There are many Hebrew legends which have gathered about that early
figure on the dim edge of history, Enoch, the son of Jared,--not
the Enoch, son of Cain (after whom the latter named the city that
he builded in the land of Nod), but the Enoch of whom the Biblical
record is simply that he lived so many years, "walked with God and
was not, for God took him." According to one of these legends he was
the first great teacher, inventor, and scientist of the race and the
first to attempt to pass on, in a systematic way, from generation to
generation, the wisdoms of human experience and divine revelation.
For, having been forewarned that the earth would be destroyed once by
fire and once by water, he erected two pillars (that came to be known
as "Enoch's Pillars") on which he caused to be inscribed "all such
learning as had been delivered unto or invented by mankind." "Thus,"
the legend adds, "it was that all knowledge and learning were not
lost, for one of these pillars remained after the flood."
Here have we the primordial illustration of that subjective mystery
of the mind's desire which is ever pushing out beyond the verge
of the known, and which is not content until it has tried to tell
the next generation what it has learned, and has found expression
objectively in such institutions as this and in such systems of
education as to-day cover great portions of the earth.
There is a subsidiary legend about this primal teacher, inventor
of sewing, and scientist (whose first text-book was one of these
pillars) that has further pertinency. It is said of this patriarch,
who did not die (and who may thus be said to personify the generic
ideal teacher, in that his influence persists as if he were living),
that he visited heaven once before his final translation, in order
that he might be prepared to teach his fellow men upon his return
to earth. (This would seem to impart a theological training, such
as your new president has had--at any rate, instruction in sacred
things.) He was lifted to the abode of the archangels, who, it is
said, not only arrange and study the revolutions of the stars, the
changes of the moon, and the revolutions of the sun, "but also
arrange teachings and instruction and sweet speaking and singing of
all kinds of glorious praise." What better or more enchanting picture
of an ideal institution for the preparation of teachers, established
from the foundation of the earth! A curriculum in which science is
interspersed with sweet speaking and singing by archangels! "Bring
first," said the Lord, "the books from the store place and give
a reed to Enoch and interpret the books to him." And so it was
that this first university, with an archangel for its president,
instructed its first earth pupil. For thirty days and thirty nights
did the archangel instruct intensively (the legend has it, "his lips
never ceased speaking") while Enoch wrote down "all the things about
heaven and earth, angels and men and all that it is suitable to be
instructed in."
And when the course of instruction was ended and Enoch had filled
three hundred thirty-six note-books (this sounds very like a modern
university lecture course), the Lord said: "Go thou with them upon
the earth.... Give them the works written out by thee and they shall
read them and shall distribute works to their children's children and
from generation to generation and from nation to nation."
"From generation to generation and from nation to nation." Here was
the command given to the first schoolmaster. So Enoch went back to
earth and began wide-spread education--even kings and princes coming
with multitude to be instructed, as a result of which "Peace reigned
over the whole world for two hundred and forty-three years." His
pedagogical influence extended over the whole of the little Biblical
earth in its physical scope, and all that was known of angels and men
(that is, the "supernal and temporal") was embraced in his curriculum.
I have evoked this golden legend (for it should be included among the
golden legends of the race), a legend which is not as familiar as the
stories that have come down from the mythological days of Greece and
Rome, and I have copied it to illuminate, as with a golden letter,
my page, in the story of the inauguration of this new Enochian
president.
We have an intimation in this legend of the rich curriculum that
should be presented for the training of those who are to incarnate
the best that the race has aspired to and striven for in one
generation (and there is nothing more important than their broad,
thorough training) and to carry on those supreme gifts to the next
generation. A recent report of the Carnegie Foundation says, in its
summary of a survey of the professional preparation of teachers, that
if "training of any sort can provide men and women who are equipped
and willing to serve youth as youth should be served, their service
is pre-eminent"--and it is "altogether a more difficult service than
any other to render well."
