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EDUCATION AND THE HIGHER LIFE
BY BISHOP SPALDING.
EDUCATION AND THE HIGHER LIFE. 12mo. $1.00.
THINGS OF THE MIND. 12mo. $1.00.
MEANS AND ENDS OF EDUCATION. 12mo. $1.00.
THOUGHTS AND THEORIES OF LIFE AND EDUCATION. 12mo. $1.00.
OPPORTUNITY AND OTHER ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES. 12mo. $1.00.
SONGS: CHIEFLY FROM THE GERMAN. 16mo, gilt top. $1.25.
A. C. McCLURG & CO.
CHICAGO.
EDUCATION
AND
THE HIGHER LIFE
BY
J. L. Spalding
Bishop of Peoria
The business of education is not, as I think, to perfect the learner
in any of the sciences, but to give his mind that freedom and
disposition, and those habits, which may enable him to attain every
part of knowledge himself.--LOCKE
SIXTH EDITION
CHICAGO
A. C. McCLURG & CO.
1900
_Copyright_,
BY A. C. MCCLURG AND CO.,
A. D. 1890.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. IDEALS 7
II. EXERCISE OF MIND 30
III. THE LOVE OF EXCELLENCE 51
IV. CULTURE AND THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE 73
V. SELF-CULTURE 92
VI. GROWTH AND DUTY 117
VII. RIGHT HUMAN LIFE 144
VIII. UNIVERSITY EDUCATION 172
EDUCATION
AND
THE HIGHER LIFE.
CHAPTER I.
IDEALS.
A noble aim,
Faithfully kept, is as a noble deed.
WORDSWORTH.
To few men does life bring a brighter day than that which places the
crown upon their scholastic labors, and bids them go forth from the
halls of the Alma Mater to the great world's battlefield. There is a
freshness in these early triumphs which, like the bloom and fragrance of
the flower, is quickly lost, never to be found again even by those for
whom Fortune reserves her most choice gifts. Fame, though hymned by
myriad tongues, is not so sweet as the delight we drink from the
tear-dimmed eyes of our mothers and sisters, in the sacred hours when we
can yet claim as our own the love of higher things, the faith and hope
which make this mortal life immortal, and fill a moment with a wealth of
memories which lasts through years. The highest joy is serious, and in
the midst of supreme delight there comes to the soul a stillness which
permits it to rise to the serene sphere where truth is most gladly heard
and most easily perceived; and in such exaltation, the young see that
life is not what they take it to be. They think it long; it is short.
They think it happy; it is full of cares and sorrows. This two-fold
illusion widens the horizon of life and tinges it with gold. It gives to
youth its charm and makes of it a blessed time to which we ever turn
regretful eyes. But I am wrong to call illusion that which in truth is
but an omen of the divine possibilities of man's nature. To the young,
life is not mean or short, because the blessed freedom of youth may make
it noble and immortal. The young stand upon the threshold of the world.
Of the many careers which are open to human activity, they will choose
one; and their fortunes will be various, even though their merits should
be equal. But if position, fame, and wealth are often denied to the most
persistent efforts and the best ability, it is consoling to know they
are not the highest; and as they are not the end of life, they should
not be made its aim. An aim, nevertheless, we must have, if we hope to
live to good purpose. All men, in fact, whether or not they know it,
have an ideal, base or lofty, which molds character and shapes destiny.
Whether it be pleasure or gain or renown or knowledge, or several of
these, or something else, we all associate life with some end, or ends,
the attainment of which seems to us most desirable.
This ideal, that which in our inmost souls we love and desire, which we
lay to heart and live by, is at once the truest expression of our nature
and the most potent agency in developing its powers. Now, in youth we
form the ideals which we labor to body forth in our lives. What in these
growing days we yearn for with all our being, is heaped upon us in old
age. All important, therefore, is the choice of an ideal; for this more
than rules or precepts will determine what we are to become. The love of
the best is twin-born with the soul. What is the best? What is the
worthiest life-aim? It must be something which is within the reach of
every one, as Nature's best gifts--air and sunshine and water--belong to
all. What only the few can attain, cannot be life's real end or the
highest good. The best is not far removed from any one of us, but is
alike near to the poor and the rich, to the learned and the ignorant, to
the shepherd and the king, and only the best can give to the soul
repose and contentment. What then is the true life-ideal? Recalling to
mind the thoughts and theories of many men, I can find nothing better
than this, "Seek ye first the kingdom of God." "Love not pleasure," says
Carlyle, "love God. This is the everlasting Yea, wherein all
contradiction is solved; wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with
him."
