Education and the Higher Life | Page 5

before
have the faith and culture which make us human, which make us strong
and wise, been the possession of so large a portion of the race. Religion
and civilization have diffused themselves, from little centres--from
Athens and Jerusalem and Rome--until people after people, whole
continents, have been brought under their influence. And in our day
this diffusion is so rapid that it spreads farther in a decade than
formerly in centuries. For ages, mountains and rivers and oceans were
barriers behind which tribes and nations entrenched themselves against
the human foe. But we have tunneled the mountains; we have bridged
the rivers; we have tamed the oceans. We hitch steam and electricity to
our wagons, and in a few days make the circuit of the globe. All lands,
all seas, are open to us. The race is getting acquainted with itself. We
make a comparative study of all literatures, of all religions, of all
philosophies, of all political systems. We find some soul of goodness in
whatever struggles and yearnings have tried man's heart. As the
products of every clime are carried everywhere, like gifts from other
worlds, so the highest science and the purest religion are communicated
and taught throughout the earth: and as a result, national prejudices and

antagonisms are beginning to disappear; wars are becoming less
frequent and less cruel; established wrongs are yielding to the pressure
of opinion; privileged classes are losing their hold upon the imagination;
and opportunity offers itself to ever-increasing numbers.
Now, in all this, what do we perceive but the purpose of God, urging
mankind to wider and nobler life? History is his many-chambered
school. Here he has taught this lesson, and there another, still leading
his children out of the darkness of sin and ignorance toward the light of
righteousness and love, until his kingdom come, until his will be done
on earth as it is in heaven. To believe in God and in this divine
education, and to make co-operation with his providential guidance of
the race a life-aim is to have an ideal which is not only the highest, but
which also blends all other true ideals into harmony. And the lovers of
culture should be the first to perceive that intellectual good is empty,
illusory, unless there be added to it the good of the heart, the good of
conscience. To live for the cultivation of one's mind, is, after all, to live
for one's self, and therefore out of harmony with the eternal law which
makes it impossible for us to find ourselves except in what is not
ourselves. "It is the capital fault of all cultivated men," says Goethe,
"that they devote their whole energies to the carrying out of a mere idea,
and seldom or never to the realization of practical good." Whatever
may be said in praise of culture, of its power to make its possessor at
home in the world of the best thought, the purest sentiment, the highest
achievements of the race; of the freedom, the mildness, the
reasonableness of the temper it begets; of its aim at completeness and
perfection,--it is nevertheless true, that if it be sought apart from faith in
God and devotion to man, its tendency is to produce an artificial and
unsympathetic character. The primal impulse of our nature is to action;
and unless we can make our thought a kind of deed, it seems to be vain
and unreal; and unless the harmonious development of all the
endowments which make the beauty and dignity of human life, give us
new strength and will to work with God for the good of men, sadness
and a sense of failure fall upon us. To have a cultivated mind, to be able
to see things on many sides, to have wide sympathy and the power of
generous appreciation,--is most desirable, and without something of all
this, not only is our life narrow and uninteresting, but our energy is

turned in wrong directions, and our very religion is in danger of losing
its catholicity.
Culture, then, is necessary. We need it as a corrective of the tendency
to seek the good of life in what is external, as a means of helping us to
overcome our vulgar self-complacency, our satisfaction with low aims
and cheap accomplishments, our belief in the sovereign potency of
machines and measures. We need it to make our lives less unlovely,
less hard, less material; to help us to understand the idolatry of the
worship of steam and electricity, the utter insufficiency of the ideals of
industrialism. But if culture is to become a mighty transforming
influence it must be wedded to religious faith, without which, while it
widens the intellectual view, it weakens the will to act. To take us out
of ourselves and to urge