I remember to this day my feelings as a college student at Knox, when
the president of the college, Doctor Newton Bateman, whom Abraham
Lincoln called his "little friend, the big schoolmaster" of Illinois,
spoke in chapel of the qualities and knowledges which a teacher
should possess. They were so far beyond what I, an awkward farm boy,
could hope to attain as to give me a sense of guilt that I had ever
attempted to teach even a district school, and to confirm me in my
purpose to enter another field of work. But as I look back now, I
realize that the "little friend" of Lincoln out here on the prairies
was but saying what educational surveys and foundation studies are
setting forth in ponderous volumes. And long, long back of my prairie
schoolmaster, another was saying in the so-called Eternal City words
that should be written in flaming letters on the walls of every
legislative hall and every banquet-room. Indeed, I am not sure that
we need others than these on our Enochian pillars, if only they were
heeded by the nation:
For not alone they are useful to the State who defend the
accused, bring forth candidates for office and cast their
vote for peace or war, but they who encourage the youth
[the teacher was ranked with the senator] who in so great
a scarcity of good teachers instruct the minds of men in
virtue [there was a great scarcity of good teachers then
as now, but who knows what the eternal influence of some
unknown teachers of to-day may be, for the greatest of world
teachers was then going, as the record has it, "among the
villages of Galilee, teaching"] and hold them back from
running after wealth and luxury [for so it was in the first
century, as in this] and teach what is meant by honesty,
patience, bravery, justice, contempt of death and how much
freely given good there is in a good conscience.
How difficult it is to prescribe the training for this high office of
incarnation and instruction is best intimated in the answer which the
president of a Missouri normal school gave when asked the question as
to how teachers can be best taught: "This is a question which only
angels can answer." But we do, indeed, need educational archangels
(as the legend of Enoch intimated) as the teachers of our teachers.
And there are many of us who have reason to thank the Lord that here,
in this valley, even, in some of its little prairie colleges, there
were and are such archangels who revealed things about heaven as well
as earth, and angels as well as men. One of them, who was my teacher,
is to be the next speaker.
But my thought is rather of the _transmission_ to the new generation,
as a whole, of what--to paraphrase George Edward Woodberry--has been
built out of the mystery of thought and passion of the past, as
generation after generation has knelt, fought, faded, and given the
best "that anywhere comes to be" to the souls of Enochian urge to
carry on, "letting all else fall into oblivion."
As the most primitive and picturesque visualization of the curriculum
of this bequest of the race mind of one generation to the next, the
pillars of Enoch stood on the verge of history against the Eastern
sky of our civilization's dawn. They have crumbled, or they lie
buried in sands that have hidden their wisdoms. The excavator's spade
could uncover no more interesting record than that which would tell
us what this great teacher thought should be saved from flood and
fire out of the experience of the race.
I have tried to imagine what was written there. It must have been a
very meagre list to have all been written in the large letters or
symbols of primitive speech on a single column. But the earth was
then young to human eyes. (It has since grown so aged as to have
its years counted by the thousands of millions.) And man was but
come upon it, or so he then thought. When I was a college student, I
supposed that he came in the year 4004 B.C., but now we are informed
that he has been here hundreds of thousands of years. Even so, in
those days he was still living in what I have called the perinikian
age; that is, in the age when he had conquered only the near, an
age when the angels even were very near the earth and walked with
man. The ideal being in that period was a creature with wings. I once
turned to my Greek lexicon to discover how many _far_ words there
were in that perinikian period, whose world the Greeks had somewhat
extended, and I found sixty-seven columns of "peri" (near) words and
only about five, as I recall, of the "tele" (far) words, for the
earth was only that which was within reach of the naked eye, the
unaided voice. It was without the far-travelling printed word.
Out upon the shores of Phoenicia, in the days of the war, I imagined
Cadmus, the legendary father of letters, who is reputed to have
borne the alphabet to the Western world out of the Orient, as not
entirely certain that he had blessed humanity with this last means
of far conquest, in this our day of higher mobility and greater
transmissibility of ideas. I seemed to hear him say:
"When I witness all the ravage
Of my alphabetic lore,
See the neolithic savage
Waging culture-loving war,
Using logarithmic tables
To direct his hellish fire
Preaching philosophic fables
To excuse his mad desire;
See pure science turned to choking,
Shooting, drowning humankind;
Hear a litany, invoking
Hate in God's benignant mind;
See the forest trees transmuted
Into lettered pulp, while man
With a brain deep-convoluted
Takes the place of primal Pan,
And instead of finding pleasure
In a simple life, with song,
Spends his planetary leisure
Reading of a world gone wrong--
Seeing, hearing this, I've wondered
'Mid this murder, greed and fret,
Whether I had sinned or blundered
Giving man the alphabet."