To the high and aspiring heart of youth, fame, honor, glory, appeal with
such irresistible power, and appear clad in forms so beautiful, that at
a time of life when all of us are unreal in our sentiments and crude in
our opinions, they are often mistaken for the best. But fame is good
only in so far as it gives power for good. For the rest, it is nominal.
They who have deserved it care not for it. A great soul is above all
praise and dispraise of men, which are ever given ignorantly and without
fine discernment. The popular breath, even when winnowed by the winds of
centuries, is hardly pure.
And then fame cannot be the good of which I speak, for only a very few
can even hope for it. To nearly all, the gifts which make it possible
are denied; and to others, the opportunities. Many, indeed, love and win
notoriety, but such as they need not detain us here. A lower race of
youth, in whom the blood is warmer than the soul, think pleasure life's
best gift, and are content to let occasion die, while they revel in the
elysium of the senses. But to make pleasure an end is to thwart one's
purpose, for joy is good only when it comes unbidden. The pleasure we
seek begins already to pall. It is good, indeed, if it come as
refreshment to the weary, solace to the heavy-hearted, and rest to the
careworn; but if sought for its own sake, it is "the honey of poison
flowers and all the measureless ill." Only the young, or the depraved,
can believe that to live for pleasure is not to be foreordained to
misery. Whoso loves God or freedom or growth of mind or strength of
heart, feels that pleasure is his foe.
"A king of feasts and flowers, and wine and revel,
And love and mirth, was never King of glory."
Of money, as the end or ideal of life, it should not be necessary to
speak. As a fine contempt for life, a willingness to throw it away in
defence of any just cause or noble opinion, is one of the privileges of
youth, so the generous heart of the young holds cheap the material
comforts which money procures. To be young is to be free, to be able to
live anywhere on land or sea, in the midst of deserts or among strange
people; is to be able to fit the mind and body to all circumstance, and
to rise almost above Nature's iron law. He who is impelled by this high
and heavenly spirit will dream of flying and not of hobbling through
life on golden crutches. Let the feeble and the old put their trust in
money; but where there is strength and youth, the soul should be our
guide.
And yet the very law and movement of our whole social life seem to point
to riches as the chief good.
"What is that which I should turn to, lighting upon days like these?
Every door is barred with gold, and opens but to golden keys."
Money is the god in whom we put our trust, to whom instinctively we pay
homage. We believe that the rich are fortunate, are happy, that the best
of life has been given to them. We have faith in the power of money, in
its sovereign efficacy to save us not only from beggary, from sneers and
insults, but we believe that it can transform us, and take away the
poverty of mind, the narrowness of heart, the dullness of imagination,
which make us weak, hard, and common. Even our hatred of the rich is but
another form of the worship of money. The poor think they are wretched,
because they think money the chief good; and if they are right, then is
it a holy work to strive to overthrow society as it is now constituted.
Buckle and Strauss find fault with the Christian religion because it
does not inculcate the love of money. But in this, faith and reason are
in harmony. Wealth is not the best, and to make it the end of life is
idolatry, and as Saint Paul declares, the root of evil. Man is more than
money, as the workman is more than his tools. The soul craves quite
other nourishment than that which the whole material universe can
supply. Man's chief good lies in the infinite world of thought and
righteousness. Fame and wealth and pleasure are good when they are born
of high thinking and right living, when they lead to purer faith and
love; but if they are sought as ends and loved for themselves, they
blight and corrupt. The value of culture is great, and the ideal it
presents points in the right direction in bidding us build up the being
which we are. But since man is not the highest, he may not rest in
himself, and culture therefore is a means rather than an end. If we make
it the chief aim of life, it degenerates into a principle of exclusion,
destroys sympathy, and terminates in a sort of self-worship.
What remains, then, but the ideal which I have proposed?--"Seek ye first
the Kingdom of God." Unless the light of Heaven fall along our way,
thick darkness gathers about us, and in the end, whatever our success
may have been, we fail, and are without God and without hope. So long
as any seriousness is left, religion is man's first and deepest concern;
to be indifferent is to be dull or depraved, and doubt is disease.
