Education and the Higher Life | Page 7

the power of labor, which makes workers willing
to wait. He must not, like a foolish child, rush forward to pluck the fruit
before it is ripe, lest this be his epitaph: The promise of his early life
was great, his performance insignificant.
Do not our young men lack noble ambition? Are they not satisfied with
low aims? To be a legislator; to be a governor; to be talked about; to
live in a marble house,--seems to them a thing to be desired. Unhappy
youths from whom the power and goodness of life are hidden, who,
standing in the presence of the unseen, infinite world of truth and
beauty, can only dream some aldermanic nightmare. They thrust
themselves into the noisy crowd, and are thrown into contact with
disenchanting experience at a time of life when the mind and heart
should draw nourishment and wisdom from communion with God and
with great thoughts. Amid the universal clatter of tongues, and in the
overflowing ceaseless stream of newspaper gossip, the soul is
bewildered and stifled. In a blatant land, the young should learn to be
silent. The noblest minds are fashioned in secrecy, through long travail
like,--
"Wines that, Heaven knows where, Have sucked the fire of some
forgotten sun And kept it thro' a hundred years of gloom Yet glowing
in a heart of ruby."
Is it not worth the labor and expectation of a life-time to be able to do,
even once, the right thing excellently well? The eager passion for
display, the desire to speak and act in the eyes of the world, is boyish.
Will is concentration, and a great purpose works in secrecy. Oh, the
goodness and the seriousness of life, the illimitable reach of
achievement, which it opens to the young who have a great heart and
noble aims! With them is God's almighty power and love, and his very

presence is hidden from them by a film only. From this little islet they
look out upon infinite worlds; heaven bends over them, and earth bears
them up as though it would have them fly. How is it possible to remain
inferior when we believe in God and know that this age is the right
moment for all high and holy work? The yearning for guidance has
never been so great. We have reached heights where the brain swims,
and thoughts are confused, and it is held to be questionable whether we
are to turn backward or to move onward to the land of promise;
whether we are to be overwhelmed by the material world which we
have so marvelously transformed, or with the aid of the secrets we have
learned, are to rise Godward to a purer and fairer life of knowledge,
justice, and love.
Is the material progress of the nineteenth century a cradle or a grave?
Are we to continue to dig and delve and peer into matter until God and
the soul fade from our view and we become like the things we work in?
To put such questions to the multitude were idle. There is here no affair
of votes and majorities. Human nature has not changed, and now, as in
the past, crowds follow leaders. What the best minds and the most
energetic characters believe and teach and put in practice, the millions
will come to accept. The doubt is whether the leaders will be
worthy,--the real permanent leaders, for the noisy apparent leaders can
never be so. And here we touch the core of the problem which
Americans have to solve. No other people has such numbers who are
ready to thrust themselves forward as leaders, no other has so few who
are really able to lead. In mitigation of this fact, it may be said with
truth, that nowhere else is it so difficult to lead; for nowhere else does
force rule so little. Every one has opinions; the whole nation is
awakened; thousands are able to discuss any subject with plausibility;
and to be simply keen-witted and versatile is to be of the crowd. We
need men whose intellectual view embraces the history of the race, who
are familiar with all literature, who have studied all social movements,
who are acquainted with the development of philosophic thought, who
are not blinded by physical miracles and industrial wonders, but know
how to appreciate all truth, all beauty, all goodness. And to this wide
culture they must join the earnestness, the confidence, the charity, and
the purity of motive which Christian faith inspires. We need scholars

who are saints, and saints who are scholars. We need men of genius
who live for God and their country; men of action who seek for light in
the company of those who know; men of religion who understand that
God reveals himself in