But when one becomes reflectively conscious of what the world's
literature has added to the few sentences upon Enoch's pillars,
beginning with the Book of Books, the one book that man cannot be
without, one has a reassuring answer for Cadmus. Indeed, I found
it myself in the Christian literature that was collected in a city
just north of Tyre and Sidon, awaiting the end of the war, for its
scattering throughout all that region on whose edge the pillars once
stood (as I have seen the columns of old Heliopolis, the city once
_so_ beloved of the sun that he hastened over the eastern hills to
spend his cloudless days about it, and lingered upon the Lebanon
Mountains as long as possible in the summer afternoon, reluctant to
leave the sight of it).
There has recently been published by a Princeton professor of biology
an essay which would seem to intimate that great progress has not
been made since those pillars were set up somewhere beyond the
Euphrates; for his contention is that human evolution has reached
its end; that for at least ten thousand years there has been no
notable progress in the evolution of the human body, and that there
has been no progress in the intellectual capacity of a man in the
last two or three thousand years--that all we can do now is to lift
the mass to the height of the most perfect individual. I cannot
assent to this, for I see man upon his way from God to God, while
summing the race that's been, _ever_ giving glimpses of a diviner
grace than has evolved (or will, if we accept the teaching of the
biologic mind that sees his evolution at an end)--than has evolved,
_but_ will, for soul is bound to mould such body as its needs require
to bear it toward the goal it seeks; else why were clay uplifted to
this height if it can never reach the higher height, the image it
would make of God in man?
But whether the biologist be right or I, we agree that it is the
constant obligation of the living generation to try to lift mankind
toward whatever highest height the individual has reached or can
reach--and it is not a local, a parochial, a provincial, or even a
national obligation, but a world obligation, in this tele-victorian
age--from generation to generation, from nation to nation. As
Mr. Wells has put it, it is a dream not alone of "individuals
educated," but of a world educated for the sake of all mankind.
But long before Mr. H. G. Wells put before the world the suggestion
of a fundamental world curriculum (it was even before the Great War
had made the need more manifest), it came to me that the curricula
of the elementary schools of the nations of the earth should be
analyzed to discover just what each nation was attempting to teach
its children through formal education, and then that the residuum,
after the purely local matter was eliminated, should be synthesized
into a single body of knowledge ("delivered to or invented by
mankind"), which should embrace what the race as a whole seemingly
thought it most vitally important to transmit out of its experience
to those who were to follow.
Once that were had, we should then call upon the greatest minds of
the earth--the Enochs of to-day--to confer as to what this minimum
for every child should be; for mere mental inertia, pride, prejudice,
the force of habit and such causes have prevented that curriculum
from keeping up with the accumulation of fundamental truth as it has
been brought into the luminous circle of the knowledge of some, at
any rate, of the race, from the encircling darkness.
These pillars must stand in the clear sight of all the children of
the earth, so that every child and youth may have advantage of all
these race lessons and come to know them by heart (_i.e._, in their
hearts), if there is to be progress toward a goal, which, if it were
not beyond our present reach, would be a mean one, and if it were
not ultimately attainable, would be Tantalian, for it is the law of
progress that one generation shall stand on the shoulders of the one
that went before.
When the captive king, Croesus, was asked by the victorious king,
Cyrus, why he went to war, he answered that he had been directed to
do so by the oracle, and he then volunteered the remark: "For no man
in his senses would prefer war to peace; since in peace the sons bury
their fathers, whereas in war the fathers bury their sons." This is a
biologic law, and it conditions intellectual and spiritual progress
as well. The sons must bury their fathers not only by outliving them
but by _outdoing_ them.
This is so obvious that I should apologize for repeating it more
than two thousand years after it was recorded (by Herodotus, as I
recall), except for the fact that the world has not heeded it. As
a distinguished university president said a few nights ago in my
hearing, the world needs a "bath in the obvious." While I should not
characterize the perusal of H. G. Wells's _Outline of History_ as
taking this sort of an ablution (so far as some of his conclusions
are concerned), I think that he was justified in giving more space
to this remark of Croesus and the incidental circumstances of its
relation than he gave to certain whole periods of national or race
existence. It is the caption that should be written at the top of our
world Enochian pillars.
And I should write below it that utterance of President Fisher, of
England's Board of Education, made in the midst of the war, when the
days were darkest:
"Education is the eternal debt which Maturity owes to Youth."
And beneath that I should put, I think, the lines of Gilbert Murray,
whom I saw the same day, taken from the lips of Hecuba:
"God, to Thee
I lift my praise, seeing the silent road
That bringeth justice ere the end be trod
To all that breathes and dies."