Difficulties assuredly there are, underlying not only faith, but all
systems of knowledge. How am I certain that I know anything? is a
question, debated in all past time, debatable in all future time; but we
are none the less certain that we know. The mind is governed by laws
which neither science nor philosophy can change, and while theories and
systems rise and pass away, the eternal problems present themselves ever
anew clothed in the eternal mystery. But little discernment is needed to
enable us to perceive how poor and symbolic are the thoughts of the
multitude. Half in pity, half in contempt, we rise to higher regions
only to discover that wherever we may be there also are the laws and the
limitations of our being; and that in whatsoever sanctuaries we may take
refuge, we are still of the crowd. We cannot grasp the Infinite;
language cannot express even what we know of the Divine Being, and hence
there remains a background of darkness, where it is possible to adore,
or to mock. But religion dispels more mystery than it involves. With it,
there is twilight in the world; without it, night. We are in the world
to act, not to doubt. Leaving quibbles to those who can find no better
use for life, the wise, with firm faith in God and man, strive to make
themselves worthy to do brave and righteous work. Distrust is the last
wisdom a great heart learns; and noble natures feel that the generous
view is, in the end, the true view. For them life means good; they find
strength and joy in this wholesome and cheerful faith, and if they are
in error, it can never be known, for if death end all, with it knowledge
ceases. Perceiving this, they strive to gain spiritual insight, they
look to God; toward him they turn the current of their thought and love;
the unseen world of truth and beauty becomes their home; and while
matter flows on and breaks and remakes itself to break again, they dwell
in the presence of the Eternal, and become co-workers with the Infinite
Power which makes goodness good, and justice right. They love knowledge,
because God knows all things; they love beauty, because he is its
source; they love the soul, because it brings man into conscious
communion with him and his universe. If their ideal is poetical, they
catch in the finer spirit of truth which the poet breathes, the
fragrance of the breath of God; if it is scientific, they discover in
the laws of Nature the harmony of his attributes; if it is political and
social, they trace the principles of justice and liberty to him; if it
is philanthropic, they understand that love which is the basis, aim,
and end of life is also God.
The root of their being is in him, and the illusory world of the senses
cannot dim their vision of the real world which is eternal. By
self-analysis the mind is sublimated until it becomes a shadow in a
shadowy universe; and the criticism of the reason drives us to doubt and
inaction, from which we are redeemed by our necessary faith in our own
freedom, in our power to act, and in the duty of acting in obedience to
higher law. Knowledge comes of doing. Never to act is never to know. The
world of which we are conscious is the world against which we throw
ourselves by the power of the will; hence life is chiefly conduct, and
its ideal is not merely religious, but moral. The duty of obedience to
our better self determines the purpose and end of action, for the better
self is under the impulse of God. Whether we look without or within, we
find things are as they should not be; and there awakens the desire,
nay, the demand that they be made other and better. The actual is a
mockery unless it may be looked upon as the means of a higher state. If
all things come forth only to perish and again come forth as they were
before; if life is a monster which destroys itself that it may again be
born, again to destroy itself,--were it not better that the tragedy
should cease? For many centuries men have been struggling for richer and
happier life; and yet when we behold the sins, the miseries, the wrongs,
the sorrows, of which the world is full, we are tempted to think that
progress means failure. The multitude are still condemned to toil from
youth to age to provide the food by which life is kept in the body;
immortal spirits are still driven by hard necessity to fix their
thoughts upon matter from which they with much labor dig forth what
nourishes the animal. Like the savage, we still tremble before the
pitiless might of Nature. Floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, untimely
frosts, destroy in a moment what with long and painful effort has been
provided. Pestilence still stalks through the earth to slay and make
desolate. Each day a hundred thousand human beings die; and how many of
these perish as the victims of sins of ignorance, of selfishness, of
sensuality.
To-day, as of old, it would seem man's worst enemy is man. What hordes
still wander through Asia and Africa, seeking opportunity for murder and
rapine; what multitudes are still hunted like beasts, caught and sold
into slavery. In Europe millions of men stand, arms in hand, waiting for
the slaughter. They still believe, because they were born on different
sides of a river and speak different languages, that they are natural
enemies, made to destroy one another. And in our own country, what other
sufferings and wrongs,--greed, sensuality, injustice, deceit,--make us
enemies one of another! There is a general struggle in which each one
strives to get the most, heedless of the misery of others. We trade upon
the weaknesses, the vices, and the follies of our fellow-men; and every
attempt at reform is met by an army of upholders of abuse. When we
consider the murders, the suicides, the divorces, the adulteries, the
prostitutions, the brawls, the drunkenness, the dishonesties, the
political and official corruptions, of which our life is full, it is
difficult to have complacent thoughts of ourselves. Consider, too, our
prisons, our insane asylums, our poor-houses; the multitudes of old men
and women, who having worn out strength and health in toil which barely
gave them food and raiment, are thrust aside, no longer now fit to be
bought and sold; the countless young people, who have, as we say, been
educated, but who have not been taught the principles and habits which
lead to honorable living; the thousands in our great cities who are
driven into surroundings which pervert and undermine character. And
worse still, the good, instead of uniting to labor for a better state
of things, misunderstand and thwart one another. They divide into
parties, are jealous and contentious, and waste their time and exhaust
their strength in foolish and futile controversies. They are not anxious
that good be done, nor asking nor caring by whom; but they seek credit
for themselves, and while they seem to be laboring for the general
welfare, are striving rather to satisfy their own selfish vanity.
