is freedom.

Renan somewhere says he could wish for nothing better than that a little volume of selections from his writings might commend itself to young women, whose fair faces should bend over it, and find there a reflection of their own pure souls. But where there is no God, the soul is not mirrored, and we never really love an author who weakens faith and hope.

With whatever success we advance towards the wide and serene life of the pure reason, let us still cling to faith, hope, and love, the primal powers which keep watch at our birth, and which bend over our cradles, and which alone lift us into the world of enduring peace and hold us within the sheltering arms of God. In the enlightened mind, faith is a higher virtue than it can be for the ignorant, and to sustain it there is need of a nobler life.

He whom neither learning nor power nor wealth can corrupt must have virtue; for learning breeds conceit, and power begets pride, and wealth debases both the mind and heart.

The intellect does not recognize that conscience may forbid its exercise, since knowledge cannot be evil. If earth were a hell and life a curse and the Universe but a cinder, it would still be good to know the fact. The saddest truth is better than the merriest lie.

To know a thing is to be conscious of its relation to the mind. We know it, not in itself, but in and through this relation. Our knowledge of God, who is the absolute, is not absolute knowledge, but a knowledge of Him in so far as He is related to the mind of man. Since, however, mind is reason and not unreason, there is harmony between it and things, between it and God; and hence to be conscious of its relation to God and the universe is to be conscious of a real relation, in which both the thinker and his thought are in truth what they seem to be. The ultimate reality is inferred, not directly perceived. It reveals itself to the purest faith and love, and may be hidden from one who knows all the sciences.

As man's relations to his fellows make him a social and political being, so his relations to the unseen power behind and within the visible world, of whose presence he is always, however dimly, conscious, and to whom he refers whatever touches the senses, as well as the principle of life itself, make him a religious being.

In identifying what seem to be our particular interests with the interests of all, we make escape from narrowness and isolation into the general life of humanity; and when we come to understand that not only mankind but all nature is a Unity in the Consciousness of the Infinite and Eternal, bound together by thought and love, we enter into the glorious liberty of the Sons of God, and feel that nor height nor depth nor things past nor things to come shall separate us from the divine charity. We are akin to all that may become part of our life; and whatever we know or love or admire is spiritualized and made human. To understand the things of the spirit we must have spiritual experience. The intuitions of time and space, as well as the principle of causality, are given in the constitution of the mind. So is the idea of being, of perfection, of beauty, of eternity, of infinity, of duty. To think implies being, to perceive things as existing in time and space implies consciousness of eternity and infinity. To know the imperfect is possible only in the light of the perfect. Subject is itself object, the first known and best understood, and the laws of mind are laws of being. If the constitution of mind makes the revelation of the material world possible only under the forms of time and space, intelligible only as sequence of cause and effect, the reason is to be found in the nature of things. If the constitution of mind postulates one who knows and shapes, in a world in which whatever is, is intelligible, in which there is order, proportion, and purpose, it is because such an One is given in the nature of things, and He is God. However living our faith, it is faith and not knowledge; and should it become knowledge, it would cease to be faith.

There are three kinds of authors,—those who impart knowledge, those who give delight, and those who strengthen and inspire.

A noble thought rightly expressed sweeps the higher nerve centres as the touch of a perfect performer the strings of an instrument; but if the instrument is poor and irresponsive, the appeal is made in vain. Life has the power to propagate itself, and if the words thou utterest are living, they will strike root somewhere and bud and blossom and bear fruit; but if there is no life in them, be content to have them fall and lie amid the dust of the dead. God and the universe are what they are, and the best even genius can do is to throw over them a revealing light. He who feels that he is always in the presence of God will strive as religiously to think only what is true as he will strive to do only what is right. A phrase which leaps forth aglow with life from the heart and brain of genius, not only lives forever, but retains forever the power to awaken, when brought into contact with a brain and heart, the thrill with which it first came into being.

Only a few know and love the poet, but they are young and fair, and the music of high thoughts and pure love is rhythmic with the current of their blood; and if among them there be found some who are old, they are choice spirits who have risen from out the lapses of time into regions where what is true and beautiful is so forever. This little band of chosen ones accompanies him adown the centuries, and listens to the melody which wells in his heart and breaks into songs that shall give delight as long as the air of spring is pleasant and the flowers fragrant and the carollings of birds delightful; and while the poet strolls on the outskirts of time, thus loved and thus attended, the stormy and glittering favorites of the crowd drop from sight and are forgotten, or remembered but as the echo of a name.

A line from Homer, which sounds like a response from our own heart, is clothed with the mystery of diviner power, because it makes us feel that we were alive thousands of years ago amid the Grecian isles, thus revealing to us the unreality of time and space, and the everlasting nature of truth and beauty.

As it is right to admire and love whatever is good wherever it is found, it needs must be the part of wisdom to seek to know and appreciate all that is true and high in the works of genius, though there, like precious stones and metals in the mine, it be mingled with baser matter. It is but narrowness or intellectual pharisaism to turn from a great author because in his life and works there may be things of which we cannot approve. Shall we abandon God because His world is full of evil, or Christ because there is corruption in the church? St. Paul appeals to pagan literature, St. Augustine is the disciple of Plato, St. Thomas Aquinas of Aristotle, and the culture and civilization of Christendom are largely due to influences which are not Christian. Whatever is good is from God. There is no surer mark of the lack of culture than the use of ill-natured and abusive epithets. To feel the need of injurious words to express one's opinion, merely shows that one is angry, and anger is vulgar.

Whatever is inspired by vanity is in bad taste. This is why a showy style is a false style, why fine writing is poor writing. The author yields to the spirit of vainglory, whereas he should be wholly bent upon uttering his thought as he knows it. It is as though he should call our attention to a costly garb when what we want to see is a man.

As a plain face is better than a mask, though fine, so one's own style, though inferior, is better than any which is borrowed.

True books survive without help or let of critics, by virtue of their vital quality, which attracts kindred spirits with irresistible power.

When their worth becomes known, the critics set up a howl of praise, and many buy; but only a few make them their serious study, and learn to know and love them. Truth is the mind's food; and, like that of the body, it is nourishment only when it has been digested and assimilated. It is, after all, but a little while since man began to think. As yet he is learning the alphabet. Take heart then, and apply thy mind. As we grow older the years seem to run to months, the months to weeks, the weeks to days, the days to hours, the hours to moments, until time, like an exhalation, appears to dissolve in the inane, and become the nothing it was and is and will be for eternity.

If thought were given us, like house and clothing, merely for our personal comfort, wisdom would lead us to think with and like all the world. They who are eager for the good opinion of others seem to have but weak faith in their own worth.

The art of pleasing would better deserve our study were there more who are worth pleasing, or were it less difficult to please without loss of sincerity and without stooping to the service of vulgar interests. Not how much or how many things thou knowest is of import. An industrious reader, of retentive memory, will easily know more things than a great philosopher compared with whom he is but a child.

Know thyself was the sum of what Socrates taught, and each of the seven wise men rested his fame upon an apothegm. To expect the multitude to appreciate the best in life or literature, is to expect them to be what they have never been and will probably never be. Would you have an ox admire the sunrise or the pearly dew, when all he feels the need of is grass? Appeal to the many if you will, but if your appeal is for the highest, only the few will hearken.

Consider not what great men or books are worth in themselves, but what they are worth to thee; for thou art able to judge of their value only in so far as thou understandest and lovest them.

If thou canst not bear trouble, sorrow, and disappointment without loss of composure, thou art poorly equipped for life's struggle. If thou mayst not lead the life thou wouldst wish, thou canst at least make the life thou leadest the means to improve thyself. If we were so constituted that thought, feeling, and imagination might have free and healthful play in ever-during darkness and isolation, life would still be good. Could I live surrounded by those I love, I should feel less keenly the discontent which the consciousness of my higher needs creates; and besides, it is not easy to rest in the comforts and luxuries which make and keep us inferior, except in the company of those we love. If our ordinary power of sight were as great as that we gain with the help of the microscope, the world would become for us a place of horrors; and if we could clearly see ourselves as we are, life would be less endurable. God blurs our vision as a mother hides from her child its wound.

Pleasures which quickly end in revulsion of feeling are but momentary escapes from pain; and they alone are fortunate who are able to persevere in pursuits which give them pure delight. "All good," says Kant, "which is not based on the highest moral principle is but empty appearance and splendid misery."

Sensations of color, taste, sound, smell, touch, heat and cold, perceptions of magnitude, and temporal and spatial relations, is the sum of what we know; and yet we are conscious that reason means infinitely more than this, that its proper object is the eternal world of truth, goodness, and beauty. Think for thyself with a single view to truth; for so only will thy thought be of worth and service to others. We feel ourselves only in action, and hence the need of doing lest we lose ourselves and be swallowed in nothingness. And for the old and feeble even worry, I suppose, is a comfort, for it helps to keep this self-consciousness alive. It is impossible to say whence a thought comes, and it is often difficult to determine the occasion by which it has been suggested.

Fortunate are the children all of whose knowledge comes from man and nature in their purity, whose memory holds no words which are not the symbols of what they themselves have seen and felt, in whose minds no will-o'-the-wisp from chimera worlds flits to and fro. It is only by keeping men in ignorance and vice that it is possible to keep them from the contagion of great thoughts. They who have little are thought to have no right to anything. Thus the plagiarized sayings of Napoleon and other nurslings of fame pass for their own; who their real authors were, seeming to be a matter of indifference.

If I am not pleased with myself, but should wish to be other than I am, why should I think highly of the influences which have made me what I am? Should I publish what I believe to be true and well expressed, and competent judges should declare it to be worthless in form and substance, the verdict would be interesting to me, and I should set to work to discover why and how I had so far failed in discernment. "A thoroughly cultivated man," says Fontenelle, "is informed by all the thinkers of the past, as though he had lived and continued to grow in knowledge during all the centuries." The author is rewarded when his readers are made better.

The most persuasive of men are the praisers of patent medicines. Their eloquence is more richly rewarded than that of all the orators, who also are paid, for the most part, in inverse ratio to the amount of truth they utter. Fame, as fame, is the merest vanity. No wise man wishes to be talked and written about, living or dead, to be a theme chiefly for fools.

Literature is writing in which genuine thought and feeling are rightly expressed. They who content themselves with what others have uttered, learn nothing. The blind need a guide, but they who are able to see should look for themselves. There is, indeed, in the words of genius a glow which never dies; but it only dazzles and misleads, if it fails to stimulate and strengthen our own powers of vision. True speech is not idle; it is utterance of life, the mate of action, and the begetter of noble deeds. Strive for knowledge and strength, but do not appear to have them.

"A book," says La Bruyère, "which exalts the mind and inspires high and manly thoughts, is good, and the work of a master." A phrase suffices to tell the man is ignorant or the book worthless. As the body is nourished by dead things, vegetable and animal, so the mind feeds on the thoughts of those who have ceased to live, which, it would seem, are never rightly understood until the thinkers have passed away.

To be unwilling to be proved wrong is to fail in love of truth; to resent an objection is to lack culture. One may believe what cannot be demonstrated, but to grow angry because there is no proof is absurd.

To do deeds and to utter thoughts which long after we have departed shall remain to cheer, to illumine, to strengthen and console, is to be like God; and the desire of noble minds is not of praise, but of abiding power for good.

He who is certain of himself needs not the good opinion of men, not of those even who are competent to judge. Only the vain and foolish or the designing and dishonest will wish to receive credit for more ability and virtue than they have. An exaggerated reputation may nourish conceit or win favor; but the wise and the good put away conceit, and desire not favors which are granted from mistaken notions.

"I hate false words," says Landor, "and seek with care, difficulty, and moroseness those that fit the thing."

Dwell not with complacency upon aught thou hast or hast achieved, but address thyself each day, like a simple-hearted child, to the task God sets thee; and remember when the last hour comes thou canst carry nothing to Him but faith in His mercy and goodness.

CHAPTER II.

TRUTH AND LOVE.

Truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it; the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it; and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.—BACON.

As those who have little think their little much, so those who have few ideas believe with obstinacy that they are the sum of all truth. If the world could but be made to see what they see there would be no ills. They have not even a suspicion of the unutterable complexity of the warp and woof of nature and of life; and when their opinions are combated they imagine they thereby acquire new importance, and they defend them with such zeal that they make proselytes and found sects in religion, politics, and literature. The source of the greater part of error is the absoluteness the mind attributes to its knowledge and, as part of this, the persuasion that at each stage of our mental life, we are capable of seeing things as they are. The aim of the philosopher, as of the Christian, is to escape from the ephemeral self by renouncing what is petty, partial, apparent, and transitory, that the true self may unfold in the world of the permanent, of things which have an aptitude for perpetuity; but the philosopher's efforts are intellectual and moral, while the Christian's source of strength is the love which is enrooted in divine faith.

"The brief precept," says St. Augustine, "is given there once for all,—Love, and do what thou wilt. If thou art silent, be silent for love; if thou speakest, speak for love; if thou correctest, correct for love; if thou sparest, spare for love. The root of love is within, and from it only good can come." Life springs from love, and love is its being, aim, and end. Each soul is born of souls yearning that he be born, and he lives only so far as he leaves himself and becomes through love part of the life of God and the race of man.

Primordial matter, with which the physicists start, is twin brother of nothing. In every conceivable hypothesis, we assume either that nothing is the cause of something, or that from the beginning there was something or some one who is all the universe may become. If truth and love and goodness are of the essence of the highest life evolved in nature, they are of the essence of that by which nature exists and energizes. If reason is valid at all, it avails as an immovable foundation for faith in God and in man's kinship with him. The larger the world we live in, the greater the opportunities for self-education. He who knows friends and foes, who is commended and found fault with, who tastes the delights of home and breathes the air of strange lands, who is followed and opposed, who triumphs and suffers defeat, who contends with many and is left alone, who dwells with his own thoughts and in the company of the great minds of all time,—necessarily gains wisdom and power, and learns to feel himself a man.

Science springs from man's yearning for truth; art, from his yearning for beauty; religion, from his yearning for love: and as truth, beauty, and love are a harmony, so are science, art, and religion; and if conflicts arise, they are the results of ignorance and passion. The charm of faith, hope, and love, of knowledge, beauty, and religion, lies in their power to open life's prison, thus permitting the soul to escape to commune with the Infinite and Eternal, with the boundless mysterious world of being which forever draws us on and forever eludes our grasp. The higher the man, the more urgent this need of self-escape.

We look upon lifelong imprisonment of the body as among the greatest of evils, but that the mind should be suffered to languish in the dungeon of ignorance, error, and prejudice, seems comparatively a slight thing. Thy whole business, as a rational being, is to know and follow truth,—with gratitude and joy if possible, but, in any case, with courage and resignation. Mind maketh man; and the most money and place can do, is to make millionnaires and titularies.

The Alpine guides, who lead travellers through the sublimest scenery in the world, are as insensible to its grandeur as the stocks they grasp; and we nearly all are as indifferent as these drudges to Nature's divine spectacle, with its starlit heavens, its risings and settings of sun and moon, its storms and calms, its changes of season, its clouds and snows and breath of many-tinted flowers, its children's faces, and plumage and songs of birds.

As we judge of many things by samples, a glance may suffice to show the worthlessness of a book, but the value of one that is genuine is not quickly perceived, for it reveals itself the more the oftener it is read and pondered. There is not a more certain, a purer, or a more delightful source of contentment and independence than a taste for the best literature. In the midst of occupations and cares of whatever kind it enables us to look forward to the hour when the noblest minds and most generous hearts shall welcome us to their company to be entertained with great thoughts rightly uttered and with information concerning whatever is of interest to man.

In every home the best works of the great poets, historians, philosophers, orators, and story-writers should lie within reach of the young, who should be permitted, not urged, to read them. We may know a man by the company he keeps; we may know him better still by the books he loves: and if he loves none, he is not worth knowing.

Matthew Arnold praises culture for "its inexhaustible indulgence, its consideration of circumstances, its severe judgment of actions joined to its merciful judgment of persons."

When we have learned to love work, to love honest work, work well done, excellently well done, we have within ourselves the most fruitful principle of education.

Who shall speak ill of bodily health and vigor? Herbert Spencer affirms that it is man's first duty to be a good animal. But since we cannot all be athletes or be well even, let us not refuse to find consolation in the fact that much of what is greatest, whether in the world of thought or action, has been wrought by mighty souls in feeble and suffering bodies; and since men gladly risk health and life to acquire gold, shall we not be willing, if need be, to be "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought," if so we may attain to truth and love?

Great things are accomplished only by concentration. What we ourselves think, love, and do, until it becomes a habit, is the form and substance of our life.

To live in the company of those who have or seek culture is to breathe the vital air of mental health and vigor.

The scientific investigator gives his whole attention to the facts before him; but the discipline of close observation, however favorable it may be to accuracy, weakens capacity for wide and profound views. On the other hand, the speculative thinker is apt to grow heedless or oblivious of facts. Hence a minute observer is seldom a great philosopher, a great philosopher rarely a careful observer.