What should be written in detail below these captions, I should
let a great international committee recommend--a committee with
planetary consciousness which could let each people continue the
excellence that has "grown habitual to its being," and yet include
such instruction in the excellence of others as to abate the hatreds
that now divide the men of the earth, even as they were divided by
their misunderstandings in that early post-Noachian period when Eber,
the son of Shelah, named his boy Peleg, "because in his day the earth
was divided," and the children could no longer read the lessons upon
Enoch's pillars.
I travelled the entire length of this line during the war, from the
edge of the desert on the farther edge of which Enoch's pillars
stood to the North Sea. From the Mount of Olives I heard and saw the
beginnings of the battle of Armageddon--not an allegorical battle,
but the literal battle, for when I made my way to Headquarters down
on the plain of Sharon, General Allenby, coming out of his map-room,
said: "I have just had word that my cavalry are at Armageddon. The
battle of Armageddon is on." And a few nights after I walked through
the broken entanglements of wire across that plain, past the Mount,
as the dawn came, where our Lord is said by some to have delivered
what we call the Sermon on the Mount, on to Nazareth, the little city
which a Denver paper referred to familiarly as "Christ's home town."
And I thought the thousand years of peace referred to in the Book of
Revelation had come.
But I have since travelled over a great part of that way--the
long, long way, let us not forget, by which we have come out of
captivity--and I found that, while the barbed-wire entanglements
have been cleared from most of the fields and the trenches had been
filled, the entanglements, suspicion and hate, were still keeping
nations apart, even without guns and bombs and poisonous gas.
I was the first American to make the journey across Asia Minor after
the Armistice. Starting from the vicinity of the Tower of Babel,
which stood amid "the whole earth of one language and one speech,"
and which sought to reach the heaven until the builders were suddenly
unable to understand one another's speech and were dispersed,
gibbering and gesticulating and quarrelling, over the earth--starting
from the neighborhood of that Scriptural memory, I travelled for days
through homeless misery and physical want and mental hate, which I
felt were but the sequelæ of the world disease, and would soon pass.
But conditions are, if anything, worse than when I passed that way.
It is only the mercy and ennobling philanthropy of Americans that are
preventing the extermination or degradation of a race.
But I have more lately travelled over nearer sections of that long
way back to the cradle of the race and of Christian civilization.
Within the year I have walked, or ridden by ship or train or
airplane, all the way from the west coast of Ireland to the then
closed door of Russia and along its then impenetrable western wall
down to Hungary and back. Alas! the separating, the estranging
hatreds are still there.
Barriers and entanglements, visible and invisible, were upon every
border all the way across Europe. Unspeakable inconveniences, often
hardships, had to be endured by the ordinary traveller in these zones
of suspicion and antipathy and hate, till I came to think of the
countries they separated as the "United Hates of Europe."
What I wish to bring out of this all is not our local obligations,
our interstate and intranational obligations, but our world
obligations, which we share with others--the obligations to see that
all the children of the earth have a chance to escape from those
hatreds into the best things of the race as a whole.
In my mid-European travels I came one day to the country where
Copernicus had developed the new theory of the universe. There I had
an experience which lifted my thought into the broader view which
ignored barriers and entanglements. It was a journey in an airplane
that rose high above boundaries and connected Warsaw with Prague and
Strasbourg and Paris. It was the morning of Pentecost Day that I made
the journey--the day which celebrates the coming together of people
from many nations and their understanding one another and being
understood because of the cloven tongues that descended upon them.
As we flew over the prairies of Poland that beautiful, clear spring
Sunday morning, I could see the shadow of the plane as of a cloven
tongue flying beneath us from village to village, and even over the
disputed territory of Upper Silesia. This was the symbolic prophecy
of the new sort of understanding, the unifying fabric woven by such
shuttles that must by their woof replace the separating entanglement
of suspicion and hatred if Europe, and so the world, is to survive
something worse than fire or flood.[1]
Before I began the airplane journey from Warsaw I went to take
my last look at the statue of Copernicus, whose conception of a
heliocentric universe is the capital event in modern thought. At the
foot of the Vosges Mountains, which I crossed a day or two later into
France, there is the little village of St. Dié, where, in a book on
the Ptolemaic System, the name America was first put on the printed
page, and on a world map. America was baptized into the Ptolemaic
cosmos, but its inhabitants (after the aborigines) dwelt from the
first in a Copernican universe, wanderers in an infinity of space,
"with a shuddering sense of physical immensity."
