breadth of sympathy, so the broad, comprehensive, and large study of
history will give hope. When the fog covers the ocean, and the mariner
befogged knows not where he is, and can not tell whence his course
has been, nor where it shall be, he sometimes goes aloft and from the
top-mast, looking above the fog, discerns the coast in the distance and
the entrance into the harbor. In history we rise out of the fog that
environs all in the lower level; we look above the fog and over it, and
know then the courses we have traced, and see the harbor and the haven
not far before us.
III. What is science, and for what purpose do we study it? I use, of
course, the word science in its restricted sense, meaning natural
science. For two purposes. Nature is a vast and wonderful machine; its
mechanism may well arouse both our astonishment and our admiration. If
you have a watch that keeps time so that it does not vary more than two
or three minutes in a year you are proud of it, and if you should by
chance have a watch that did not vary more than one minute in a year
you would be a remarkably humble man if you did not boast of it to
your acquaintances. But in the heavens the sun and the planets round
it have been keeping time for the centuries, and as yet astronomy has
not detected an appreciable variation in its time. What a wonderful
mechanism is this! If an inventor should construct a furnace which
would keep us warm in winter and cool in summer, no manufacturer
would be able to supply the orders. But you have within you a furnace
such that although you may go from the land of the Esquimaux with
the thermometer 40° below zero, to the tropics with the thermometer
110° above zero, this furnace does not allow the habitation in which
you dwell to vary more than four or five degrees. What a wonderful
mechanism is this nature which we study! And we study this mechanism
partly that we may use it, that we may lay hold on these great forces
of nature and make them subservient to our will by understanding the
laws which regulate and govern them. But nature is more than a machine;
nature is also a book, and a wonderful book, written all over in
hieroglyphics that require study for their apprehension. It is more
than a mechanism. It is a revelation; and it reveals wondrous things to
him who knows how to read it aright. Edison and Morse, Copernicus and
Newton—they have interpreted nature on the one side; but Wordsworth,
and Longfellow, and Bryant—they have interpreted nature on the other,
and the one class of interpretations is as valuable as the other. We
study nature as a mechanism that we may know how to use it; we study
nature as a book that we may know how to read it.
Now, all that which is most valuable in nature, as a mechanism, we
lay hold of and use without going through the labor necessary in the
original examination by the first investigator. We do not need to
understand the laws of heat and steam to use them; some one has learned
the laws, and has brought fire and water together and has pronounced a
nuptial blessing over them, and a child has been born of the marriage,
and we take steam for our slave without knowing the ritual which
married the father and mother. Some one must have learned how to reach
his hand to the cloud, and bring down the electricity, make it run our
errands and serve the purpose of our illumination; but we do not need
to know the processes in order to sit under the light. Not only is it
true that the mechanical uses that come from natural sciences we get
without going through the processes, but the literary and spiritual we
get also. Others have been turning over the pages of this marvelous
book and have been reading it to us, and unconsciously, unknowingly,
almost without the sense that we have been learning anything, we have
learned great lessons in this book of nature. Scientists on the one
side and theologians on the other have put science and religion into
antagonism with one another. But they are sister teachers of the race;
science has received all its life from the late comprehended revelation
of the first chapter of Genesis that nature is man’s servant, not
his god; and theology has learned some of its profoundest lessons
from the book of nature which science has interpreted. Consider for
one moment what a fundamental religious lesson we have learned in the
school-room of science almost without knowing that she was our teacher.
The ancient Hebrews believed that Palestine was the world; all the
rest was a mere outlying district environing it, the back yard as it
were. The Mediterranean was the Great Sea, the little pond of Galilee
was the Sea of Galilee, the sun and moon and stars were torches for
man’s illumination—that was their conception of the universe. With that
conception it is not strange that they had an equally insignificant
and unworthy conception of the God of the world, a conception against
which the inspired writers were continually struggling, and from which
they were continually endeavoring to lift the people up. When the
Philistines fought against the Israelites and captured the ark of God
they were in triumph. “We have captured God,” they thought; and the
Israelites were almost equally in despair, for they also half thought
that Jehovah had been carried off a prisoner. Now, science, even more
than revelation, has been enlarging our conceptions of this universe.
The Holy Land, a province about as large as Vermont, is no longer the
earth; the Atlantic and the Pacific are the great seas; this globe on
which we live is but one of the smaller globes of the planetary system;
and the great planetary system itself is but a smaller one of the great
planetary systems which are circling around some vast and distant sun.