"Employment," says Ruskin, "is the half, and the primal half of education, for it forms the habits of body and mind, and these are the constitution of man." Tell me at and in what thou workest, and I will tell thee what thou art. The secret of education lies in the words of Christ,—He that hath eyes to see, let him see; he that hath ears to hear, let him hear. The soul must flow through the channels of the senses until it meets the universe and clothes it with the beauty and meaning which reveal God.

When I think of all the truth which still remains for me to learn, of all the good I yet may do, of all the friends I still may serve, of all the beauty I may see, life seems as fresh and fair, as full of promise, as is to loving souls the dawn of their bridal day. Animals, children, savages, the thoughtless and frivolous, live in the present alone; they consequently lead a narrow, ephemeral, and superficial existence. They strike no deep roots into the past, they forebode no divine future, they enter not behind the veil where the soul finds ever-during truth and power.

"The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers."

Whatever sets the mind in motion may lead us to secret worlds, though it be a falling apple, as with Newton, or the swing of the pendulum, as with Galileo, or a boy's kite, as with Franklin, or throwing pebbles into the water, as with Turner. Watt sat musing by the fire, and noticed the rise and fall of the lid of the boiling kettle, and the steam engine, like a vision from unknown spheres, rose before his imagination. A child, carelessly playing with the glasses that lay on the table of a spectacle-maker, gave the clew to the invention of the telescope. The pestle, flying from the hand of Schwarz, told him he had found the explosive which has transformed the world. Drifting plants, of a strange species, whispered to Columbus of a continent that lay across the Atlantic. Patient observation and work are the mightiest conquerors.

Among the maxims, called triads, which have come down to us from the Celtic bards, we find this: "The three primary requisites of genius,—an eye that can see nature; a heart that can feel nature; and boldness that dares follow nature." He who has no philosophy and no religion, no theory of life and the world, has nothing which he finds it greatly important to say or do. He lacks the impulse of genius, the educator's energy and enthusiasm. Having no ideal, he has no end to which he may point and lead. To do well it is necessary to believe in the worth of what we do. The power which upholds and leads us on is faith,—faith in God, in ourselves, in life, in education.

Forever to be blessed and cherished is the love-inspired mother or the teacher whose generous heart and luminous mind first leads us to believe in the priceless worth of wisdom and virtue, thus kindling within the soul a quenchless fire which warms and irradiates our whole being.

To be God's workman, to strive, to endure, to labor, even to the end, for truth and righteousness, this is life.

"My desire," says Dante, "and my will rolled onward, like a wheel in even motion, swayed by the love which moves the sun and all the stars."

If there are any who shrink from wrong more than from disgrace they best deserve to be called religious.

Strive not to be original or profound, but to think justly and to express clearly what thou seest; and so it may happen that thy view shall pierce deeper than thou knowest.

The words and deeds which are most certain to escape oblivion are those which nourish the higher life of the soul. Self-love, the love of one's real self, of one's soul, is the indispensable virtue. It is this we seek when we strive to know and love truth and justice; it is this we seek, when we love God and our fellow-men. In turning from ourselves to find them, we still seek ourselves; in abandoning life we seek richer and fuller life.

Truth separate from love is but half truth. Think of that which unites thee with thy fellows rather than of what divides thee from them. Religion is the bond of love, and not a subject for a debating club. If thou wouldst refute thy adversaries, commit the task to thy life more than to thy words. Read the history of controversy and ask thyself whether there is in it the spirit of Christ, the meek and lowly One? Its champions belong to the schools of the sophists rather than to the worshippers of God in spirit and in truth. And what has been the issue of all their disputes but hatreds and sects, persecutions and wars? If it is my duty to be polite and helpful to my neighbor, it is plainly also my duty to treat his opinions and beliefs with consideration and fairness.

There is a place in South America where the whole population have the goitre, and if a stranger who is free from the deformity chances to pass among them, they jeer and cry, "There goes one who has no goitre." What could be more delightfully human? We think it a holy thing to put down duelling, the battle of one with one; but we are full of enthusiasm over battles of a hundred thousand with a hundred thousand. Thus the Southern slave-owners were sworn advocates of the rights of man and of popular liberty.

The explanation of many provoking things is to be found in Dr. Johnson's words,—"Ignorance, simple ignorance;" but of many more probably in these other words,—Greed, simple greed.

"In science," says Bulwer, "read by preference the newest books; in literature, the oldest." This is wiser than Emerson's saying: "Never read a book which is not a year old."

The facility with which it is now possible to get at whatever is known on any subject has a tendency to create the opinion that reading up in this or that direction is education, whereas such reading as is generally done, is unfavorable to discipline of mind. Shall our Chautauquas and summer schools help to foster this superstition?

What passion can be more innocent than the passion for knowledge? And what passion gives better promise of blessings to one's self and to one's fellow-men? Why desire to have force and numbers on thy side? Is it not enough that thou hast truth and justice?

The loss of the good opinion of one's friends is to be regretted, but the loss of self-respect is the only true beggary.

Zeal for a party or a sect is more certain of earthly reward than zeal for truth and religion.

As it is unfortunate for the young to have abundance of money, fine clothes, and social success, so popularity is hurtful to the prosperity of the best gifts. It draws the mind away from the silence and strength of eternal truth and love into a world of clamor and noise. Patience is the student's great virtue; it is the mark of the best quality of mind. It takes an eternity to unfold a universe; man is the sum of the achievements of innumerable ages, and whatever endures is slow in acquiring the virtues which make for permanence.

The will to know, manifesting itself in persistent impulse, in never-satisfied yearning, is the power which urges to mental effort and enables us to attain culture.

"If a thing is good," says Landor, "it may be repeated. The repetition shows no want of invention; it shows only what is uppermost in the mind, and by what the writer is most agitated and inflamed." What hast thou learned to admire, to long for, to love, genuinely to hope for and believe? The answer tells thy worth and that of the education thou hast received.

When we have said a thousand things in praise of education, we must, at last, come back to the fundamental fact that nearly everything depends on the kind of people of whom we are descended, and on the kind of family in which our young years have passed. Nearly everything, but not everything; and it is this little which makes liberty possible, which inspires hope and courage, which, like the indefinable something that gives the work of genius its worth and stamp, makes us children of God and masters of ourselves. "Wisdom is the principal thing," says Solomon; "therefore get wisdom, and with all thy getting, get understanding."

He who makes himself the best man is the most successful one, while he who gains most money or notoriety may fail utterly as man.

With the advance of civilization our wants increase; and yet it is the business of religion and culture to raise us above the things money buys, and consequently to diminish our wants. They who are nearest to God have fewest wants; and they who know and follow truth need not place or title or wealth.

To every one the tempter comes, with a thousand pretexts drawn both from the intellect and the emotional nature, promising to lull conscience to sleep that he may lead the lower life in peace; but he who hearkens becomes a victim as helpless and as wretched as the victims of alcohol and opium.

In deliberate persevering action for high ends, all the subconscious forces within us, the many currents, which, like hidden water-veins, go to make our being, are taken up and turned in a deep-flowing stream into the ocean of our life. In such course of conduct the baser self is swallowed, and we learn to feel that we are part of the divine energy which moves the universe to finer issues. As life is only by moments and in narrow space, a little thing may disturb us and a little thing may take away the cause of our trouble. We are petty beings in a world of petty concerns. A little food, a little sleep, a little joy is enough to make us happy. A word can fill us with dismay, a breath can blow out the flickering flame of our self-consciousness. I often ride among graves, and think how easy it is for the fretful children of men to grow quiet. There they lie, having become weary of their toys and plays, on the breast of the great mother from whom they sprang, about whose face they frolicked and fought and cried for a day, and then fell back into her all-receiving arms, as raindrops fall into the water and mingle with it and are lost. No sight is so pathetic as that of a vast throng seeking to enjoy themselves. The hopelessness of the task is visible on all their thousand faces, athwart which, while they talk or listen or look, the shadow of care flits as if thrown from dark wings wheeling in circuits above them. The sorrow and toil and worry they have thought to put away, still lie close to them, like a burden which, having been set down, waits to be taken up again. God surely sees with love and pity His all-enduring and all-hoping children; it is His voice we hear in the words of Christ, "Misereor super turbam." I cannot but wish to be myself, and therefore to be happy; but when I think of God as essential to my happiness, I feel it is enough for me to know and love Him; for to imagine I might be of service to Him would be the fondest conceit. But He makes it possible for me to help my fellows, and in doing this, I fulfil the will of Him who is the father of all. The divine reveals itself in the human; and that religion alone is true which, striking its roots deep into humanity, exerts all its power to make men more godlike by making them more human.

They who in good faith inflicted the tortures of the Inquisition were led not by the light of reason, or that which springs from the contemplation of the life of Christ, but by the notion that the rack and fagot are instruments of mercy, if employed to save men from eternal torments; and tyrants, who are always cruel, gave encouragement and aid to the victims of fanaticism. Why should the sorrow or the sin or the loss of any human being give me pleasure? Is it not always the same story? In the fall of one we all are degraded, since, whoever fails, it is our common nature which suffers hurt.

Whether or not we have come forth from a merely animal condition, let us thank God we are human, and bend all our energies to remove the race farther and farther from the life over which thought and love and conscience have no dominion.

In the presence of the mighty machine, whose wheels and arms are everywhere, whose power is drawn from the exhaustless oceans and the boundless heavens, the importance of the individual dwindles and seems threatened with extinction. At such a time it is good to know that a right human soul is greater than a universe of machinery.

We feel that we are higher than all the suns and planets, because we know and love, and they do not; but when, in the light of this superiority, we turn to the thought of our own littleness, being scarcely more than nothing, such trouble rises in the soul that we throw ourselves upon God to escape doubt of the reality of life. If we believe that man is what he eats, his education is simply a question of alimentation; but if we hold that he is what he knows, and loves, and yearns, and strives for, his education is a problem of soul-nutrition.

The child is made educable by its faith in the father and mother, which is nothing else than faith in their truth and love; and the educableness of the man is in proportion to his faith in the sovereign and infinite nature of truth and love, which is faith in God.

It is in youth that we are most susceptible of education, because it is the privilege of youth to be free from tyrannic cares, and to be sensitive to the charm of noble and disinterested passions. If we show the young soul the way to higher worlds, he will not ask us to strew it with flowers, or pave it with gold, but he will be content to walk with bruised feet along mountain wastes, if at the summit is illumination and joy and peace.

As in religion many are called but few chosen, as in the race for wealth and place many start but few win the prize, so in the pursuit of intellectual and moral excellence, of the few who begin, the most soon weary, while of the remnant, many grow infirm in purpose or in body before the goal is reached.

Time and space, which hold all things, separate all things; but religion and culture bind them into unity through faith in God and through knowledge, thus forming a communion of holy souls and noble minds, for whom discord and division disappear in the harmony of the divine order in which temporal and spatial conditions of separateness yield to the eternal presence of truth and love. New ideas seem at first to remain upon the surface of the soul, and generations sometimes pass before they enter into its substance and become motives of conduct; and, in the same way, sentiments may influence conduct, when the notions from which they sprang have long been rejected. The old truth must renew itself as the race renews itself; it must be re-interpreted and re-applied to the life of each individual and of each generation, if its liberating and regenerating power is to have free scope. Reason and conscience are God's most precious gifts; and what does He ask but that we make use of them?

Right thinking, like right doing, is the result of innumerable efforts, innumerable failures, the final outcome of which is a habit of right thought and conduct.

Whoever believes in truth, freedom, and love, and follows after them with his whole heart, walks in God's highway, which leads to peace and blessedness.

A thing may be obscure from defect of light or defect of sight; and in the same way an author may be found dull either because he is so, or because his readers are dull. The noblest book even is but dead matter until a mind akin to its creator's awakens it to life again.

The appeal to the imagination has infinitely more charm than the appeal to the senses.

"But when evening falls," says Machiavelli, "I go home and enter my study. On the threshold I lay aside my country garments, soiled with mire, and array myself in courtly garb. Thus attired, I make my entrance into the ancient courts of the men of old, where they receive me with love, and where I feed upon that food which only is my own, and for which I was born. For four hours' space I feel no annoyance, forget all care; poverty cannot frighten nor death appall me." A man of genius works for all, for he compels all to think. An enlightened mind and a generous heart make the world good and fair.

Where there is perfect confidence, conversation does not drag; while for those who love it is enough that they be together: if they are silent, it is well; if they speak, mere nothings suffice.

The world of knowledge, all that men know, is, in truth, little and simple enough. It seems vast and intricate because we are imperfectly educated.

The soul, like the body, has its atmosphere, out of which it cannot live.

When opinions take the place of convictions, ideas that of beliefs, great characters become rare.

The pith of virtue lies not in thinking, but in doing. A real man strives to assert himself; for whether he seeks wealth, or power, or fame, or truth, or virtue, or the good of his fellows, he knows that he can succeed only through self-assertion, through the prevalence of his own thought and life.

They who abdicate the rights God gives the individual, seek in vain to preserve by constitutional enactments a semblance of liberty.

If it is human to hate whom we have injured, it is not less so to despise whom we have deceived; and yet those who are easily deceived are the most innocent or the most high-minded and generous. It seems hardly a human and must therefore be a divine thing, to live and deal with men without in any way giving them trouble and annoyance. Truth loves not contention, and when men fight for it, it vanishes in the noise and smoke of the combat.

The controversies of the schools, whether of philosophy, theology, literature, or natural science, have been among the saddest exhibitions of ineptitude. Is it conceivable that a thinker, or a believer, or a scholar, or an investigator should wrangle in the spirit of a pothouse politician? The more certain we are of ourselves and of the truth of what we hold, the easier it is for us to be patient and tolerant.

Wicked is whoever finds pleasure in another's pain. We can know more than we can love. Hence communion with the world is wider through the mind than through the heart, though less intimate and less satisfying. It is, however, longer active, for we continue to be delighted by new truth when we have ceased to care to make new friends. Learn to bear the faults of men as thou sufferest the changes of weather,—with equanimity; for impatience and anger will no more improve thy neighbors than they will prevent its being hot or cold. What men think or say of thee is unimportant—give heed to what thou thyself thinkest and sayst. If thou art ignored or reviled, remember such has been the fate of the best, while the world's favorites are often men of blood or lust or mere time-servers. He who does genuine work is conscious of the worth of what he does, and is not troubled with misgivings or discouraged by lack of recognition. If God looked away from His universe it would cease to be; and He sees him. The more we detach ourselves from crude realism, from the naive views of uneducated minds, the easier it becomes for us to lead an intellectual and religious life, for such detachment enables us to realize that the material world has meaning and beauty only when it has passed through the alembic of the spirit and become purified, fit object for the contemplation of God and of souls. They are true students who are drawn to seek knowledge by mental curiosity, by affinity with the intelligible, like that which binds and holds lover to lover, making their love all-sufficient and above all price. All that is of value in thy opinions is the truth they contain—to hold them dearer than truth is to be irrational and perverse. Thy faith is what thou believest, not what thou knowest. The crowd loves to hear those who treat the tenets of their opponents with scorn, who overwhelm their adversaries with abuse, who make a mockery of what their foes hold sacred; but to vulgarity of this kind a cultivated mind cannot stoop. To do so is a mark of ignorance and inferiority; is to confuse judgment, to cloud intellect, and to strengthen prejudice. If there are any who are so absurd or so perverse as to be unworthy of fair and rational treatment, to refute them is loss of time, to occupy one's self with them is to keep bad company. With the contentious, who are always dominated by narrow and petty views and motives, enter not into dispute, but look beyond to the wide domain of reason and to the patience and charity of Christ. When minds are alive and active, opposing currents of thought necessarily arise. Contradiction is the salt which keeps truth from corruption. As we let the light fall at different angles upon a precious stone, and change our position from point to point to study a work of art, so it is well to give more than one expression to the same truth, that the intellectual rays falling upon it from several directions, and breaking into new tints and shades, its full meaning and worth may finally be brought clearly into view. If those with whom thou art thrown appear to thee to be hard and narrow, call to mind that they have the same troubles and sorrows as thyself, essentially too the same thoughts and yearnings; and as, in spite of all thy faults, thou still lovest thyself, so love them too, even though they be too warped and prejudiced to appreciate thy worth.

The wise man never utters words of scorn,
For he best knows such words are devil-born.

Our opponents are as necessary to us as our friends, and when those who have nobly combated us die, they seem to take with them part of our mental vigor; they leave us with a deeper sense of the illusiveness of life. Freedom is found only where honest criticism of men and measures is recognized as a common right.

As one man's meat is another's poison, so in the world of intelligible things what refreshes and invigorates one, may weary and depress another. What delights the child makes no impression upon the man. Men and women, the ignorant and the learned, philosophers and poets, mothers and maidens, doers and dreamers, find their entertainment largely in different worlds. Napoleon despised the idealogue; the idealogue sees in him but a conscienceless force.