Europe could not readily forget the geography of its infancy and
childhood and maturity, but America began its God-fearing settlement
with an astronomy of infinite distances, with a cosmography in which
it was itself infinitesimal, and with a geography partaking of the
sky, as well as of the sea and land.
With this Copernican consciousness of the universe, America should be
the least provincial, and Americans the most "universe-minded" of all
the inhabitants of the earth.
Isolate we have indeed been as a people, but not provincially nor
narrowly nor proudly isolate. We kept out of the partisan Ptolemaic
concerns of Europe, but when the freedom of mankind was threatened,
America's policies leaped to the world horizon of her interest in
humanity. Our America has had from the first a cosmic view, a concern
for all mankind. "All men" are included in its national creed. It
is only those who would narrow our horizon of sympathy and bring
a Ptolemaic sky over our heads again that it has in its doctrine
excluded.
So it is not by accident, I think, that we have put the stars in
the field of our flag. They are cosmic symbols gathered from the
immeasurable universe, not from pieces of earth and stretches of
water, which together make up what we are accustomed to call,
whatever our origin, "our native land"--a people of clearly
defined national personality, but of planetary consciousness and
of interdependent destinies.
But in this land of Copernicus, where "the capital event of modern
thought" occurred, I found that only two million eight hundred
thousand children of school age out of four million six hundred
thousand had any schooling whatever. It was hoped by the minister
of education that by 1928, if only the fear of a new partition of
Poland could be removed and credits found, they might make some most
elemental provision for the rest--_and this only because so many of
the young men of Poland had perished in the World War that the coming
generation would be a smaller one_. I could present statistics of
like import for other European states. They would all support my
thesis, that since we have had a World War for freedom, we should
have a world plan for giving the children who have suffered in this
divided earth (the millions of "Pelegs") an elemental chance to enjoy
that freeing of the soul which is, with the unity of mankind, the
ideal end of the state.
A plan which I proposed some time ago, and which I have now taken
courage of the support in modified form by men of large financial
and organizing experience to defend, is that the Allied debts be
made a permanent trust fund, to be administered for the education of
the children of all peoples, so far as they can be so applied. The
proposal has been characterized as "good business," not to demand
the full payment of these debts with interest of that which we
loaned, but spent largely at home, and after we entered the war.
The fundamental thought on which I should base the proposal is that
the world, as a whole, owes something to the children who have no
fair chance in it because of what those upon whom they are naturally
dependent have sacrificed for the good of the world as a whole.
My original proposal was that the principal should be cancelled as it
was so spent, but Judge Lovett, president of the Union Pacific, has
proposed merely the application of the interest at a moderate rate
annually to this purpose if and when it can be paid, though he has
given it a broader scope--putting education last--the care of widows,
orphans, and crippled first--but ultimately it should all be devoted
to education.
A ten-billion dollar war debt converted (as a thanksgiving offering
for deliverance from something worse than the world knows even at its
worst to-day) into a perpetual trust fund for the children of the
world, especially for those who have come "trailing clouds of glory"
into a part of the world where they haven't a chance to come into the
heritage of their generation.
Five hundred million dollars a year (an incredible number of Austrian
crowns, Russian roubles, or Polish marks (if indeed the interest
could be paid at the rate of five per cent)) which would give an
elementary-school training to ten million children each year--as many
children as are born each year into the world. And this interest
could be paid if armaments were unnecessary.
Ten million children a year taught the best that has been "delivered
unto or invented by mankind" (as listed in the world curriculum)
and led in their tuition toward the conscious unity of the
race--planetary consciousness!
Has a more stirring opportunity ever been offered to any people than
is ours in the refunding of the great war debt, in such a way as
to make it a blessing to the next generation instead of a crushing
burden to the tax-paying generation that now goes bent with its
burdens across Europe? If we were to demand our pound of flesh we
should deserve the future fate of those in the "Inferno" who went
eternally about weighed with cloaks of lead that were covered by a
veneer of gold.
Some of the principal might be used to buy books in which these
millions of children might enter into the common possession of the
race (perhaps in a common language), free of scorn of other nations,
and so never know the hatreds which estranged their fathers; and
some might be spent for the syndicated material of which Mr. Wells
speaks--the knowledges of those things which would help them to find
their particular place in the cosmos.