But the knowledge of all this does not discourage him who, guided by the
light of true ideals, labors to make reason and the will of God prevail.
If things are bad he knows they have been worse. Never before have the
faith and culture which make us human, which make us strong and wise,
been the possession of so large a portion of the race. Religion and
civilization have diffused themselves, from little centres--from Athens
and Jerusalem and Rome--until people after people, whole continents,
have been brought under their influence. And in our day this diffusion
is so rapid that it spreads farther in a decade than formerly in
centuries. For ages, mountains and rivers and oceans were barriers
behind which tribes and nations entrenched themselves against the human
foe. But we have tunneled the mountains; we have bridged the rivers; we
have tamed the oceans. We hitch steam and electricity to our wagons,
and in a few days make the circuit of the globe. All lands, all seas,
are open to us. The race is getting acquainted with itself. We make a
comparative study of all literatures, of all religions, of all
philosophies, of all political systems. We find some soul of goodness in
whatever struggles and yearnings have tried man's heart. As the products
of every clime are carried everywhere, like gifts from other worlds, so
the highest science and the purest religion are communicated and taught
throughout the earth: and as a result, national prejudices and
antagonisms are beginning to disappear; wars are becoming less frequent
and less cruel; established wrongs are yielding to the pressure of
opinion; privileged classes are losing their hold upon the imagination;
and opportunity offers itself to ever-increasing numbers.
Now, in all this, what do we perceive but the purpose of God, urging
mankind to wider and nobler life? History is his many-chambered school.
Here he has taught this lesson, and there another, still leading his
children out of the darkness of sin and ignorance toward the light of
righteousness and love, until his kingdom come, until his will be done
on earth as it is in heaven. To believe in God and in this divine
education, and to make co-operation with his providential guidance of
the race a life-aim is to have an ideal which is not only the highest,
but which also blends all other true ideals into harmony. And the lovers
of culture should be the first to perceive that intellectual good is
empty, illusory, unless there be added to it the good of the heart, the
good of conscience. To live for the cultivation of one's mind, is, after
all, to live for one's self, and therefore out of harmony with the
eternal law which makes it impossible for us to find ourselves except in
what is not ourselves. "It is the capital fault of all cultivated men,"
says Goethe, "that they devote their whole energies to the carrying out
of a mere idea, and seldom or never to the realization of practical
good." Whatever may be said in praise of culture, of its power to make
its possessor at home in the world of the best thought, the purest
sentiment, the highest achievements of the race; of the freedom, the
mildness, the reasonableness of the temper it begets; of its aim at
completeness and perfection,--it is nevertheless true, that if it be
sought apart from faith in God and devotion to man, its tendency is to
produce an artificial and unsympathetic character. The primal impulse of
our nature is to action; and unless we can make our thought a kind of
deed, it seems to be vain and unreal; and unless the harmonious
development of all the endowments which make the beauty and dignity of
human life, give us new strength and will to work with God for the good
of men, sadness and a sense of failure fall upon us. To have a
cultivated mind, to be able to see things on many sides, to have wide
sympathy and the power of generous appreciation,--is most desirable, and
without something of all this, not only is our life narrow and
uninteresting, but our energy is turned in wrong directions, and our
very religion is in danger of losing its catholicity.
Culture, then, is necessary. We need it as a corrective of the tendency
to seek the good of life in what is external, as a means of helping us
to overcome our vulgar self-complacency, our satisfaction with low aims
and cheap accomplishments, our belief in the sovereign potency of
machines and measures. We need it to make our lives less unlovely, less
hard, less material; to help us to understand the idolatry of the
worship of steam and electricity, the utter insufficiency of the ideals
of industrialism. But if culture is to become a mighty transforming
influence it must be wedded to religious faith, without which, while it
widens the intellectual view, it weakens the will to act. To take us out
of ourselves and to urge 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 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 science, and works in Nature as in the soul of man,
for the good of those who love him. Let us know the right moment, and
let us know that it comes for those alone who are prepared.