Outcries against wrong have little efficacy. They alone improve men who inspire them with new confidence, new courage, who help them to renew and purify the inner sources of life. Harsh zeal provokes excess, because it provokes contradiction. Whoever stirs the soul to new depths, whoever awakens the mind to new thoughts and aspirations, is a benefactor. The common man sees the fruits of his toil; the seed which divine men sow, ripens for others. The counsels worldlings give to genius can only mislead. Not only the truth which Christ taught, but the truth which nearly all sublime thinkers have taught, has seemed to the generation to which it was announced but a beggarly lie. The powerful have sneered with Pilate, while the mob have done the teachers to death.

Make truth thy garb, thy house, wherein thou movest and dwellest, and art comfortable and at home.

If thou knowest what thou knowest and believest what thou believest, thou canst not be disturbed by contradiction, but shalt feel that thy opposers are appointed by God to confirm thee in truth.

As the merchant keeps journal and ledger, so should he whose wealth is truth, take account in writing of the thoughts he gains from observation, reflection, reading, and intercourse with men. We become perfectly conscious of our impressions only in giving expression to them; hence ability to express what we feel and know is one of the chief and most important aims and ends of education.

What thou mayst not learn without employing spies, or listening to the stories of the malignant or the gossip of the vulgar, be content not to know.

Our miseries spring from idleness and sin; and idleness is sin and the mother of sin. "To confide in one's self and become something of worth," says Michelangelo, "is the best and safest course." Life-weariness, when it is not the result of long suffering, comes of lack of love, for to love any human being in a true and noble way makes life good. Whatever mistakes thou mayst have made in the choice of a profession and in other things, it is still possible for thee to will and do good, to know truth, and to love beauty, and this is the best life can give. Think of living, and thou shalt find no time to repine.

The character of the believer determines the character of his faith, whatever the formulas by which it is expressed. What we are is the chief constituent of the world in which we now live, and this must be true also of the world in which we believe and for which we hope. For the sensualist a spiritual heaven has neither significance nor attractiveness. The highest truth the noblest see has no meaning for the multitude, or but a distorted meaning. What is divinest in the teaching of Christ, only one in thousands, now after the lapse of centuries, rightly understands and appreciates. It is not so much the things we believe, know, and do, as the things on which we lay the chief stress of hope and desire, that shape our course and decide our destiny.

They alone receive the higher gifts, who, to obtain them, renounce the lower pleasures and rewards of life. Those races are noblest, those individuals are noblest, who care most for the past and the future, whose thoughts and hopes are least confined to the world of sense which from moment to moment ceaselessly urges its claims to attention. Desire fanned by imagination, when it turns to sensual things, makes men brutish; but when its object is intellectual and moral, it lifts them to worlds of pure and enduring delight.

When we would form an estimate of a man, we consider not what he knows, believes, and does, but what kind of being his knowledge, faith, and works have made of him. He who makes us learn more than he teaches has genius. Whoever has freed himself from envy and bitterness may begin to try to see things as they are.

Each one is the outcome of millions of causes, which, so far as he can see, are accidental. How ridiculous then to complain that if this or that only had not happened, all would be well. It is ignorance or prejudice to make a man's conduct an argument against the worth of his writings. Byron was a bad man, but a great poet; Bacon was venal, but a marvellous thinker.

Books, to be interesting to the many, must abound in narrative, must run on like chattering girls, and make little demand upon attention. The appeal to thought is like a beggar's appeal for alms,—heeded by one only in hundreds who pass; for, to the multitude, mental effort is as disagreeable as parting with their money.

A newspaper is old the day after its publication, and there are many books which issue from the press withered and senile, but the best, like the gods, are forever young and delightful.

"Whatever bit of a wise man's work," says Ruskin, "is honestly and benevolently done, that bit is his book or his piece of art. It is mixed always with evil fragments,—ill-done, redundant, affected work; but if you read rightly, you will easily discover the true bits, and those are the book." Again: "No book is worth anything which is not worth much; nor is it serviceable until it has been read and re-read, and loved, and loved again; and marked so that you may refer to the passages you want in it."

Unity, steadfastness, and power of will mark the great workers. A dominant impulse urges them forward, and with firm tread they move on till death bids them stay. As the will succumbs to idleness and sin, it can be developed and maintained in health and vigor only by right action.

If thou makest thy intellectual and moral improvement thy chief business, thou shalt not lack for employment, and with thy progress thy joy and freedom shall increase.

Progress is betterment of life. The accumulation of discoveries, the multiplication of inventions, the improvement of the means of comfort, the extension of instruction, and the perfecting of methods, are valuable in the degree in which they contribute to this end. The characteristic of progress is increase of spiritual force. In material progress even, the intellectual and moral element is the value-giving factor. Progress begets belief in progress. As we grow in worth and wisdom, our faith in knowledge and conduct is developed and confirmed, and with more willing hearts we make ourselves the servants of righteousness and love; for in the degree in which religion and culture prevail within us, co-operation for life tends to supersede the struggle for life, which if not the dominant law, is, at least, the general course of things when left to Nature's sway.

Catchwords, such as progress, culture, enlightenment, and liberty, are for the multitude rarely more than psittacisms, mere parrot sounds. So long as we genuinely believe in an ideal and strive to incarnate it, the spirit of hope kindles the flame of enthusiasm within the breast. Its attainment, however, if the ideal is sensual or material, leads to disappointment and weariness. Behold yonder worshipper at the shrine of money and pleasure, whose life is but a yawn between his woman and his wine. But if the ideal is spiritual, failure in the pursuit cannot dishearten us, and success but opens to view diviner worlds towards which we turn our thought and love with self-renewing freshness of mind.

If thou seekest for beauty, it is everywhere; if for hideousness, it too is everywhere.

To believe in one's self, to have genuine faith in the impressions, thoughts, hopes, loves, and aspirations which are in one's own soul, and to strive ceaselessly to come to clear knowledge of this inner world which each one bears within himself, is the secret of culture. To bend one's will day by day to the weaving this light of the mind and warmth of the heart into the substance of life, into conduct, is the secret of character. At whatever point of time or space we find ourselves, we can begin or continue the task of self-improvement; for the only essential thing is the activity of the soul, seeking to become conscious of itself, through and in God and His universe.

The little bird upbuilds its nest
Of little things by ceaseless quest:
And he who labors without rest
By little steps will reach life's crest.

The true reader is brought into contact with a personality which reveals itself or permits its secret to be divined. In spirit and imagination he lives the life of the author. In his book he finds the experience and wisdom of years compressed into a few pages which he reads in an hour. The vital sublimation of what made a man is thus given him in its essence to exalt or to degrade, to inspire or to deaden his soul. In looking through the eyes of another, he learns to see himself, to understand his affinities and his tendencies, his strength and his weakness. Eat this volume and go speak to the children of Israel, said the spirit to the prophet Ezekiel. The meaning is—mentally devour, digest, and assimilate the book into the fibre and structure of thy very being, and then shalt thou be able to utter words of truth and wisdom to God's chosen ones. The world's spiritual wealth, so far as it has existence other than in the minds of individuals, is stored in literature, in books,—the great treasure-house of the soul's life, of what the best and greatest have thought, known, believed, felt, suffered, desired, toiled, and died for; and whoever fails to make himself a home in this realm of truth, light, and freedom, is shut out from what is highest and most divine in human experience, and sinks into the grave without having lived.

To those who have uttered themselves in public speech, there comes at times a feeling akin to self-reproach. They have taken upon themselves the office of teacher, and yet what have they taught that is worth knowing and loving? They have lost the privacy in which so much of the charm and freedom of life consists; they have been praised or blamed without discernment; and a great part of what they have said and written seems to themselves little more than a skeleton from which the living vesture has fallen. Ask them not to encourage any one to become an author. The more they have deafened the world with their voices, the more will they, like Carlyle, praise the Eternal Silence. They have in fact been taught, by hard experience, that the worth of life lies not in saying or writing anything whatever, but in pure faith, in humble obedience, in brave and steadfast striving. The woman who sweeps a room, the mother who nurses her child, the laborer who sows and reaps, believing and feeling that they are working with God, are leading nobler lives and doing diviner things than the declaimers and theorizers, and the religion which upholds them and lightens their burdens is better than all the philosophies.

CHAPTER III.

THE MAKING OF ONE'S SELF.

The wise man will esteem above everything and will cultivate those sciences which further the perfection of his soul.—PLATO.

It has become customary to call these endings of the scholastic year commencements; just as the people of the civilized world have agreed to make themselves absurd by calling the ninth month the seventh, the tenth the eighth, the eleventh the ninth, and the twelfth the tenth. And, indeed, the discourses which are delivered on these occasions would be more appropriate and more effective if made to students who, having returned from the vacations with renewed physical vigor, feel also fresh urgency to exercise of mind. But now, so little is man in love with truth, the approach of the moment when you are to make escape and find yourselves in what you imagine to be a larger and freer world, occupies all your thoughts, and thrills you with an excitement which makes attention difficult; and, like the noise of crowds and brazen trumpets, prevents the soul from mounting to the serene world where alone it is free and at home.

Since, however, the invitation with which I have been honored directs my address to the graduates of Notre Dame in this her year of Golden Jubilee, I may, without abuse of the phrase, entitle it a commencement oration; for the day on which a graduate worthy of the name leaves his college is the commencement day of a new life of study, more earnest and more effectual than that which is followed within academic walls, because it is the result of his sense of duty alone and of his uncontrolled self-activity. And, though I am familiar with the serious disadvantages with which a reader as compared with a speaker has to contend, I shall read my address, if for no other reason, because I shall thus be able to measure my time; and if I am prolix, I shall be so maliciously, and not become so through the obliviousness which may result from the illusive enthusiasm that is sometimes produced in the speaker by his own vociferation, and which he fondly imagines he communicates to his hearers.

The chief benefit to be derived from the education we receive in colleges and universities, and from the personal contact into which we are there thrown with enlightened minds, is the faith it tends to inspire and confirm in the worth of knowledge and culture, of conduct and religion; for nothing else we there acquire will abide with us as an inner impulse to self-activity, a self-renewing urgency to the pursuit of excellence. If we fail, we fail for lack of faith; but belief is communicated from person to person,—fides ex auditu,—and to mediate it is the educator's chief function. Through daily intercourse with one who is learned and wise and noble, the young gain a sense of the reality of science and culture, of religion and morality; which thus cease to be for them vague somethings of which they have heard and read, and become actual things,—realities, like monuments they have inspected, or countries through which they have travelled. They have been taken by the hand and led where, left to themselves, they would never have gone. The true educator inspires not only faith, but admiration also, and confidence and love,—all soul-evolving powers. He is a master whose pupils are disciples,—followers of him and believers in the wisdom he teaches. He founds a school which, if it does not influence the whole course of thought and history, like that of Plato or Aristotle, does at least form a body of men, distinguished by zeal for truth and love of intellectual and moral excellence. To be able thus, in virtue of one's intelligence and character, to turn the generous heart and mind of youth to sympathy with what is intelligible, fair, and good in thought and life, is to be like God,—is to have power in its noblest and most human form; and its exercise is the teacher's chief and great reward. To be a permanent educational force is the highest earthly distinction. Is not this the glory of the founders of religions, of the discoverers of new worlds?

In stooping to the mind and heart of youth, to kindle there the divine flame of truth and love, we ourselves receive new light and warmth. To listen to the noise made by the little feet of children when at play, and to the music of their merry laughter, is pleasant; but to come close to the aspiring soul of youth, and to feel the throbbings of its deep and ardent yearnings for richer and wider life, is to have our faith in the good of living revived and intensified. It is the divine privilege of the young to be able to believe that the world can be moulded and controlled by thought and spiritual motives; and in breathing this celestial air, the choice natures among them learn to become sages and saints; or if it be their lot to be thrown into the fierce struggles where selfish and cruel passions contend for the mastery over justice and humanity, they carry into the combat the serene strength of reason and conscience; for their habitual and real home is in the unseen world, where what is true and good has the Omnipotent for its defence. Of this soul of youth we may affirm without fear of error—

"The soul seeks God; from sphere to sphere it moves,
Immortal pilgrim of the Infinite."

Life is the unfolding of a mysterious power, which in man rises to self-consciousness, and through self-consciousness to the knowledge of a world of truth and order and love, where action may no longer be left wholly to the sway of matter or to the impulse of instinct, but may and should be controlled by reason and conscience. To further this process by deliberate and intelligent effort is to educate. Hence education is man's conscious co-operation with the Infinite Being in promoting the development of life; it is the bringing of life in its highest form to bear upon life, individual and social, that it may raise it to greater perfection, to ever-increasing potency. To educate, then, is to work with the Power who makes progress a law of living things, becoming more and more active and manifest as we ascend in the scale of being. The motive from which education springs is belief in the goodness of life and the consequent desire for richer, freer, and higher life. It is the point of union of all man's various and manifold activity; for whether he seeks to nourish and preserve his life, or to prolong and perpetuate it in his descendants, or to enrich and widen it in domestic and civil society, or to grow more conscious of it through science and art, or to strike its roots into the eternal world through faith and love, or in whatever other way he may exert himself, the end and aim of his aspiring and striving is educational,—is the unfolding and uplifting of his being.

The radical craving is for life,—for the power to feel, to think, to love, to enjoy. And as it is impossible to reach a state in which we are not conscious that this power may be increased, we can find happiness only in continuous progress, in ceaseless self-development. This craving for fulness of life is essentially intellectual and moral, and its proper sphere of action is the world of thought and conduct. He who has a healthy appetite does not long for greater power to eat and drink. A sensible man who has sufficient wealth for independence and comfort does not wish for more money; but he who thinks and loves and acts in obedience to conscience feels that he is never able to do so well enough, and hence an inner impulse urges him to strive for greater power of life, for perfection. He is akin to all that is intelligible and good, and is drawn to bring himself into ever-increasing harmony with this high world. Hence attention is for him like a second nature, for attention springs from interest; and since he feels an affinity with all things, all things interest him. And what is thus impressed upon his mind and heart he is impelled to utter in deed or speech or gesture or song, or in whatever way thought and sentiment may manifest themselves. Attention and expression are thus the fundamental forms of self-activity, the primary and essential means of education, of developing intellectual and moral power.

Interest is aroused and held by need, which creates desire. If we are hungry, whatever may help us to food interests us. Our first and indispensable interests relate to the things we need for self-preservation and the perpetuation of the race; and to awaken desire and stimulate effort to obtain them, instinct is sufficient, as we may see in the case of mere animals. But as progress is made, higher and more subtle wants are developed. We crave for more than food and wife and children. The social organism evolves itself; and as its complexity increases, the relations of the individual to the body of which he is a member are multiplied, and become more intricate. As we pass from the savage to the barbarous, and from the barbarous to the civilized state, intellect and conscience are brought more and more into play. Mental power gains the mastery over brute force, and little by little subdues the energies of inorganic nature, and makes them serve human ends. Iron is forced to become soft and malleable, and to assume every shape; the winds bear man across the seas; the sweet and gentle water is imprisoned and tortured until with its fierce breath it does work in comparison with which the mythical exploits of gods and demi-gods are as the play of children. Strength of mind and character takes precedence of strength of body. Hercules and Samson are but helpless infants in the presence of the thinker who reads Nature's secret and can compel her to do his bidding. If we bend our thoughts to this subject, we shall gain insight into the meaning and purpose of education, which is nothing else than the urging of intellect and conscience to the conquest of the world, and to the clear perception and practical acknowledgment of the primal and fundamental truth that man is man in virtue of his thought and love.

Instruction, which is but part of education, has for its object the development of the intellect and the transmission of knowledge. This, whether we consider the individual or society, is indispensable. It is good to know. Knowledge is not only the source of many of our highest and purest joys, but without it we can attain neither moral nor material good in the nobler forms. Virtue when it is enlightened gains a higher quality. And if we hold that action and not thought is the end of life, we cannot deny that action is, in some degree at least, controlled and modified by thought. Nevertheless, instruction is not the principal part of education; for human worth is more essentially and more intimately identified with character and heart than with knowledge and intellect. What we will is more important than what we know; and the importance of what we know is derived largely from its influence on the will or conduct.

A nation, like an individual, receives rank from character more than from knowledge; since the true measure of human worth is moral rather than intellectual. The teaching of the school becomes a subject of passionate interest, through our belief in its power to educate sentiment, stimulate will, and mould character. For in the school we do more than learn the lessons given us: we live in an intellectual and moral atmosphere, acquire habits of thought and behavior; and this, rather than what we learn, is the important thing. To imagine that youths who have passed through colleges and universities, and have acquired a certain knowledge of languages and sciences, but have not formed strongly marked characters, should forge to the front in the world and become leaders in the army of religion and civilization, is to cherish a delusion. The man comes first; and scholarship without manhood will be found to be ineffectual. The semi-culture of the intellect, which is all a mere graduate can lay claim to, will but help to lead astray those who lack the strength of moral purpose; and they whom experience has made wise expect little from young men who have bright minds and have passed brilliant examinations, but who go out into the world without having trained themselves to habits of patient industry and tireless self-activity.

