With all our learning the greatest lesson before us is this one of
living right, of finding our full heritage and filling our places as
men and women in this world. If our systems of education fail to teach
us how to live they fail altogether.
The great need of our day is that we shall train the conscience to
right moral judgment, that we shall educate all for the business of
living, and that we shall so educate all that we shall not only have a
generation of bright, smart, money-making or fame-making machines, but
that we may have clean, upright, truth-loving, self-reverencing,
God-fearing men and women.
There is little likelihood that America will fail for lack of business
ability. The danger is that we shall fail at the point of character;
that we shall fail where failure is fatal to every other kind of
success. This is the crucial point.
We do well to perfect the plans by which we teach men the encyclopedia
of their bodies, their country, the world and its history. But we
cannot forget, and recent events have reminded us with a terrible note
of warning, that no amount of knowledge constitutes any sort, even the
feeblest kind, of guarantee as to rectitude of life.
If you neglect the heart, the will, and conscience, if you neglect the
knowledge of and training in right relations with men, reverence and
right relations to the most high, your culture of the intellect is
worse than waste; it is the perfecting of the poison of our social
life; it is the whetting of the edge of a man's villainy and grossness.
Above all other things, the most desirable is that men shall love truth
and hate a lie; that they shall love honour and truth so much more than
fame, power, or possessions that never for an instant will these weigh
in the scale against the former. But for long it has been thought that
this choice flower of nobility grew by chance; the culture of the soul
was so mysterious as never to be brought under scientific law.
If a man grew up to be good it was due either to accident or to
miracle. The realm of character has been the last to come under the
reign of law. Now we recognize that we must learn to live as truly as
we must learn to read, and that the culture of the soul must profit by
the wondrous strides that all educational science has made; that all
our efforts to produce character must be so wisely directed that we
shall secure the best and most enduring results.
One message comes from the lips of every seer, from every page of
history. It is that the man or the nation alone is wise, alone finds
enduring life, who sets before commercial supremacy or political power
or fame in learning the glory of righteousness, the beauty of practical
holiness. Their wealth lies beyond corruption and their days know no
end who are wise and rich in the things within.
The greatest service we can render our day is by giving it the riches
of worthy living, by setting before ourselves the production of high
character through all life's processes of learning, and by bringing in
every way we may to an age engrossed in selfishness and commercialism
the significance of the call of character.
No wonder it sometimes seems to us that we have forgotten to smile;
that our faces are so drawn with the tense struggle of life that we
have lost sight of the meaning of happiness. How can we be happy
unless we shall set our whole lives in harmony with the things that are
fundamental and eternal?
We must learn to order our lives, not as machines to be driven at the
top of their efficiency in the money mill, but as part of the great
life of the spiritual world, as inheritors of things divine, sublime,
and glorious, as possessors of the joy that made the morning stars sing
together and the beauty that paints the evening red.