You may perhaps remember how Wendell Phillips, in his great
Harvard address on "The Scholar and the Republic" reproached some
men of learning for their conservatism and timidity, their
backwardness in reform. And it is true that conservatism and
timidity are never so hateful and harmful as in the scholar. "Be
bold, be bold, and evermore be bold," those words which Emerson
liked to quote, are words which should ever ring in the scholar's
ear.
But you must remember that Roger Williams and Sir Harry Vane, the
very men whom Wendell Phillips named as "two men deepest in
thought and bravest in speech of all who spoke English in their
day," came, the one from Cambridge, the other from Oxford; and
that Sam Adams and Jefferson, the two men whom he named as
preeminent, in the early days of the republic, for their trust in
the people, were the sons of Harvard and William and Mary. John
Adams and John Hancock and James Otis and Joseph Warren, the
great Boston leaders in the Revolution, were all Harvard men,
like Samuel Adams; and you will remember how many of the great
Virginians were, like Jefferson, sons of William and Mary.
And never was a revolution so completely led by scholars as the
great Puritan Revolution which planted New England and
established the English commonwealth.
No. Scholars have often enough been cowards and trimmers.
But from the days when Moses, learned in all the wisdom of the
Egyptians, brought his people up out of bondage, and Paul, who
had sat at the feet of Gamaliel, preached Christ, and Wyclif and
Luther preached Reformation, to the time when Eliot and Hampden
and Pym and Cromwell and Milton and Vane, all scholars of Oxford
and Cambridge, worked for English commonwealth, to the time of
Jefferson and Samuel Adams and the time of Emerson and Sumner and
Gladstone, scholars have been leaders and heroes too.--Edwin D.
Mead.