Man is essentially a moral being; and he who fails to become so, fails to become truly human. Individuals and nations are brought to ruin not by lack of knowledge, but by lack of conduct. "Now that the world is filled with learned men," said Seneca, "good men are wanting." He was Nero's preceptor, and saw plainly how powerless intellectual culture was to save Rome from the degeneracy which undermined its civilization and finally brought on its downfall. If in college the youth does not learn to govern and control himself,—to obey and do right in all things, not because he has not the power to disobey and do wrong, but because he has not the will,—nothing else he may learn will be of great service. It seems to me I perceive in our young men a lack of moral purpose, of sturdiness, of downright obstinate earnestness, in everything—except perhaps in money-getting pursuits; for even in these they are tempted to trust to speculation and cunning devices rather than to persistent work and honesty, which become a man more than crowns and all the gifts of fortune. Without truthfulness, honesty, honor, fidelity, courage, integrity, reverence, purity, and self-respect no worthy or noble life can be led. And unless we can get into our colleges youths who can be made to drink into their inmost being this vital truth, little good can be accomplished there. Now, it often happens that these institutions are, in no small measure, refuges into which the badly organized families of the wealthy send their sons in the vain expectation that the fatal faults of inheritance and domestic training will be repaired. In college, as wherever there are men, quality is more precious than quantity. The number of students is great enough when they are of the right kind; and the work which now lies at our hand is to make it possible that those who have talent and the will to improve themselves may enter our institutions of learning. But those who are shown to be insusceptible of education should be eliminated; for they profit not themselves, and are a hindrance to the others.

Gladly I turn from them to you, young gentlemen, who have persevered in the pursuit of knowledge and virtue, and to-day are declared worthy to receive the highest honor Notre Dame can confer. The deepest and the best thing in us is faith in reason; for when we look closely, we perceive that faith in God, in the soul, in good, in freedom, in truth, is faith in reason. Individuals, nations, the whole race, wander in a maze of errors. The world of the senses is apparent and illusive, that of pure thought vague and shadowy. Science touches but the form and surface; speculation is swallowed in abysses and disperses itself; ignorance darkens, passion blinds the mind; the truth of one age becomes the error of a succeeding; opinions change from continent to continent and from century to century. The more we learn, the less we know; and what we most of all desire to know eludes our grasp. But, nevertheless, our faith in reason is unshaken; and holding to this faith, we hold to God, to good, to freedom, and to truth.

Goodness is the radical principle; the good, the primal aim and final end of life; for the good is whatever is helpful to life. Hence what is true is good, what is useful is good, what is fair is good, what is right is good; and the true, the useful, the fair, and the right are intertwined and circle about man like a noble sisterhood, to waken him to life, and to urge him toward God, the supreme good, whose being is power, wisdom, love without limit. The degree of goodness in all things is measured by their approach to this absolute Being. Hence the greater our strength, wisdom, and love, the greater our good, the richer and more perfect our life. There is no soul which does not bow with delight and reverence before Beauty and Power; and when we come to true insight, we perceive that holiness is Beauty and goodness Power. Genuine spiritual power is from God, and compels the whole mechanic world to acknowledge its absoluteness. The truths of religion and morality are of the essence of our life; they cannot be learned from another, but must be wrought into self-consciousness by our own thinking and doing,—by habitual meditation, and constant obedience to conscience. Virtue, knowledge, goodness, and greatness are their own reward: they are primarily and essentially ends, and only incidentally means. Hence those who strive for perfection with the view thereby to gain recognition, money, or place, do not really strive for perfection at all. They are also unwise; for virtue, knowledge, goodness, and greatness are not the surest means to such ends, and they can be acquired only with infinite pains. The highest human qualities cease to be the highest when they are made subordinate to the externalities of office and wealth. The one aim of a mind smitten with the love of excellence is to live consciously and lovingly with whatever is true or good or fair. And such a one cannot be disturbed whether by the general indifference of men or by their praise or blame. The standpoint of the soul is: What thou art, not what others think thee. If thou art at one with thy true self, God and the eternal laws bear thee up and onward. The moral and the religious life interpenetrate each other. To sunder them is to enfeeble both. To weaken faith is to undermine character; to fail in conduct is to deprive faith of inspiration and vigor. Learn to live thy religion, and thou shalt have little need or desire to argue and dispute about it. Truth is mightier than its witnesses, religion greater than its saints and martyrs. Learn to think, and thou shalt easily learn to live.

In the presence of the highest manifestations of thought and love, of truth and beauty, nothing perfect or divine is incredible. Men of genius, philosophers, poets, and saints, who by thinking and doing make this ethereal but most real world rise before us in concrete form and substance, are heavenly messengers and illuminators of the soul. Had none of them lived, how should we see and understand that man is Godlike and that God is truth and love? We cannot make this high world plain by telling about it. It is not a land which may be described. It is a state of soul which they alone comprehend who have been transformed by patient meditation and faithful striving. But once it is revealed, a thousand errors and obscurities fall away from us. If not educated, strive at least to be educable,—a believer in wisdom, and sensitive to all high influence, and eager to be quit of thy ignorance and hardness. As the dead cannot produce the live, so mechanical minds, however much they may be able to drill, train, and instruct, cannot educate. The secret of the mother's specific educational power lies in the fact that she is a spiritual not a mechanical force, loves and is loved by her pupils. The most ennobling and the most thoroughly satisfying sentiment of which we are capable is love. Until we love we are strangers to ourselves. We are like beings asleep or lost to the knowledge of themselves and all things, till, awakening to the appeal of the pure light and the balmy air, they look upon what is not themselves; and, finding it fair and beautiful, learn in loving it to feel and know themselves.

Increase of the power to love is increase of life. But love needs guidance. We first awaken in the world of the senses, and are attracted by what we see and touch and taste. The aim of education is to help the soul to rise above this world, in which, if we remain, we are little better than brutes. Hence the teacher seeks in many ways to reveal to the young the fact that the perfect, the best, cannot be seen or touched, cannot be grasped even by the mind; but that it is, nevertheless, that which they should strive to make themselves capable of loving above all things. And thus he prepares them to understand what is meant by the love of truth and righteousness, by the love of God. In the training of animals even, patience and gentleness are more effective than violence. How, then, shall we hope by physical constraint and harsh methods to educate human beings, who are human precisely because they are capable of love and are swayed by rational motives? There is no soul so gross, so deeply buried in matter, but it shall from some point or other make a sally to show it still bears the impress of God's image. At such points the educator will keep watch, studying how he may make this single ray of light interfuse itself with his pupil's whole being.

It is not possible to know there is no God, no soul, no free will, no right or wrong; at the worst, it is only possible to doubt all this. The universe is as inconceivable as God, and theories of matter as full of difficulties as theories of spirit. It is a question of belief or unbelief; ultimately a question of health or disease, of life or death. They who have no faith in God can have little faith in the worth of life, which can be for them but an efflorescence of death, a sort of inexplicable malady of atoms dreaming they are conscious. If the age tends irresistibly to destroy belief in God, the end will be the ruin of belief in the good of life. In the mean while the doubt which weakens the springs of hope and love is not a symptom of health but of disease, pregnant with suffering and misery for all, but most of all for the young. He who is loved in a true and noble way is surrounded by an element of spiritual light in which his worth is revealed to him. In perceiving what he is to another, he comes to understand what he is or may be in himself.

Our self respect even is largely due to the love we receive in childhood and youth. Enthusiasm springs from faith in God and in the soul, which begets in us a high and heroic belief in the divine good of life. It is thus an educational force of highest value. It calms and exalts the soul like the view of the starlit heavens and the everlasting mountains. It is, in every good and noble cause, a fountain head of endurance and perseverance. It bears us on with a sense of joy and vigor, such as is felt when, mounted on a high-mettled steed, we ride in the pleasant air of a spring morning, amid the beauties and grandeurs of nature. In the front of battle and in the presence of death it throws around the soul the light of immortal things. It gives us the plenitude of existence, the full and high enjoyment of living. On its wings the poet, the lover, the orator, the hero, and the saint are borne in rapture through worlds whose celestial glory and delightfulness cold and unmoved minds do not suspect. It is not a flame from the dry wood and withered grass, but a heat and glow from the abysmal depths of being. It makes us content to follow after truth and love in dark and narrow ways, as the miner, in central deeps where sunlight has never fallen, seeks his treasure. It keeps us fresh and young; and, like the warmer sun, reclothes the world day by day with new beauty. It teaches patience, the love of work without haste and without worry. It gives strength to hear and speak truth, and to walk in the sacred way of truth, as though we but idly strolled with pleasant friends amid fragrant flowers. It gives us deeper consciousness of our own liberty, faith in human perfectibility, which lies at the root of our noblest efforts; to which the more we yield ourselves the more we feel that we are free. It knows a thousand words of truth and might, which it whispers in gentlest tones to rightly attuned ears: Since the universe is a harmony whose diapason is God, why should thy life strike a discordant note? Yield not to discouragement; thou art alive, and God is in His world. The combat and not the victory proclaims the hero. If thy success had been greater, thou hadst been less. The noisy participants in great conflicts, of whatever kind, exercise less influence upon the outcome than choice spirits, who, turning aside from the thunder and smoke of battle, gain in lonely striving and meditation view of new truth by which the world is transformed.

We owe more to Columbus than to Isabella; to Descartes than to Louis XIV.; to Bacon than to Elizabeth; to Pestalozzi than to Napoleon; to Goethe than to Blücher; to Pasteur than to Bismarck. If thou wouldst be persuaded and convinced, persuade and convince thyself. Be thy aim not increase of happiness, but of knowledge, wisdom, power, and virtue; and thou shalt, without thinking of it, find thyself also happy. Character is formed by effort, resistance, and patience. If necessity is the mother of invention, suffering is the mother of high moods and great thoughts. Poets have sung to ease their sorrow-burdened or love-tortured hearts; and the travail of souls yearning with ineffable pain for truth has led to the nearest view of God. Wisdom is the child of suffering, as beauty is the child of love. If a truth discourages thee, thou art not yet ripe for it; for thee it is not yet wholly true. Work not like an ox at the plough, but like a setter afield; not because thou must, but because thou takest delight in thy task. Only they have come of age who have learned how to educate themselves. Education, like life, works from within outward: the teacher loosens the soil and removes the obstacles to light and warmth and moisture; but growth comes of the activity of the soul itself.

A new century will not make new men; but if, in truth, it be a new century, it will be made so by the deeper thought and diviner love of men and women. Let the old tell what they have done, the young what they are doing, and fools what they intend to do.

The power to control attention, as a good rider holds his horse to the road and to his gait, is a result of education; and when it is acquired other things become easy.

Let not poverty or misfortune or insult or flattery or success, O seeker after truth and beauty! turn thee from thy divine task and purpose. Pardon every one except thyself, and put thy trust in God and in thyself. "If I buy thee," asked one of a Spartan captive, "and treat thee well, wilt thou be good?"—"I will," he replied, "if thou buy me or not; or if, having bought me, thou treat me ill."

If there be anything of worth in thee, it will make thee strong and contented; it is so good for thee to have it that thou canst easily forget it is unrecognized by others.

If all sufferings, sorrows, and disappointments had been left out of thy life, wouldst thou be more or less than thou art? Less worthy, doubtless, and less wise. In these evils, then, there is something good. If thou couldst but bear this always in mind, thou shouldst be better able to suffer pain, whether of body or soul. There are things thou hast greatly desired which, had they been given thee, would make thee wretched. The wiser thou growest, the better shalt thou understand how little we know what is for the best.

"Had I but lived!" cried Obermann. And a woman of genius replied: "Be consoled, O Obermann! Hadst thou lived, thou hadst lived in vain." So it is. In the end we neither regret that pleasures have been denied us, nor feel that those we have enjoyed were a gain unless they are associated with the memory of high faith and thought and virtuous action. He who is careful to fill his mind with truth and his heart with love will not lack for retreats in which he may take refuge from the stress and storms of life. Noise, popularity, and buncombe: onions, smoke, and bedbugs.

Be thy own rival, comparing thyself with thyself, and striving day by day to be self-surpassed. If thy own little room is well lighted the whole world is less dark. If thou art busy seeking intellectual and moral illumination and strength, thou shalt easily be contented. Higher place would mean for thee less liberty, less opportunity to become thyself. The secret of progress lies in knowing how to make use, not of what we have chosen, but of what is forced upon us. To occupy one's self with trifles weans from the habit of work more effectually than idleness. Perfect skill comes of talent, study, and exercise; and the study and exercise must continue through the whole course of life. To cease to learn is to lose freshness and the power to interest. We lack will rather than strength; are able to do more and better than we are inclined to do; and say we can not because we have not the courage to say we will not. The law of unstable equilibrium applies to thee, as to whatever has life. Thou canst not remain what thou art, but must rise or fall. The body is under the sway of physical law, but the progress of the mind is left in a large measure to the play of free will. If thou willest what thou oughtest, thou canst do what thou willest; for obligation cannot transcend ability. Happy are they who from earliest youth understand the meaning of duty, and hearken to the stern but all-reasonable voice of this daughter of God, the smile upon whose face is the fairest thing we know.

He who willingly accepts the law of moral necessity is free; for in thus accepting it he transcends it, and is self-determined; while he who rebels against this law sinks to a lower plane of being than the properly human, and becomes the slave of appetite and passion. Duty means sacrifice; it is a turning from the animal to the spiritual self; from the allurements of the world of manifold sensation—from ease, idleness, gain, and pleasure—to the high and lonely regions, where the command of conscience speaks in the name of God and of the nature of things. Forget thyself and do thy best, as unconscious of vain-glorious thoughts as though thou wert a wind or a stream, an impersonal force in the service of God and man. Obey conscience, and laugh in the face of death. Convince thyself that the best thing for thee is to know truth and to make truth the law of thy life. Let this faith subordinate all else, as it is, indeed, faith in reason and in God. Abhorrence of lies is the test of character. Hold fast by what thou knowest to be true, not doubting for a moment because thou canst not reconcile it with other truth. Somewhere, somehow, truth will be matched with truth, as love mates heart with heart.

A man's word is himself, his reason, his conscience, his faith, his love, his aspiration. If it is false or vain or vile, he is so. It is the expression of life as it has come to consciousness within him. It is the revelation of quality of being; it is of the man himself, his sign and symbol, the form and mould and mirror of his soul.

Thou thinkest to serve God with lies,
Thou devil-worshipper and fool!

The moral value of the study of science lies in the love of truth it inspires and inculcates. He who knows science knows that liars are imbeciles. From the educator's point of view, truthfulness is the essential thing. His aim and end is to teach truth, and the love of truth, which leavens the whole mass and makes it life-giving. But the liar has no proper virtue of any kind.

The doubt of an earnest, thoughtful, patient, and laborious mind is worthy of respect. In such doubt there may be found indeed more faith than in half the creeds. But the scepticism of sciolists lacks the depth and genuineness of truth. To be frivolous where there is question of all that gives life meaning and value is want of sense. The sciolist is one who has a superficial knowledge of various things, which for lack of deep views and coherent thought, for lack of the understanding of the principles of knowledge itself, he is unable to bring into organic unity. The things he knows are confused and intermingled, and thus fail either to enlighten his mind or to impel him to healthful activity. He forms opinions lightly and pronounces judgment rashly. Knowing nothing thoroughly, he has no suspicion of the infinite complexity of the world of life and thought. The evil effects of this semi-culture are most disagreeable and most harmful in those whose being has been developed only on its temporal and earthly side. Their spiritual and moral nature has no centre about which it may move, and they wander on the surface of things in self-satisfied conceit, proclaiming that what is beyond the senses is beyond the reach of the mind, as though our innermost consciousness were not of what is intangible and invisible.

All divine things are within and about us, here and now; but we are too gross to see the celestial light, or to catch the whisperings of the heavenly voices. God is here; but we, like plants and mollusks, live in worlds of which we do not dream, upheld and nourished and borne onward by a Power of whom we are but dimly conscious,—nay, of whom, for the most part, we are unconscious.

There is a truth above the reach of logic, an impulse of the mind and heart which urges beyond the realms of sense, beyond the ken of the dialectician, to the Infinite and Eternal, before whom the material universe is but a force at whose finest touch souls awaken to the thrill of thought and love.

