Education and the Higher Life | Page 6

us on to labor with God that we may leave the
world better because we have lived, religion alone has power. It gives
new vigor to the cultivated mind; it takes away the exclusive and
fastidious temper which a purely intellectual habit tends to produce; it
enlarges sympathy; it teaches reverence; it nourishes faith, inspires
hope, exalts the imagination, and keeps alive the fire of love. To lead a
noble, a beautiful, and a useful life, we should accept and follow the
ideals both of religion and of culture. In the midst of the
transformations of many kinds which are taking place in the civilized
world, neither the uneducated nor the irreligious mind can be of help.
Large and tolerant views are necessary; but not less so is the
enthusiasm, the earnestness, the charity of Christian faith. They who
are to be leaders in the great movements upon which we have entered,
must both know and believe. They must understand the age, must
sympathize with whatever is true and beneficent in its aspirations, must
hail with thankfulness whatever help science, and art, and culture can
bring; but they must also know and feel that man is of the race of God,
and that his real and true life is in the unseen, infinite, and eternal world
of thought and love, with which the actual world of the senses must be
brought into ever-increasing harmony. Liberty and equality are good,
wealth is good, and with them we can do much, but not all that needs to
be done. The spirit of Christ is not merely the spirit of liberty and
equality; it is more essentially the spirit of love, of sympathy, of
goodness; and this spirit must breathe upon our social life until it

becomes as different from what it is as is fragrant spring from cheerless
winter. Sympathy must become universal; not merely as a sentiment
prompting to deeds of helpfulness and mercy, but as the informing
principle of society until it attains such perfectness that whatever is loss
or gain for one, shall be felt as loss or gain for all. The narrow,
exclusive self must lose itself in wider aims, in generous deeds, in the
comprehensive love of God and man. The good must no longer thwart
one another; the weak must be protected; the wicked must be
surrounded by influences which make for righteousness; and the forces
of Nature itself must more and more be brought under man's control.
Pestilence and famine must no longer bring death and desolation; men
must no longer drink impure water and adulterated liquors, no longer
must they breathe the poisonous air of badly constructed houses;
dwellings which are now made warm in winter, must be made cool in
summer; miasmatic swamps must be drained; saloons, which stand like
painted harlots to lure men to sin and death, must be closed. Women
must have the same rights and privileges as men; children must no
longer be made the victims of mammon and offered in sacrifice in his
temple, the factory; ignorance, which is the most fruitful cause of
misery, must give place to knowledge; war must be condemned as
public murder, and our present system of industrial competition must
be considered worse than war; the social organization, which makes the
few rich, and dooms the many to the slavery of poorly paid toil, must
cease to exist; and if the political state is responsible for this cruelty, it
must find a remedy, or be overthrown; society must be made to rest
upon justice and love, without which it is but organized wrong. These
principles must so thoroughly pervade our public life that it can no
more be the interest of any one to wrong his fellow, to grow rich at the
cost of the poverty and misery of another. Life must be prolonged both
by removing many of the physical causes of death, and by making men
more rational and religious, more willing and able to deny themselves
those indulgences which are but a kind of slow suicide.
Never before have questions so vast, so complex, so pregnant with
meaning, so fraught with the promise of good, presented themselves;
and it can hardly be vanity or conceit which prompts us to believe that
in this mighty movement toward a social life in harmony with our idea

of God and with the aspirations of the soul, America is the divinely
appointed leader. But if this faith is not to be a mere delusion, it must
become for the best among us the impulse to strong and persevering
effort. Not by millionaires and not by politicians shall this salvation be
wrought; but by men who to pure religion add the best intellectual
culture. The American youth must learn patience; he must acquire that
serene confidence in