Again, a part of the principal might be spent (and cancelled as a
debt when so spent) in building schoolhouses where none can otherwise
be built for a generation or two. These would be modern Enochian
pillars--for what is a schoolhouse, after all, essentially but the
very thing that Enoch caused to be erected--at any rate, when the
teacher is in the schoolhouse furnished with the knowledge of the
race mind?
Even so, there would be enough left to provide for millions of
planetary pupils in perpetuity.
It would be the greatest foundation ever established upon earth for
the salvation of civilization.
Many years ago, when as a young college president in this valley
I was speaking at a real-estate dinner in Chicago, I recalled how
an ancient city was saved by the fact that it had so many score
thousand children who could not tell their right hand from their
left hand--and also much cattle. Innocent children and cattle saved
Nineveh for a time, but not permanently. If the prophet Jonah were
alive to-day he would know that the doom he preached finally came
upon the city. He sleeps (or so the tradition is) in a village but
six or eight miles from Bethlehem, that might have seen the star if
it had been awake on the night when it came and stood over the place
where the young child was. He would know if he, himself, were awake
that it is only children who have learned the lessons of the race who
have the power of world salvation--children who have also learned by
heart the lessons of the two great commandments.
Years ago I was ploughing corn on a hot June day on an Illinois
prairie when I heard a sound in the air above me, which one unused to
the country might have thought the thrumming of a choir celestial.
But with a farm boy's instinct I divined that it was a swarm of bees,
even before I saw the little cloud moving over the field toward the
woods two or three miles away. I did what any farm boy would have
done if he could leave his team. I followed the swarm, throwing up
dust and clods of earth, and making all possible noise, with the
result that I brought the swarm down upon the branch of a tree at the
edge of the field. Then at evening I got a hive, lured them into it,
and then carried them home, where they made honey for the season.
So if we follow these ideals, which may seem at first but some
millennial rhetoric, and bring them down to earth, we may find a
way to sweeten the bitter bread of millions of children in other
lands--and yet have enough and to spare for our own, in spite of the
reports which I have been hearing to-day from those same corn-fields,
whose bountiful crops the farmers cannot sell, though others are
starving.
But let us take courage of the way we have already come, since Enoch
reared his pillars in the pre-Noachian days. The children of Israel
were required to keep each year the feast of the tabernacles, during
the seven days of which they were commanded to leave their homes and
go out and live in booths or tents, not for a holiday, but that they
might be kept mindful of the fact that their fathers came out of
captivity. I have often thought that it would have a very wholesome
effect if all the world could keep such a feast, and this would
be its proclamation, as I have drafted it, though not in the usual
form:[2]
"This shall ye do, O men of earth,
Ye who've forgotten your far birth,
Your forebears of the slanting skull,
Barbaric, brutal, sluggard, dull,
(Of whom no portraits hang to boast
The ancient lineage of the host)--
Ye who've forgot the time when they
Were redolent of primal clay,
Or lived in wattled hut, or cave,
But, turned to dust or drowned by wave,
Have left no traces on Time's shores
Save mounds of shells at their cave doors
And lithic knives and spears and darts
And savage passions in our hearts;
This shall ye do: seven days each year
Ye shall forsake what ye hold dear;
From fields of tamed fruits and flowers,
From love-lit homes and sky-built towers,
From palaces and tenements
Ye shall go forth and dwell in tents,
In tents, and booths of bough-made roofs,
Where ye may hear the flying hoofs
Of beasts long gone, the cries of those
Who were your fathers' forest foes,
Or see their shadows riding fast
Along the edges of the past;
All this, that ye may keep in mind
The nomad way by which mankind
Has come from his captivity,
Walking dry-shod the earth-wide sea,
Riding the air, consulting stars,
Driving great caravans of cars,
Building the furnace, bridge and spire
Of earth-control and heav'n desire,
Rising in journey from the clod
Into the glory of a god.
This shall ye do, O men of earth,
That ye may know the crownéd worth
Of what ye are--and hope renew,
Seeing the road from dawn to you!
Then turning toward the pillared cloud
Ahead, or pillared fire, endowed
With prescience of a promised goal
See still a highway for the soul."
And along the way at intervals stand the Enochian schools, colleges,
and universities, giving instruction in the best that the human
race has learned "from generation to generation and from nation to
nation."