When we are made conscious of the fact that the Divine Word is the light of men, we readily understand that our every true thought, our every good deed, our every deeper view of nature and of life, comes from God, who is always urging us into the glorious liberty of His children, until we become a heavenly republic in which righteousness, peace, and joy shall reign. "The restless desire of every man to improve his position in the world is the motive power of all social development, of all progress," says Scherr, unable to perceive that the mightiest impulses to nobler and wider life have been given by those who were not thinking at all of improving their position, but were wholly bent upon improving themselves. Make choice, O youth! between having and being. If having is thy aim, consent to be inferior; if being is thy aim, be content with having little. Real students, cultivators of themselves, are not inspired by the love of fame or wealth or position, but they are driven by an inner impulse to which they cannot but yield. Their enthusiasm is not a fire that blazes for an hour and then dies out; it is a heat from central depths of life, self-fed and inextinguishable.

The impulse to nobler and freer life springs, never from masses of men, but always from single luminous minds and glowing hearts. The lightning of great thoughts shows the way to heroic deeds. It is better to know than to be known, to love than to be loved, to help than to be helped; for since life is action, it is better to act than to be acted upon. Whosoever makes himself purer, worthier, wiser, works for his country, works for God. The belief that the might of truth is so great that it must prevail in spite of whatever opposition, needs, to say the least, interpretation; for it has often happened that truth has been overcome for whole generations and races; and the important consideration is not whether it shall finally prevail, but whether it shall prevail for us, for our own age and people. It is of the nature of spiritual gifts to work in every direction; they enrich the individual and the nation; they develop, purify, and refine the intellectual, moral, and physical worlds in which men live and strive. The State and the Church are organisms; the body, the social and religious soul, under the guidance of God, creates for itself. And not only should there be no conflict between them, but there should be none between them and the free and full development of the individual. A peasant whose mental state is what it might have been a thousand years ago is for us, however moral and religious, an altogether unsatisfactory kind of man. All knowledge is pure, and all speech is so if it spring from the simple desire to utter what is seen and recognized as truth. The love of liberty is rare. It is not found in those whose life-aim is money, pleasure, and place, which enslave; but in those who love truth, which is the only liberating power. Knowledge is the correlative of being, and only a high and loving soul can know what truth is or understand what Christ meant when He said: "Ye shall know truth, and truth shall make you free." High thinking and right loving may make enemies of those around us, but they make us Godlike. How seldom in our daily experience of men do we find one who wishes to be enlightened, reformed, and made virtuous! How easy it is to find those who wish to be pleased and flattered!

At no period in history has civilization been so widespread or so complex as to-day. Never have the organs of the social body been so perfect. Never has it been possible for so many to co-operate intelligently in the work of progress. You, gentlemen, have youth and faith and the elements of intellectual and moral culture. In the freshness and vigor of early manhood, you stand upon the threshold of the new century. You speak Shakspeare's and Milton's tongue; in your veins is the blood which in other lands and centuries has nourished the spirit which makes martyrs, heroes, and saints. Your religion strikes its roots into the historic past of man's noblest achievements, and looks to the future with the serene confidence with which it looks to God. Your country, if not old, is not without glory. Its soil is as fertile, its climate as salubrious as its domain is vast. It is peopled by that Aryan race, which, from most ancient days, has been the creator and invincible defender of art and science and philosophy and liberty; and with all this the divine spirit and doctrine of the Son of Man have been interfused.

We are here in America constituted on the wide basis of universal freedom, universal opportunity, universal intelligence, universal good-will. Our government is the rule of all for the welfare of all; it has stood the test of civil war, and in many ways proved itself both beneficent and strong. Already we have subdued this continent to the service of man. Within a hundred years we have grown to be one of the most populous and wealthy and also one of the most civilized and progressive nations of the earth. Your opportunities are equal to the fullest measure of human worth and genius. In the midst of a high and noble environment it were doubly a disgrace to be low and base. In intellectual and moral processes and results the important consideration is not how much, but what and how. How much, for instance, one has read or written gives us little insight into his worth and character; but when we know what and how he has read and written, we know something of his life. When I am told that America has more schools, churches, and newspapers than any other land, I think of their kind, and am tempted to doubt whether it were not better if we had fewer.

The more general and the higher the average education of the people, the more urgent is the need of thoroughly cultivated and enlightened minds to lead them wisely. The standard of our intellectual and professional education is still low; and neither from the press nor the pulpit nor legislative halls do we hear highest wisdom rightly uttered. To be an intellectual force in this age one must know—must know much and know thoroughly; for now in many places there are a few, at least, who are acquainted with the whole history of thought and discovery, who are familiar with the best thinking of the noblest minds that have ever lived; and to imagine that a sciolist, a half-educated person, can have anything new or important to impart is to delude one's self.

But if you fail, you will fail like all who fail,—not from lack of knowledge, but from lack of conduct; for the burden which in the end bears us down is that of our moral delinquencies. All else we may endure, but that is a sinking and giving way of the source of life itself. It is better, in every way, that you should be true Christian men than that you should do deeds which will make your names famous. And if you could believe this with all your heart, you would find peace and freedom of spirit, even though your labors should seem vain and your lives of little moment. The more reason and conscience are brought to bear upon you, the more will you be lifted into the high and abiding world, where truth and love and holiness are recognized to be man's proper and imperishable good. Become all it is possible for you to become. What this is you can know only by striving day by day, from youth to age, even unto the end; leaving the issue with God and His master-workman, Time.

CHAPTER IV.

WOMAN AND EDUCATION.

Progress, man's distinctive mark alone;
Not God's and not the beasts'; God is, they are;
Man partly is and wholly hopes to be.—Browning.

The partialness of man's life, the low level on which the race has been content to dwell, is attributable, in no small measure, to the injustice done to woman. It was assumed she was inferior, and to make the assumption true, she was kept in ignorance, dwarfed and treated as a means rather than as an end.

The right to grow is the primal right; it is the right to live, to unfold our being on every side in the ceaseless striving for truth and love and beauty. In comparison with this, purely political and civil rights are unimportant. And in a free state this fundamental right must not only be acknowledged and defended, but a public opinion must be created which shall declare it to be the most sacred and inviolable. The principle is universal, and is as applicable to woman as to man.

There is not a religion, a philosophy, a science, an art for man and another for woman. Consequently there is not, in its essential elements at least, an education for man and another for woman. In souls, in minds, in consciences, in hearts, there is no sex. What is the best education for woman? That which will best help her to become a perfect human being, wise, loving, and strong. What is her work? Whatever may help her to become herself. What is forbidden her? Nothing but what degrades or narrows or warps. What has she the right to do? Any good and beautiful and useful thing she is able to do without hurt to her dignity and worth as a human being.

Between her and man the real question is not of more and less, of inferiority and superiority, but of unlikeness. Chastity is woman's great virtue; truthfulness, which is the highest form of courage, is man's; yet men and women are equally bound to be chaste and truthful. Mildness and sweet reasonableness are woman's subtlest charms; wisdom and valor, man's; yet women should be wise and brave, and men should be mild and reasonable. The spiritual endowment of the sexes is much the same, but they are not equally interested in the same things. Man prefers thought; woman, sentiment; he reaches his conclusions through analysis and argument; she, through feeling and intuition. He has greater power of self-control; she, of self-sacrifice. He is guided by law and principle; she, by insight and tact; he demands justice; she, equity. He wishes to be honored for wealth and position; she, for herself. For him what he possesses is a means; for her, something to which she holds and is attached. He asks for power; she, for affection. He derives his idea of duty from reason; she, from faith and love. He prefers science and philosophy; she, literature and art. His religion is a code of morality; hers, faith and hope and love and imagination. For her, things easily become persons; for him, persons are little more than things. She has greater power of self-effacement, forgetting herself wholly in her love. Whether she marry or become a nun, she abandons her name, the symbol of her identity, in proof that she is dedicate to the race and to God. The arguments of infidels have less weight with her than with man, for her sense of religion is more genuine, her faith more inevitable. She passes over objections as a chaste mind passes over what is coarse or impure. She more easily finds complacency in her appearance and surroundings, but she has less pride and conceit than man. She is more grateful, too, because she loves more, and the heart makes memory true. If her greater fondness for jewelry and showy adornment proves her to be more barbarous, her greater refinement and chastity prove her to be more civilized than man. And does not her delight in dress come of her care for beauty, which in a world of coarse and ugly creatures is a virtue as fair as the face of spring? Why should the flowers and the fields, the hills and the heavens, be beautiful, and man hideous, and the cities where he abides dismal? Are we but cattle to be stalled and fed? Are corn and beef and iron the only good and useful things? Are we not human because we think and admire, and are exalted in the presence of what is infinitely true and divinely fair?

Faith, hope, and love are larger and more enduring powers for woman than for man. She feeds the sacred fire which never dies on the altars of home and religion and country. She lives a more interior life, and more easily retains consciousness of the soul's reality and of God's presence. If she speaks less of patriotism in peaceful times, in the hour of danger the white light flashes from her soul. It is this that makes brave men think of their mothers and wives and sisters when they march to battle. They know that those sweet hearts, however keen the pangs they suffer, would rather have them dead than craven. When woman shall grow to the full measure of her endowments, a purer flame will glow upon the hearth, and love of country will be a more genuine passion.

If she gain a wider and more varied interest in life, she will become happier, more willing and more able to help the progress of the race. Like man, she exists for herself and God, and in her relations to others, her duties are not to the home alone, but to the whole social body, religious and civil. Whether man or woman, is a minor thing; to be wise and worthy and loving is all in all. Our deeper consciousness and practical recognition of the equality of the sexes is better evidence that we are becoming Christian and civilized than popular government and all our mechanical devices. We, however, still have prejudices as ridiculous and harmful as that which made it unbecoming in a woman to know anything or in a man of birth to engage in business. If we hold that every human being has the right to do whatever is fair or noble or useful, we must also hold that it is wrong to throw hindrance in the way of the complete education of any human being. We at last, however slowly, are approaching the standpoint of Christ, who, with his divine eye upon the sexless soul, overlooks distinctions of sex, and placing the good of life in knowing and loving, in being and doing, makes it the privilege and duty of all to help all to know and love, to become and do. Is it true? Is it right? These are the immortal questions, springing from what within us is most like God, and they who deal deceitfully with them have no claim upon attention. They are jugglers and liars.

What is developed is not really changed, but made more fully itself, and by giving to woman a truer education, the beauty and charm of her nature will be brought more effectively into play. None of us love "a woman impudent and mannish grown;" but knowledge and culture and strength of mind and heart and body have no tendency to produce such a caricature. Whether there is question of man or woman, the aim and end of education is to bring forth in the individual the divine image of humanity as it exists in the thought of God, as it is revealed in the life of Christ.

"Yet in the long years liker must they grow;
The man be more of woman, she more of man:
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;
She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care;
More as the double-natured poet each."

The apothegm, man is born to do, woman to endure, no longer commends itself to our judgment. Both are born to do and to endure; and in educating girls, we now understand that it is our business to strengthen them and to stimulate them to self-activity. We strive to give them self-control, sanity, breadth of view, wide sympathies, and an abiding sense of justice. One might, indeed, be tempted to think it were well woman should retain a touch of folly, that she still may be able to believe the man she loves is half divine; but to think so one must be a man, with his genius for self-conceit. To train a girl chiefly with a view to success in society is to pervert, is to hinder from attaining to the power of free, rich, and varied life. It is to neglect education for accomplishments; it is to prefer form to substance, manner to conduct, graceful carriage and dress to thought and love. We degrade her when we consider her as little else than a candidate for matrimony. A man may remain single and become the noblest of his kind, and so may a woman. Marriage is first of all for the race; the individual may stand alone and grow to the full measure of human strength and worth. The popular contempt for single women who have reached a certain age, is but a survival of the contempt for all women which is found among savages and barbarians. In the education of woman, as of man, the end is increase of power,—of the might there is in intelligence and love, of the strength there is in gentleness and sweetness and light, of the vigor there is in health, in the rhythmic pulse and in deep breathing, of the sustaining joy there is in pure affection and in devotion to high purposes. Whether there is question of boys or of girls, the safe way is to strive to make them all it is possible for them to become, putting our trust for the rest in human nature and in God; for talent, like genius, is a divine gift, and to prevent its development is to sin against religion and humanity. For girls as for boys, the aim should be not knowledge, but power; not accomplishments, but faculty. Nine-tenths of what we learn in school is quickly forgotten, and is valueless unless it issue in increase of moral and intellectual strength. "In whatever direction I turn my thoughts," says Schleiermacher, "it seems to me that woman's nature is nobler and her life happier than man's; and if ever I play with an idle wish it is that I might be a woman." Hardly any man, I imagine, would rather be a woman, and many women doubtless would rather be men; and yet there is much in Schleiermacher's thought, if we believe, as the wise do believe, that love is the best, and that they who love most are the highest and, therefore, the happiest, since the noblest mind the best contentment has.

What fountains to the desert are,
What flowers to the fresh young spring,
What heaven's breast is to the star,
That woman's love to earth doth bring.

Whether mid deserts she is found,
Or girt about by happy home,
Where'er she treads is holy ground
Above which rises love's high dome.

Or be she mother called or wife,
Or sister or the soul's twin mate,
She still is each man's best of life,
His crown of joy, his high estate.

What is our Christian faith but the revelation of the supreme and infinite worth of love, as being of the essence of God himself? Is it not easy to believe that to a loving soul in an all-chaste body the unseen world may lie open to view? That Joan of Arc saw heavenly visions and heard whisperings from higher worlds, who can doubt that has considered how her most pure womanly soul redeemed a whole people, and, by them forsaken, from midst fierce flames took its flight to God?

Should women vote? The rule of the people is good only when it is the rule of the good and wise among the people, and of these, women, in great numbers, are part. The leadership of the best comes near to being the leadership of God. But the question of the suffrage for women is grave; it is one on which an enlightened mind will long hold judgment in suspense. Does not political life, as it exists in our democracy, tend to corrupt both voters and office-seekers? Is it not largely a life of cant, pretence, and hypocrisy, of venality, corruption, and selfishness, of lying, abuse, and vulgarity? Do not public men, like public women, sell themselves, though in a different way? Is the professional politician, the professional caucus-manipulator, the professional voter, the type of man we can admire or respect even? The objection so frequently raised, that political life would corrupt women, has, at least, the merit of a certain grim humorousness. Could it by any chance make them as bad as it makes men? To tell them they are the queens of the home, to whom the mingling with plebeians is degrading, is an insult to their intelligence. We have forsworn kings and queens, both in private and in public life, and at home women are, for the most part, drudges. What need is there of a hollow phrase when the appeal to truth is obvious?

"A servant with this clause
Makes drudgery divine;
Who sweeps a room as for thy laws,
Makes that and the action fine."

Active participation in political life is not a refining, an ennobling, a purifying influence. Is it desirable that the half of the people to which the interests of the home, of the heart, of the religious and moral education of the young are especially committed, should be hurled into the maelstrom of selfish passion and coarse excitement?

The smartness and self-assertiveness of American women are already excessive; they lack repose, serenity, and self-restraint. If they rush into the arena of noisy and vulgar strife, will not the evil be increased? Will not the political woman lose something of the sacred power of the wife and mother? Are not the primal virtues, those which make life good and fair and which are a woman's glory,—are they not humble and quiet and unobtrusive? The suffrage has not emancipated the masses of men, who are still held captive in the chains of poverty and dehumanizing toil.

Do women themselves, those, at least, in whom the woman soul, which draws us on and upward, is most itself, desire that the vote be given them?

But whatever our opinions on the subject may be, let us not lose composure. "If a great change is to be made," says Edmund Burke, "the minds of men will be fitted to it, the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope will forward it; and then they who persist in opposing the mighty current will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself than the mere designs of men. They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate."

Whether or not woman shall become a politician, there is no doubt that she is becoming a worker in a constantly widening field. The elementary education of the country is already intrusted to her. She is taking her position in the higher institutions of learning. She has gained admission to professional life. In the business world, her competition with man is more and more felt. In literature, in our country at least, her appreciativeness is greater than man's, and her performance not inferior to his. There is a larger number of serious students among women than among men. In the divinely imposed task of self-education, they are fast becoming the chief workers. They are the great readers of books, especially of poetry. The muse was the first school-mistress, and the love of genuine poetry is still the finest educational influence. The vulgar passions and coarse appetites which rob young men of faith in the higher life and of the power to labor perseveringly for ideal ends, have little hold upon the soul of woman. Her betrayers are frivolity and vanity, and a too confiding heart; and the more she is educated the less will she take delight in what is merely external, and the greater will become her ability to bring sentiment under the control of reason and conscience.

There are not two educations, then, one for man, and another for woman, but both alike we bid contend to the uttermost for completeness of life; bid both trust in human educableness, which makes possible the hope of attaining all divine things. True faith in education is ever associated with genuine humility. Only they strive infinitely who feel that their lack is infinite.

The power of education is as many sided and as manifold as life. There is no finest seed or flower or fruit, no most serviceable animal, which has not been brought to perfection by human thought and labor, or which, were this help withdrawn, would not degenerate; and if the highest thought and the most intelligent labor were made to bear ceaselessly upon the improvement of the race of man, we should have a new world.

When we consider all the beauty, knowledge, and love which are within man's reach, how is it possible not to believe that infinitely more and higher lie beyond? Call to mind whatever quality of life, physical, intellectual, or moral, and you will have little difficulty in seeing that it is a result of education. We are born, indeed, with unequal endowments; but strength of limb, ease and swiftness of motion, grace and fluency of speech, modulation of voice, distinctness of articulation, correctness of pronunciation, power of attention, fineness of ear, clearness of vision, control of hand and certainty of touch in drawing, writing, painting, playing upon instruments and operating with the knife, truth and vividness of imagination, force of will, refinement of manner, perfection of taste, skill in argument, purity of desire, rectitude of purpose, power of sympathy and love, together with whatever else goes to the making of a perfect man or woman, are all acquired through educational processes.

Education is the training of a human being with a view to make him all he may become; and hence it is possible to educate one's self in many ways and on many sides.

Refinement, grace, and cleanliness are aims and ends, as truly as are vigor and suppleness of mind and strength and purity of heart. Like sunshine and flowers and the songs of birds, they help to make life pleasant and beautiful. Even the fishes are not clean, but the only clean animal is here and there a man or a woman who has forsworn dirt visible and invisible. We can educate ourselves in every direction, to sleep well even, and neither physicians nor poets have told half the good there is in sleep. The bare thought of it always brings to me the memory of lulling showers, and grazing sheep, and murmuring streams, and bees at work, and the breath of flowers and cooing doves and children lying on the sward, and lazy clouds slumbering in azure skies. It is pleasant as the approach of evening, fresh and fair as the rising sun which sets all the world singing, sacred and pure as babes smiling in their dreams on the breasts of gentle mothers. If thou canst not see the divine worth in nature and in works of genius, it is because thou art what thou art. Can the worm at thy feet recognize thy superiority? The blind and the heedless see nothing, O foolish maid.

What I know and love is of my very being, is, in fact, my knowing and loving self. Quality of knowledge and love determines quality of life, and when I know and love God I am divine. As trees are enrooted in earth, as fishes are immersed in water, and our bodies in air, that they may live, so the soul has its being in God that it may have life, that it may know and love. I become self-conscious only in becoming conscious of what is not myself; and when the not-myself is the Eternal, is God, my self-consciousness is divine. The marvel and the mystery of our being is that self-consciousness should exist at all, not that it should continue to exist forever. But words cannot strengthen or explain or destroy our belief in God, in the immortality of the soul, and in the freedom of the will. The antagonism supposed to exist between scientific facts or theories and religious faith would cease to be recognized as real, were it not for the eagerness with which those who are incapable of profound and comprehensive views, catch up certain shibboleths and hurl them like firebrands upon the combustible imaginations of the unthinking.

To prove, means, in the proper sense of the word, to test, to bring ideas, opinions, and beliefs to the ordeal of reason, of accepted standards of judgment. It is a criticism of the mind and its operations, and hence it may easily happen that to prove is to weaken and unsettle. In what is most vital, in belief in God, immortality, and freedom of the will, in religion and morality, our faith is stronger than any proof that may be brought in its defence; and this is not less true of our faith in the reality of nature and the laws of science; and when this is made plain by criticism, those whose mental grasp is weak or partial, are confused and tempted to doubt. They are not helped, but harmed, and our ceaseless discussions and provings, in press and pulpit, are the source of much of the unrest, religious doubt, and moral weakness of the age. The people need to be taught by those who know and believe, not by those whose skill is chiefly syllogistic and critical. Philosophic speculation is like a vast mountain into which men, generation after generation, have sunk shafts in search of some priceless treasure, and have left in the materials they have thrown out the mark and evidence of failure. But the noblest minds will still be haunted by the infinite mystery which they will seek in vain to explain. Their faith in reason, like that of the vulgar, cannot be shaken, nor can defeat, running through thousands of years, enfeeble their courage or dampen their ardor. Let our increasing insight into Nature's laws fill us with thankfulness and joy. It is good, and makes for good. Let us bow with respect and reverence before the army of patient investigators who bring highly disciplined faculties to bear upon the most useful researches. Let knowledge grow. A nearer and truer view of the boundless fact will not make the world less wonderful, or the soul less divine, or God less adorable. If one should declare that it is contrary to the teachings of faith to hold that conversation may be carried on by persons a thousand miles apart, it would be sufficient to reply that such conversation takes place, and that to attempt to annul fact by doctrine is absurd. There is no excuse for the controversial conflict between science and religion; for science is ascertained fact, not theory about fact, and when fact is rightly ascertained it is accepted of all men. The most certain fact, for each one, is that he knows and loves, and that this power comes to him through communion with what is higher and deeper and wider than himself,—with God.

There was a time when collisions among the masses of the sidereal system were frequent, shocks of unimaginable force by which the celestial bodies were shivered into atoms, so that what now remains is but a survival of worlds which escaped destruction in the chaotic struggle when suns madly rushed on one another and rose in star-dust about the face of God, who was, and is, and shall be, eternal and forever the same. Where there is no thinker, there is no thing. It is in, and through, and with Him that we know ourselves and our environment; and recognize that our particular life is, in its implications, universal and divine. He is the principle of unity which is present in whatever is an object of thought, and which gives the mind the power to co-ordinate the manifold of sensation into the harmony of truth; He is the principle of goodness and beauty, which makes the universe fair, and thrills the heart of man with hope and love. Amid endless change, He alone is permanent, and He is power and wisdom and love, and they only are good and wise and strong who cleave to His eternal and absolute being. But since here and now the real world of matter as distinguished from the apparent is hidden behind the veil of sense, it is vain to hope that the world of eternal life shall be made plain to the pure reason. Religion, like life, is faith, hope, and love, striving and doing, not intellectual intuition and beatific vision. We find it impossible to separate our thought of God from that of infinite goodness and love; but when we look away from our own souls to Nature's pitiless and fatal laws, we realize that this faith in all-embracing and all-conquering love is opposed by seemingly insurmountable difficulties. It is a mystery we believe, not a truth we comprehend. Systems of philosophy, morality, and religion, however cunningly devised, cannot make men philosophers, sages, or saints. This they can become only through the communion which faith, hope, and love have power to establish with the living fountain-head of truth, wisdom, and goodness.

The pursuit of knowledge, like the struggle for wealth and place, ends in disillusion, in the disappointment which results from the contrast between what we hope for and what we attain. The greater the success, the more complete the disenchantment. As the rich and famous best see the unsatisfactoriness of wealth and honor, so they who know much best understand how knowledge avails not, how it is but a cloud-built citadel, whose foundations rest upon the uncertain air, whose walls and turrets lose in substance what they gain in height. When we imagine we know all things, we awake as from a dream to find that we know nothing, that our knowing is but a believing, our science but a faith. We are little children who wander in a father's wide domain, seeing many things and understanding not anything, who imagine we are in a real and abiding world, while in truth we are but passing through the picture-gallery of the senses.

Faith, Hope, and Love:—these three
Are life's deep root;
They reach into infinity,
Whence life doth shoot.
But Faith and Hope have not attained
The Eternal best;
While Love, sweet Love, the end has gained,—
In God to rest.

So long as these life-begetting, life-sustaining, and life-developing powers hold mightier sway over the soul of woman than over that of man, so long will woman's heel crush the serpent's head and woman's arms bear salvation to the world. She will not worship the rising sun, or become the idolatress of success, but within her heart will cherish fallen heroes and lost causes and the memory of all the sorrows by which God humanizes the world.

If we consider mankind merely as a phenomenon, the extinction of the race need give us little more concern than the disappearance of Pterodactyls and Ichthyosauri. What repels from such contemplation is not man's physical, but his spiritual being,—that which makes him capable of thought and love, of faith and hope. The universe is anthropomorphized, for whithersoever man looks he sees the reflection of his own countenance. What he calls things are stamped with the impress and likeness of himself, as he himself is an image of the eternal mind, in which all things are mirrored.

An atheist or a materialist, an agnostic or a pessimist, may have greater knowledge, greater intellectual force than the most devout believer in God; but is it possible for him to feel so thoroughly at home in the world, to feel so deeply that, whatever happens, it is and will be well with him? In an atheistic world the spirit of man is ill at ease. He who has no God makes himself the centre of all things, and, like a spoiled child, loses the power to admire, to enjoy, and to love. Genuine faith in God is such an infinite force that one may be tempted to doubt whether it is found.

Undisciplined minds become victims of the formulas they receive, and if what they have accepted as truth is shown to be false or incomplete, they grow discouraged and lose faith; but the wise know that the verbal vesture of truth is a symbol which has but a proximate and relative value. The spirit is alive, and ceaselessly outgrows or transmutes the body with which it is clothed. What we can do with anything,—with money, knowledge, wealth,—depends on what we are. Ruskin prefers holy work to holy worship; but the antithesis is mistaken, for if worship is holy it impels to work, if work is holy it impels to worship. God's most sacred visible temple is a human body, and its profanation is the worst sacrilege.

All true belief, when we come to the last analysis, is belief in God, and the teacher of religion must keep this fact always in view.

The law of the struggle for life applies to opinions, beliefs, hopes, aims, ideals, just as it applies to individuals and species. Whatever survives, survives through conflict, because it is fit to survive. It does not follow, however, that the best survives, though we must think that in the end this is so, since we believe in God. When serious minds grapple with problems so remote from vulgar opinion that they seem to be meaningless or insoluble, the multitude, ever ready, like a crowd of boys, to mock and jeer, break forth into insult. These men, they cry are wicked, or they are fools.

In a society where it is assumed that all are equal, those who are really superior incur suspicion as though it were criminal to be different from the multitude; and hence they rarely win the favor of the crowd. The life-current of those who stir up a noise about them, runs shallow. The champion of the prize-ring or the race-course is hailed with shouts, for the crowd understand the achievement; but what can they know of the worth of a sage or a saint? The noblest struggles are of the mind and heart wrestling with unseen powers, with spirits, as St. Paul says, that they may compel them to give up the secret of truth and holiness. A glimpse of truth, a thrill of love, is better than the applause of a whole city. In striving steadfastly for thy own perfection and the happiness of others thou walkest and workest with God. Thy progress will help others to labor for their own, and the happiness thou givest will return to thee and become thine; and what is the will of God, if it is not the perfection and happiness of his children? To have merely enough strength to bear life's burden, to do the daily task, to face the cares which return with the sun and follow us into the night, is to be weak, is to lack the strong spirit for which work is light as play, and whose secret is heard in whispers by the hero and the saint. To be able to give joy and help to others we must have more life, wisdom, virtue, and happiness than we need for ourselves; and it is in giving joy and help to others that we ourselves receive increase of life, wisdom, virtue, and happiness. Be persuaded within thy deepest soul, that moral evil can never be good, and that sin can never be gain. So act that if all men acted as thou, all would be well. If to be like others is thy aim, thou art predestined to remain inferior. To be followed and applauded is to be diverted from one's work. Better alone with it in a garret than a guest in a banquet hall.

Let thy prayer be work and work thy prayer,
As God's truth and love are everywhere,
And whether by word or deed thou strive
In Him alone thou canst be alive.

If thou hast done thy best, God will give it worth.

If thou carest not for truth and love, for thee they are nothing worth; but it is because thou thyself art worthless. Wisdom and virtue is all thou lackest; of other things thou hast enough. When the passion for self-improvement is strong within us, all our relations to our fellow-men and nature receive new meaning and power, as opportunities to make ourselves what it is possible for us to become; and as we grow accustomed to take this view of whatever happens, we are made aware that disagreeable things are worth as much as the pleasant, that foes are as useful as friends. The obstacle arrests attention, provokes effort, and educates. It throws the light back upon the eye, and reveals the world of color and form; from it all sounds reverberate. We grow by overcoming; the force we conquer becomes our own. We rise on difficulties we surmount. What opposes, arouses, strengthens, and disciplines the will, discloses to the mind its power, and implants faith in the efficacy of patient, persevering labor. They who shrink from the combat are already defeated. To make everything easy is to smooth the way whereby we descend. To surround the young with what they ought themselves to achieve is to enfeeble and corrupt them. Happy is the poor man's son, who whithersoever he turns, sees the obstacle rise to challenge him to become a man; miserable the children of the rich, whose cursed-blessed fortune is an ever-present invitation to idleness and conceit. O mothers, you whose love is the best any of us have known, harden your sons, and urge them on, not in the race for wealth, but in the steep and narrow way wherein, through self-conquest and self-knowledge, they rise toward God and all high things. Nothing that has ever been said of your power tells the whole truth, and the only argument against you is the men who are your children. Education is always the result of personal influence. A mother, a father in the home, a pure and loving heart at the altar, a true man or woman in the school, a noble mind uttering itself in literature, which is personal thought and expression,—these are the forces which educate. Life proceeds from life, and religion, which is the highest power of life, can proceed only from God and religious souls. Not by preaching and teaching, but by living the life, can we make ourselves centres of spiritual influence.

Be like others, walk in the broad way, one of a herd, content to graze in a common pasture, believing equality man's highest law, though its meaning be equality with the brute. Is this our ideal? It is an atheistic creed. There is no God, there is nothing but matter, but atoms, and atoms are alike and equal,—let men be so too. To struggle with infinite faith and hope for some divine good is idolatry, is to believe in God; to be one's self is the unpardonable sin. It is thy aim to rise, to distinguish thyself; this means thou wouldst have higher place, more money, a greater house than thy neighbor's. It is a foolish ambition. Instead of trying to distinguish thyself, strive to become thyself, to make thyself worthy of the approval of God and wise men. "I am not to be pitied, my lord," said Bayard; "I die doing my duty." God has not given His world into thy keeping, but he has given thee to thyself to fashion and complete. If thou art busy seeking money or pleasure or praise, little time will remain wherein to seek and find thyself. They who are interesting to themselves, are interesting to themselves alone. The self-absorbed are the victims of mental and moral disease. The life which flows out to others, bearing light and warmth and fragrance, feels itself in the blessings it gives; that which is self-centred, stagnates like a pool, and becomes the habitation of doleful creatures.

There is a popularity which is born of the worship of noble deeds,—it is the best. There is another, which comes of the crowd's passion for what is noisy and spectacular,—it is the worst. The one is the popularity of heroes, the other that of charlatans.

Whatever thy chosen work, it is thy business to make thyself a man or a woman, and not a mere specialist; yet in following a specialty with enthusiasm, thou shalt go farther towards perfection and completeness of life than the multitude of pretenders, who are not in earnest about anything. Every harsh and unjust sentiment, every narrow and unworthy thought consented to and entertained, remains like a stain upon character. Whoever speaks or writes against freedom or knowledge or faith in God, or love of man or reverence of woman, but makes himself ridiculous; for men feel and believe that their true world is a world of high thoughts and noble sentiments, and they can neither respect nor trust those who strive to weaken their hold upon this world. Become thyself; do thy work. For this, all thy days are not too many or too long. If thou and it are worthy to be known, the presentation can be made in briefest time; and it matters little though it be deferred until after thy death.

Besides whatever other conditions, time is necessary to bring the best things to maturity, and to imagine that excellence demands less than lifelong work, is to mistake. It is by the patient observation of the infinitesimal that science has done its best work; and it is only by unwearying attention to the thousand little things of life that we may hope to make some approach to moral and intellectual perfection. He who works with joy and cheerfulness in the field which himself has found and chosen, will acquire knowledge and skill, and his labor will be transformed into increase and newness of life.

We gain a clear view of things only when we set them apart from ourselves, and contemplate them simply as objects of thought. To see them aright we must be free from emotion and behold them in the cold air of the intellect. To look on them as in some way bound up with our personal good or evil, is to have the vision blurred. Study in the spirit of an investigator, who has no other than a scientific interest in what he sets himself to examine. The wise physician is wholly intent upon making a correct diagnosis, though the patient be his mother. What gain would self-delusion bring him or her he loves? Things are what they are, and it is our business to know them. Observe and hold thy judgment in suspense until patient looking shall have made truth so plain that to pass judgment is superfluous.

The aim of mental training is clearness and accuracy of view, together with the strength to keep steadfastly looking into the world of intelligible things. What rouses desire tends to enslave; what gives delight tends to liberate; the one appeals to the senses, the other to the soul. Hence, intellectual and moral pleasures alone are associated with the sense of freedom and pure joy. The lovers of freedom are as rare as the lovers of truth and of God. For most, liberty is but a trader's commodity, to be parted with for price, as their obedience is a slave's service. The chief good consists in acting justly and nobly, rather than in thinking acutely and profoundly. The free play of the mind is delightful, but the law of moral obligation is the deepest thing in us. Honor, place, and wealth, which are won at the price of self-improvement, the wise will not desire. Great opportunities seldom present themselves, but every moment of every hour of thy conscious life is an opportunity to improve thyself, which for thee is the best and most necessary thing. Since our power over others is small, but over ourselves large, let us devote our energies to self-improvement. "Nor let any man say," writes Locke, "he cannot govern his passions, nor hinder them from breaking out and carrying him into action; for what he can do before a prince or great man he can do alone or in the presence of God, if he will."

The sure way to happiness is to yield ourselves wholly to God, knowing that he has care of us, and at the same time to seek to draw from life whatever joy and delight it may bestow upon a high mind and a pure heart, receiving the blessing gladly, conscious all the while that what is external cannot really be ours, and is not, therefore, necessary to our contentment.

That many are wiser and stronger than thou, is not a motive for discouragement; the depressing thought is, that so few are wise and strong. He who gives his whole life to what he believes he is most capable of doing, succeeds, whatever be the worth of his work. There are many who are busy with many things; but one who has a high purpose, and who devotes all his energies to its fulfillment, is not easily found; and great and interesting characters are, therefore, rare.

To what better use can we put life than to employ it in ameliorating life? It is to this every wise and good man devotes himself, whether he be priest or teacher, physician or lawyer, philosopher or poet, captain of industry or statesman.

CHAPTER V.

THE SCOPE OF PUBLIC-SCHOOL EDUCATION.

Our system of Public-School Education is a result of the faith of the people in the need of universal intelligence for the maintenance of popular government. Does this system include moral training? Since the teaching of religious doctrines is precluded, this, I imagine, is what we are to consider in discussing the Scope of Public-School Education. The equivalents of scope are aim, end, opportunity, range of view; and the equivalents of education are training, discipline, development, instruction. The proper meaning of the word education, it seems, is not a drawing out, but a training up, as vines are trained to lay hold of and rise by means of what is stronger than themselves. My subject, then, is the aim, end, opportunity, and range of view of public-school education, which to be education at all, in any true sense, must be a training, discipline, development, and instruction of man's whole being, physical, intellectual, and moral. This, I suppose, is what Herbert Spencer means when he defines education to be a preparation for complete living. Montaigne says the end of education is wisdom and virtue; Comenius declares it to be knowledge, virtue, and religion; Milton, likeness to God through virtue and faith; Locke, health of body, virtue, and good manners; Herbart, virtue, which is the realization in each one of the idea of inner freedom; while Kant and Fichte declare it to consist chiefly in the formation of character. All these thinkers agree that the supreme end of education is spiritual or ethical. The controlling aim, then, should be, not to impart information, but to upbuild the being which makes us human, to form habits of right thinking and doing. The ideal is virtually that of Israel,—that righteousness is life,—though the Greek ideal of beauty and freedom may not be excluded. It is the doctrine that manners make the man, that conduct is three-fourths of life, leaving but one-fourth for intellectual activity and æsthetic enjoyment; and into this fourth of life but few ever enter in any real way, while all are called and may learn to do good and avoid evil.

"In the end," says Ruskin, "the God of heaven and earth loves active, modest, and kind people, and hates idle, proud, greedy, and cruel ones." We can all learn to become active, modest, and kind; to turn from idleness, pride, greed, and cruelty. But we cannot all make ourselves capable of living in the high regions of pure thought and ideal beauty; and for the few even who are able to do this, it is still true that conduct is three-fourths of life.

"The end of man," says Büchner, "is conversion into carbonic acid, water, and ammonia." This also is an ideal, and he thinks we should be pleased to know that in dying we give back to the universe what had been lent. He moralizes too; but if all we can know of our destiny is that we shall be converted into carbonic acid, water, and ammonia, the sermon may be omitted. On such a faith it is not possible to found a satisfactory system of education. Men will always refuse to think thus meanly of themselves, and in answer to those who would persuade them that they are but brutes, they will, with perfect confidence, claim kinship with God; for from an utterly frivolous view of life both our reason and our instinct turn.

The Scope of Public-School Education is to co-operate with the physical, social, and religious environment to form good and wise men and women. Unless we bear in mind that the school is but one of several educational agencies, we shall not form a right estimate of its office. It depends almost wholly for its success upon the kind of material furnished it by the home, the state, and the church; and, to confine our view to our own country, I have little hesitation in affirming that our home life, our social and political life, and our religious life have contributed far more to make us what we are than any and all of our schools. The school, unless it works in harmony with these great forces, can do little more than sharpen the wits. Many of the teachers of our Indian schools are doubtless competent and earnest; but their pupils, when they return to their tribes, quickly lose what they have gained, because they are thrown into an environment which annuls the ideals that prevailed in the school. The controlling aim of our teachers should be, therefore, to bring their pedagogical action into harmony with what is best in the domestic, social, and religious life of the child; for this is the foundation on which they must build, and to weaken it is to expose the whole structure to ruin. Hence the teacher's attitude toward the child should be that of sympathy with him in his love for his parents, his country, and his religion. His reason is still feeble, and his life is largely one of feeling; and the fountain-heads of his purest and noblest feelings are precisely his parents, his country, and his religion, and to tamper with them is to poison the wells whence he draws the water of life. To assume and hold this attitude with sincerity and tact is difficult; it requires both character and culture; it implies a genuine love of mankind and of human excellence; reverence for whatever uplifts, purifies, and strengthens the heart; knowledge of the world, of literature, and of history, united with an earnest desire to do whatever may be possible to lead each pupil toward life in its completeness, which is health and healthful activity of body and mind and heart and soul.

As the heart makes the home, the teacher makes the school. What we need above all things, wherever the young are gathered for education, is not a showy building, or costly apparatus, or improved methods or text-books, but a living, loving, illumined human being who has deep faith in the power of education and a real desire to bring it to bear upon those who are intrusted to him. This applies to the primary school with as much force as to the high school and university. Those who think, and they are, I imagine, the vast majority, that any one who can read and write, who knows something of arithmetic, geography, and history, is competent to educate young children, have not even the most elementary notions of what education is.

What the teacher is, not what he utters and inculcates, is the important thing. The life he lives, and whatever reveals that life to his pupils; his unconscious behavior, even; above all, what in his inmost soul he hopes, believes, and loves, have far deeper and more potent influence than mere lessons can ever have. It is precisely here that we Americans, whose talent is predominantly practical and inventive, are apt to go astray. We have won such marvellous victories with our practical sense and inventive genius that we have grown accustomed to look to them for aid, whatever the nature of the difficulty or problem may be. Machinery can be made to do much, and to do well what it does. With its help we move rapidly; we bring the ends of the earth into instantaneous communication; we print the daily history of the world and throw it before every door; we plough and we sow and we reap; we build cities, and we fill our houses with whatever conduces to comfort or luxury. All this and much more machinery enables us to do. But it cannot create life, nor can it, in any effective way, promote vital processes. Now, education is essentially a vital process. It is a furthering of life; and as the living proceed from the living, they can rise into the wider world of ideas and conduct only by the help of the living; and as in the physical realm every animal begets after its own likeness, so also in the spiritual the teacher can give but what he has. If the well-spring of truth and love has run dry within himself, he teaches in vain. His words will no more bring forth life than desert winds will clothe arid sands with verdure. Much talking and writing about education have chiefly helped to obscure a matter which is really plain. The purpose of the public school is or should be not to form a mechanic or a specialist of any kind, but to form a true man or woman. Hence the number of things we teach the child is of small moment. Those schools, in fact, in which the greatest number of things are taught give, as a rule, the least education. The character of the Roman people, which enabled them to dominate the earth and to give laws to the world, was formed before they had schools, and when their schools were most flourishing they themselves were in rapid moral and social dissolution. We make education and religion too much a social affair, and too little a personal affair. Their essence lies in their power to transform the individual, and it is only in transforming him that they recreate the wider life of the community. The Founder of Christianity addressed himself to the individual, and gave little heed to the state or other environment. He looked to a purified inner source of life to create for itself a worthier environment, and simply ignored devices for working sudden and startling changes. They who have entered into the hidden meaning of this secret and this method turn in utter incredulity from the schemes of declaimers and agitators.

The men who fill the world, each with his plan for reforming and saving it, may have their uses, since the poet tells us there are uses in adversity, which, like the toad, ugly and venomous, wears yet a precious jewel in its head; but to one deafened by their discordant and clamorous voices, the good purpose they serve seems to be as mythical as the jewel in the toad's head.

Have not those who mistake their crotchets for Nature's laws invaded our schools? Have they not succeeded in forming a public opinion and in setting devices at work which render education, in the true sense of the word, if not impossible, difficult? Literature is a criticism of life, made by those who are in love with life, and have the deepest faith in its possibilities; and all criticism which is inspired by sympathy and faith and controlled by knowledge is helpful. Complacent thoughts are rarely true, and hardly ever useful. It is a prompting of nature to turn from what we have to what we lack, for thus only is there hope of amendment and progress. We are, to quote Emerson,

"Built of furtherance and pursuing,
Not of spent deeds, but of doing."

Hence the wise and the strong dwell not upon their virtues and accomplishments, but strive to learn wherein they fail, for it is in correcting this they desire to labor. They wish to know the truth about themselves, are willing to try to see themselves as others see them, that self-knowledge may make self-improvement possible. They turn from flattery, for they understand that flattery is insult. Now, if this is the attitude of wise and strong men, how much more should it not be that of a wise and strong people? Whenever persons or things are viewed as related in some special way to ourselves, our opinions of them will hardly be free from bias. When, for instance, I think or speak of my country, my religion, my friends, my enemies, I find it difficult to put away the prejudice which my self-esteem and vanity create, and which, like a haze, ever surrounds me to color or obscure the pure light of reason. It cannot do us harm to have our defects and shortcomings pointed out to us; but to be told by demagogues and declaimers that we are the greatest, the most enlightened, the most virtuous people which exists or has existed, can surely do us no good. If it is true, we should not dwell upon it, for this will but distract us from striving for the things in which we are deficient; and if it is false, it can only mislead us and nourish a foolish conceit. It is the orator's misfortune to be compelled to think of his audience rather than of truth. It is his business to please, persuade, and convince; and men are pleased with flattering lies, persuaded and convinced by appeals to passion and interest. Happier is the writer, who need not think of a reader, but finds his reward in the truth he expresses.

It is not possible for an enlightened mind not to take profound interest in our great system of public education. To do this he need not think it the best system. He may deem it defective in important requisites. He may hold, as I hold, that the system is of minor importance, the kind of teacher being all important. But if he loves his country, if he loves human excellence, if he has faith in man's capacity for growth, he cannot but turn his thoughts, with abiding attention and sympathy, to the generous and determined efforts of a powerful and vigorous people to educate themselves. Were our public-school system nothing more than the nation's profession of faith in the transforming power of education, it would be an omen of good and a ground for hope; and one cannot do more useful work than to help to form a public opinion which will accept with thankfulness the free play of all sincere minds about this great question, and which will cause the genuine lovers of our country to turn in contempt from the clamors politicians and bigots are apt to raise when an honest man utters honest thought on this all-important subject.

I am willing to assume and to accept as a fact that our theological differences make it impossible to introduce the teaching of any religious creed into the public school. I take the system as it is,—that is, as a system of secular education,—and I address myself more directly to the question proposed: What is or should be its scope?

The fact that religious instruction is excluded makes it all the more necessary that humanizing and ethical aims should be kept constantly in view. Whoever teaches in a public school should be profoundly convinced that man is more than an animal which may be taught cunning and quickness. A weed in blossom may have a certain beauty, but it will bear no fruit; and so the boy or youth one often meets, with his irreverent smartness, his precocious pseudo-knowledge of a hundred things, may excite a kind of interest, but he gives little promise of a noble future. The flower of his life is the blossom of the weed, which in its decay will poison the air, or, at the best, serve but to fertilize the soil. If we are to work to good purpose we must take our stand, with the great thinkers and educators, on the broad field of man's nature, and act in the light of the only true ideal of education,—that its end is wisdom, virtue, knowledge, power, reverence, faith, health, behavior, hope, and love; in a word, whatever powers and capacities make for intelligence, for conduct, for character, for completeness of life. Not for a moment should we permit ourselves to be deluded by the thought that because the teaching of religious creeds is excluded, therefore we may make no appeal to the fountain-heads which sleep within every breast, the welling of whose waters alone has power to make us human. If we are forbidden to turn the current into this or that channel, we are not forbidden to recognize the universal truth that man lives by faith, hope, and love, by imagination and desire, and that it is precisely for this reason that he is educable. We move irresistibly in the lines of our real faith and desire, and the educator's great purpose is to help us to believe in what is high and to desire what is good. Since for the irreverent and vulgar spirit nothing is high or good, reverence, and the refinement which is the fruit of true intelligence, urge ceaselessly their claims on the teacher's attention. Goethe, I suppose, was little enough of a Christian to satisfy the demands of an agnostic cripple even, and yet he held that the best thing in man is the thrill of awe; and that the chief business of education is to cultivate reverence for whatever is above, beneath, around, and within us. This he believed to be the only philosophical and healthful attitude of mind and heart towards the universe, seen and unseen. May not the meanest flower that blows bring thoughts that lie too deep for tears? Is not reverence a part of all the sweetest and purest feelings which bind us to father and mother, to friends and home and country? Is it not the very bloom and fragrance, not only of the highest religious faith, but also of the best culture? Let the thrill of awe cease to vibrate, and you will have a world in which money is more than man, office better than honesty, and books like "Innocents Abroad" or "Peck's Bad Boy" more indicative of the kind of man we form than are the noblest works of genius. What is the great aim of the primary school, if it is not the nutrition of feeling? The child is weak in mind, weak in will, but he is most impressionable. Feeble in thought, he is strong in capacity to feel the emotions which are the sap of the tree of moral life. He responds quickly to the appeals of love, tenderness, and sympathy. He is alive to whatever is noble, heroic, and venerable. He desires the approbation of others, especially of those whom he believes to be true and high and pure, he has unquestioning faith, not only in God but in great men, who, for him, indeed, are earthly gods. Is not his father a divine man, whose mere word drives away all fear and fills him with confidence? The touch of his mother's hand stills his pain; if he is frightened, her voice is enough to soothe him to sleep. To imagine that we are educating this being of infinite sensibility and impressionability when we do little else than teach him to read, write, and cipher, is to cherish a delusion. It is not his destiny to become a reading, writing, and ciphering machine, but to become a man who believes, hopes, and loves; who holds to sovereign truth, and is swayed by sympathy; who looks up with reverence and awe to the heavens, and hearkens with cheerful obedience to the call of duty; who has habits of right thinking and well doing which have become a law unto him, a second nature. And if it be said that we all recognize this to be so, but that it is not the business of the school to help to form such a man; that it does its work when it sharpens the wits, I will answer with the words of William von Humboldt: "Whatever we wish to see introduced into the life of a nation must first be introduced into its schools."

Now, what we wish to see introduced into the life of the nation is not the power of shrewd men, wholly absorbed in the striving for wealth, reckless of the means by which it is gotten, and who, whether they succeed or whether they fail, look upon money as the equivalent of the best things man knows or has; who therefore think that the highest purpose of government, as of other social forces and institutions, is to make it easy for all to get abundance of gold and to live in sloven plenty; but what we wish to see introduced into the life of the nation is the power of intelligence and virtue, of wisdom and conduct. We believe, and in fact know, that humanity, justice, truthfulness, honesty, honor, fidelity, courage, integrity, reverence, purity, and self-respect are higher and mightier than anything mere sharpened wits can accomplish. But if these virtues, which constitute nearly the whole sum of man's strength and worth, are to be introduced into the life of the nation, they must be introduced into the schools, into the process of education. We must recognize, not in theory alone but in practice, that the chief end of education is ethical, since conduct is three-fourths of human life. The aim must be to make men true in thought and word, pure in desire, faithful in act, upright in deed; men who understand that the highest good does not lie in the possession of anything whatsoever, but that it lies in power and quality of being; for whom what we are and not what we have is the guiding principle; who know that the best work is not that for which we receive most pay, but that which is most favorable to life, physical, moral, intellectual, and religious; since man does not exist for work or the Sabbath, but work and rest exist for him, that he may thrive and become more human and more divine. We must cease to tell boys and girls that education will enable them to get hold of the good things of which they believe the world to be full; we must make them realize rather that the best thing in the world is a noble man or woman, and to be that is the only certain way to a worthy and contented life. All talk about patriotism which implies that it is possible to be a patriot or a good citizen without being a true and good man, is sophistical and hollow. How shall he who cares not for his better self care for his country?

We must look, as educators, most closely to those sides of the national life where there is the greatest menace of ruin. It is plain that our besetting sin, as a people, is not intemperance or unchastity, but dishonesty. From the watering and manipulating of stocks to the adulteration of food and drink, from the booming of towns and lands to the selling of votes and the buying of office, from the halls of Congress to the policeman's beat, from the capitalist who controls trusts and syndicates to the mechanic who does inferior work, the taint of dishonesty is everywhere. We distrust one another, distrust those who manage public affairs, distrust our own fixed will to suffer the worst that may befall rather than cheat or steal or lie. Dishonesty hangs, like mephitic air, about our newspapers, our legislative assemblies, the municipal government of our towns and cities, about our churches even, since our religion itself seems to lack that highest kind of honesty, the downright and thorough sincerity which is its life-breath.

If the teacher in the public school may not insist that an honest man is the noblest work of God, he may teach at least that he who fails in honesty fails in the most essential quality of manhood, enters into warfare with the forces which have made him what he is, and which secure him the possession of what he holds dearer than himself, since he barters for it his self-respect; that the dishonest man is an anarchist and dissocialist, one who does what in him lies to destroy credit, and the sense of the sacredness of property, obedience to law, and belief in the rights of man. If our teachers are to work in the light of an ideal, if they are to have a conscious end in view, as all who strive intelligently must have, if they are to hold a principle which will give unity to their methods, they must seek it in the idea of morality, of conduct, which is three-fourths of life.

I myself am persuaded that the real and philosophical basis of morality is the being of God, a being absolute, infinite, unimaginable, inconceivable, of whom our highest and nearest thought is that he is not only almighty, but all-wise and all-good as well. But it is possible, I think, to cultivate the moral sense without directly and expressly assigning to it this philosophical and religious basis; for goodness is largely its own evidence, as virtue is its own reward. It all depends on the teacher. Life produces life, life develops life; and if the teacher have within himself a living sense of the all-importance of conduct, if he thoroughly realize that what we call knowledge is but a small part of man's life, his influence will nourish the feelings by which character is evolved. The germ of a moral idea is always an emotion, and that which impels to right action is the emotion rather than the idea. The teachings of the heart remain forever, and they are the most important; for what we love, genuinely believe in, and desire decides what we are and may become. Hence the true educator, even in giving technical instruction, strives not merely to make a workman, but to make also a man, whose being shall be touched to finer issues by spiritual powers, who shall be upheld by faith in the worth and sacredness of life, and in the education by which it is transformed, enriched, purified, and ennobled. He understands that an educated man, who, in the common acceptation of the phrase, is one who knows something, who knows many things, is, in truth, simply one who has acquired habits of right thinking and right doing. The culture which we wish to see prevail throughout our country is not learning and literary skill; it is character and intellectual openness,—that higher humanity which is latent within us all; which is power, wisdom, truth, goodness, love, sympathy, grace, and beauty; whose surpassing excellence the poor may know as well as the rich; whose charm the multitude may feel as well as the chosen few.

"He who speaks of the people," says Guicciardini, "speaks, in sooth, of a foolish animal, a prey to a thousand errors, a thousand confusions, without taste, without affection, without firmness." The scope of our public-school education is to make common-places of this kind, by which all literature is pervaded, so false as to be absurd; and when this end shall have been attained, Democracy will have won its noblest victory.

How shall we find the secret from which hope of such success will spring? By so forming and directing the power of public opinion, of national approval, and of money, as to make the best men and women willing and ready to enter the teacher's profession. The kind of man who educates is the test of the kind of education given, and there is properly no other test. When we Americans shall have learned to believe with all our hearts and with all the strength of irresistible conviction that a true educator is a more important, in every way a more useful, sort of man than a great railway king, or pork butcher, or captain of industry, or grain buyer, or stock manipulator, we shall have begun to make ourselves capable of perceiving the real scope of public-school education.

CHAPTER VI.

THE RELIGIOUS ELEMENT IN EDUCATION.

The theory of development, which is now widely received and applied to all things, from star dust to the latest fashion, is at once a sign and a cause of the almost unlimited confidence which we put in the remedial and transforming power of education. We no longer think of God as standing aloof from nature and the course of history. He it is who works in the play of atoms and in the throbbings of the human heart; and as we perceive his action in the evolution both of matter and of mind, we know and feel that, when with conscious purpose we strive to call forth and make living the latent powers of man's being, we are working with him in the direction in which he impels the universe. Education, therefore, we look upon as necessary, not merely because it is indispensable to any high and human kind of life, but also because God has made development the law both of conscious and unconscious nature. He is in act all that the finite may become, and the effort to grow in strength, knowledge, and virtue springs from a divine impulse.

Although we know that the earth is not the centre of the universe, that it is but a minor satellite, a globule lost in space, our deepest thought still finds that the end of nature is the production of rational beings, of man; for the final reason for which all things exist is that the infinite good may be communicated; and since the highest good is truth and holiness, it can be communicated only to beings who think and love. Hence all things are man's, and he exists that he may make himself like God; in other words, that he may educate himself; for the end of education is to fit him for completeness of life, to train all his faculties, to call all his endowments into play, to make him symmetrical and whole in body and soul. This, of course, is the ideal, and consequently the unattainable; but in the light of ideals alone do we see rightly and judge truly; and to take a lower view of the aim and end of education is to take a partial view. To hold that God is, and that man truly lives only in so far as he is made partaker of the divine life, is, by implication, to hold that his education should be primarily and essentially religious. Our opinions and beliefs, however, are never the result of purely rational processes, and hence a mere syllogism has small persuasive force, or even no influence at all, upon our way of looking at things, or the motives which determine action.

As it is useless to argue against the nature of things, so we generally plead in vain when our world-view is other than that of those whom we seek to convince; for those who observe from different points either do not see the same objects or do not see them in the same light. Life is complex, and the springs of thought and action are controlled in mysterious ways by forces and impulses which we neither clearly understand nor accurately measure. What is called the spirit of the age, the spirit which, as the Poet says, sits at the roaring loom of time and weaves for God the garment whereby He is made visible to us, exercises a potent influence upon all our thinking and doing. We live in an era of progress, and progress means differentiation of structure and specialization of function. The more perfect the organism, the more are its separate functions assigned to separate parts. As social aggregates develop, a similar differentiation takes place. Offices which were in the hands of one are distributed among several. Agencies are evolved by which processes of production, distribution, and exchange are carried on. Trades and professions are called into existence. As enlightenment and skill increase, men become more difficult to please. They demand the best work, and the best work can be done, as a rule, only by specialists. Specialization thus becomes a characteristic of civilization. The patriarch is both king and priest. In Greece and Rome, religion is a function of the State. In the Middle Age, the Church and the State coalesce, and form such an intimate union that the special domain of either is invaded by both. But differentiation finally takes place, and we all learn to distinguish between the things of Cæsar and the things of God. This separation has far-reaching results. In asserting its independence, the State was driven to use argument as well as force. Thus learning, which in the confusion that succeeded the incursions of the Barbarians was cultivated almost exclusively by ecclesiastics, grew to be of interest and importance to laymen. They began to study, and the subjects which most engaged their thoughts were not religious, in the accepted sense of the word. The Protestant rebellion is but a phase of this revolution. It began with the introduction of the literature of Greece into Western Europe. The spirit of inquiry and mental curiosity was thereby awakened in wider circles; enthusiasm for the truth and beauty to which Greek genius has given the most perfect expression, was aroused; and interest in intellectual and artistic culture was called forth. New ideals were upheld to fresh and wondering minds. The contagion spread, and the thirst for knowledge was carried to ever-widening spheres. It thus came to pass that the cleric and the scholar ceased to be identical. The boundaries of knowledge were enlarged when the inductive method was applied to the study of nature, and it soon became impossible for one man to pretend to a mastery of all science. And so the principle of the division of labor was introduced into things of the intellect. Of old, the prophet or the philosopher was supposed to possess all wisdom; but now it had become plain that proficiency could be hoped for only by lifelong devotion to some special branch of knowledge. This led to other developments. The business of teaching, which had been almost exclusively in the hands of ecclesiastics, was now necessarily taken up by laymen also. As feudalism fell to decay, and the assertion of popular rights began to point to the advent of democracy, the movement in opposition to privilege logically led to the claim that learning should no longer be held to be the appanage of special classes, but that the gates of the temple of knowledge should be thrown open to the whole people. To make education universal, the most ready and the simplest means was to levy a school tax; and as this could be done only by the State, the State established systems of education and assumed the office of teacher. The result of all this has been that the school, which throughout Christendom is the creation of the church, has in most countries very largely passed into the control of the civil government.

This transference of control need not, however, involve the exclusion of religious influence and instruction; though once the State has gained the ascendency, the natural tendency is to take a partial and secular view of the whole question of education, and to limit the functions of the school to the training of the mental faculties. And, as a matter of fact, this tendency is found in men of widely differing and even conflicting opinions and convictions concerning religion itself. It is most pronounced, however, in the educational theories and systems of positivists and agnostics. As they hold that there is no God, or that we cannot know that there is a God, they necessarily conclude that it is absurd to attempt to teach children anything about God. This view is forcibly expressed by Issaurat, a French writer on education, in a recently published volume, which he calls "The Evolution and History of Pedagogy."

"All religion," he affirms, in the concluding chapter of his book, "impedes, thwarts, misdirects, and troubles the natural education of man, the normal and harmonious development of his physical, moral, and intellectual faculties; and since educational reform is not possible without reformation in the government, it is the duty of the State, not merely to separate itself from the church, but to suppress the church and to found the science of education upon biological philosophy, upon transformism—let us say the word, upon materialism." This view is manifestly the inevitable result of Issaurat's general system of thought and belief. In his opinion, matter alone really exists, and what is called spirit is but a phase of its evolution. The world of spirit, therefore, is illusory; and to bring up the young to believe that it is the infinite, essential reality, is to teach them what is false, and to give a wrong direction to the whole course of life. For practical purposes this is the view not only of materialists and positivists, but of agnostics as well, who, though they do not deny the existence of spirit, assert that only the phenomenal can be known, or become the subject-matter of teaching. They all agree in holding that the theological world-view was the primitive one, which, yielding to the metaphysical, has been finally superseded by the scientific, the sole basis of a rational philosophy. The ideas of God, substance, cause, and end, are metaphysical ideas, which, if we wish to understand nature, must be ignored; for the study of nature is the study simply of facts and their relations with one another. There is, so they think, no such thing as substance, any more than there is such a thing as a principle of gravity, heat, light, electricity, or chemical affinity. The vital principle too, which has played so great a part in physiological inquiries, must be given up; and therefore, while nearly all the philosophers, from Kant to our own day, have made psychology the foundation of the science of education, there is at present a marked tendency to have it rest solely on biology. Whether and to what extent these theories are true or false, is beyond the purpose of this argument. True or false, they fairly describe the views of a large number of thinkers in our day, and enable us to form a conception of their philosophy of education. "Why trouble ourselves," asks Professor Huxley, "about matters of which, however important they may be, we do know nothing and can know nothing? With a view to our duty in this life, it is necessary to be possessed of only two beliefs: The first, that the order of nature is ascertainable by our faculties to an extent that is practically unlimited; the second, that our volition counts for something as a condition of the course of events." Our volition counts as a condition, but it is after all only a part of the course of events, and, consequently, the only belief it is necessary to hold is, that the course of events is ascertainable by our faculties to a practically unlimited extent. Such is the brief creed of materialists and agnostics. The order of nature is the only known god, and man's sole end and duty is to make himself acquainted with it, that through obedience he may attain the highest perfection and happiness of which he is capable. This is the one true religion, and an enlightened people should forbid that any other be taught in their schools. Here we have an intelligible and well-defined position, and the one which, from the point of view of such men as Issaurat and Huxley, is alone tenable.

Every one now, who thinks at all, has some theory of the world, and hence the shades of unbelief as of belief are many; and since views of education are part of a more general system of philosophy, it is inevitable that those who disagree upon the fundamental questions of thought, disagree also in their notions as to what is the school's proper office.

Materialists, pantheists, positivists, secularists, and pessimists unite in denying that there is a God above and distinct from nature, while agnostics and cosmists affirm that such a being, if he exist, must necessarily lie outside the domain of knowledge. Positive religious doctrines, therefore, are superstition. As these views are reflected in a more or less vague way in the writings of the multitude of those who make the current literature, public opinion becomes averse to religious dogmas. A large number of cultivated minds turn from all definite systems, whether of thought or belief. Everything may be tolerated, if only the spirit of dogmatism is away. They recognize how great a thing religion is, how profoundly it touches life, how powerfully it shapes conduct. Without it, civilization is hard and mechanical, art is formal and feeble, and man himself but a shrewd animal. But, from their points of view, doctrines about God and Christ and the church have nothing to do with religion. To think of God as substance is to convert him into nature, to think of him as a person is to limit him. The only absolute is the moral order of the world. The religion of Christ is not a theory or a system of thought; it is a view of life, and its essence is found in belief in the reality of moral ideas. The supernatural may fall away,—even the notion of a Providence which rules the world in the interest of the good may be given up,—and we still have the method and the secret of Jesus, all that is of value in his life and teaching. All theology is an illusion, all creeds are a mistake. Religion rests upon the moral power, which is not a conclusion drawn from facts, but the fact itself,—the primal and essential fact in human life. Religion is simply morality suffused by the glow and warmth of a devout and reverent temper, and to teach doctrines about God and the church will not make men religious.

It is obvious to object that morality supposes belief in a Personal God and in the soul of man, as law implies a law-giver. This objection is meaningless, not only for the thinkers whom I have mentioned, but for others who find little interest in the literary and religious ideas of such men as Matthew Arnold. Morality, they claim, is independent, not only of metaphysics, but of religion as well. It is a science, as yet, indeed, imperfectly developed, but a science nevertheless, just as chemistry or physiology is a science. Human acts are controlled, not by a higher will or man's freedom of choice, but by physical laws. The peculiarity of this view does not lie in the contention that ethics is a science, but in the claim that it is a science altogether independent of metaphysical and religious dogmas. All forces, it is asserted, physical, mental, and moral, are identical; and morality, like bodily vigor, is a product of organism. It is, in fact, but an elaboration of the two radical instincts of nutrition and propagation, from which springs the twofold movement of conscious life, the egoistic and the altruistic. This theory is accepted alike in the German school of materialism, in the French school of positivism, and in the English school of utilitarianism. What the influence of modern empiricism upon American opinion may be, it is difficult to determine. Americans certainly are a practical people, but they are not devoid of interest in speculative views. More than any other people, possibly, they have faith in the marvellous things which science is destined to accomplish, and they willingly listen to men of science, even when they quit the regions of fact for those of opinion. Thus the various theories, to which the progress of natural knowledge has given rise, are received by them, if not with implicit trust, with a kind of feeling, at least, that they may be true.

There is even a disposition to treat doubts of the truth of Christianity as a mark of intellectual vigor, and sometimes as a sign of religious sincerity. Preoccupied with material interests, but yet finding time to read the thoughts of many minds and to hear the discussion of antagonistic opinions and systems, they find it difficult to trust with entire confidence to what they know or believe. It all seems to be relative, and another generation may see everything in a different light. Problems take the place of principles, religious convictions are feeble, the grasp of Christian truth is relaxed, and the result is a certain moral hesitancy and infirmity.

They are not hostile to the churches, but they are more or less indifferent to their doctrines. As each sect has its peculiar creed, the dogmatic position of the church is thought to be of little moment. The important thing is to promote intelligence and virtue. The distinctively sectarian view they look upon as narrow and false, and the good which ecclesiastical organizations do is done in spite of their characteristic doctrines. The note of sectarianism is to them what the note of provincialism is to a man of culture, or lack of breeding to a gentleman. The moral fervor, which sectarians more than others feel, is, they freely grant, a power for good. It has a wholesome influence upon character, and is a support of the virtues which make free institutions possible, and which alone can make them permanent. But it has no necessary connection with theological doctrines, since it is found in earnest believers, whatever their creed. It is the child of enthusiastic faith, and is nourished and kept living by worship, not by dogmatic asseverations. As the power of the churches does not lie in their creeds, to make these creeds a school lesson cannot be desirable, especially when we reflect that the method of religion and the method of science are at variance.

Such, I imagine, are the views of large numbers of Americans, who are not members of any church, but whose influence is strongly felt in political and commercial as well as in social and professional life. And numbers of zealous Protestants are in substantial agreement with them, since they hold that faith is an emotional rather than an intellectual state of mind, and that religion is not so much a way of thinking as a way of feeling and acting. They assume, of course, as the prerequisites of religious belief, the dogmas of the existence of a personal God and of an immortal human soul; but, for the rest, they lay stress upon conduct and piety, not upon orthodox faith. A church must have a creed, as a party must have a platform; but unhesitating confidence in the truth of the doctrines which it thus formulates is not indispensable. American churches tend to ignore creeds. This is due, in a measure, to the growing desire to form a union among the several sects; but it is none the less a sign of waning belief in dogmatic religion. Hence the increasing emphasis which preaching lays upon the moral, æsthetic, and emotional aspects of the religious life. Hence, too, the assumption that the soul of the church may live, though the body be dead.