Science has taught us too that all this universe is linked together,
bound together by a common law, bound together by a common order of
phenomena. It has investigated the sun and the stars, it has analyzed
their light, it has shown us that the substances of these bodies are
identical with the substances of ours. It has taught us the unity of
nature, it has taught us the vastness of nature. There are stars in
the firmament which you can see with the naked eye, on which if a
man were standing with a telescope fine enough and powerful enough
to see what is transpiring on this globe, and should look through it
to-day, he would see not this congregation assembled under this roof,
but the first outbreaking of the revolution, so long does it take
light to traverse from our globe to the stars, light that takes but
eight minutes to travel from the sun to the earth. There are stars so
distant that he would see not Chautauqua gathered here to-night, but
the crucifixion of Christ taking place on the hill of Calvary; stars
so distant, that with a telescope powerful enough to carry the message
of this world to his sight, he would see Abraham coming out of the
land of his idolatry into the promised land; stars so distant that he
would see this earth first taking on its brightness in the birth-day
of its glory. So vast is our universe that the mind can not attempt
to comprehend its majestic distances. It is not theology, it is not
religion, it is not even the Bible that has unfolded this vastness; it
is science. It is impossible that men who have once learned anything
of this greatness of creation, or anything of this unity of creation,
should ever bow down again before idols of wood and stone. So long as
men thought that the laws of the material universe were antagonistic
and anarchic, that the universe was made up of warring tribes and
provinces, so long it was not strange that they should worship many
gods. So long as they thought that it was a little province on which
they lived, the boundaries of which they could themselves measure with
their tape-line, they might well worship before images they had formed
with their utterances or with their hands. But to-day you might burn
every Bible in the land, you might burn every church and Sunday-school
house, you might put all the priests and ministers in America on the
great bonfire, and consume them as well, and then you might erase
from every mind every lesson that had been learned from church or
Sunday-school, from priest or minister, and this nation could not go
back to idolatry, unless it went back to the utter barbarism of utter
ignorance. That which is highest and supremest in science you can
learn without becoming a scientist; and you can not learn it without
learning the large reverence that is the very foundation of religion.
IV. What is philosophy? The study of philosophy is the study of the
laws which govern the spiritual realm, as the study of natural science
is the study of the laws which govern the natural and the physical
realm. It is not studying Hegel, and Kant, and Schleiermacher; it is
not studying Hickock or Hopkins; it is not studying what philosophers
have thought—they are the mere translators, the mere “ponies.”
Philosophy is the law of humanity, either social or individual. The
study of philosophy is the study of the laws which God has ordained
for the binding of men together into a common organism, or for the
government of their individual lives. Men believed that the foundation
of the State was a compact, and that each citizen gave up something of
his rights for the common welfare; they believed that the foundation of
the Nation was a compact in which each State gave up something which it
had of right to secure the advantage of a commonwealth. So believing,
they concluded that any State might withdraw from its allegiance, and
they might have easily concluded that any individual might withdraw
from his allegiance. It is only as we learned that we are born into
the government and made a part of the State from the beginning by
the ordinance of God, that we have learned what is the bond that has
bound the nation together. Revolting from the Romish doctrine that
marriage is a sacrament, Protestantism has been teaching for years
that it is merely a civil contract. We are reaping the result of this
false teaching. To-day in Puritan Connecticut, the minister can not
tie the marriage bond much faster than the courts across the street
can dissolve it. We have yet to learn that marriage is more than a
civil contract, that it is an ordinance of God; that he who made man
and woman made them that these twain should become one flesh, and made
the home to be the first Church and the first State. When we have
learned that, we shall have learned the foundation of the home as we
have learned the foundation of the State. To study philosophy is to
study the laws which govern society in its organism. All text-books
are only instructions to teach us how to study life itself, which is
the great text-book. To study philosophy is also to study the laws
which govern the individual. It is to know that God has made you body,
soul and spirit; that he has given you a physical organism, wonderful,
but simply a mechanism in your hands; that he has given you a mental
power wonderful in its reasoning qualities, but with its partial
parallels in the animals about you; it is to know that far above the
body and the mind is the spirit—reverence, and love, and hope, and a
living faith—that makes you one with God, and that points you to your
eternal habitation. This it is to study mental and moral philosophy.
It is to know how to read the secrets of your own soul. It is to know
how to read the inner life of the souls of others. Books will help;
scholarship will help; but the great book is the human soul, and we
need not have scholarship to read that book. Burns and Shakspere were
not great scholars; but no scholar ever surpassed Burns and Shakspere
in the reading of the human soul.
No one ever exerted so profound an influence on the life of humanity as
Jesus of Nazareth. You may think that Jesus was simply a man; you will
not doubt that from the teachings of Jesus have gone forth an influence
greater by far than went forth from Plato, or Socrates, or Confucius,
or Buddha. You may think with me that he was the Son of God; you surely
will not doubt the potency of the influence that proceeded from the
incarnate Son of God. Jesus, the son of the carpenter, what did he
know of literature, of science, of philosophy? Rather, what knowledge
did he employ? He was thoroughly familiar with the literature of his
day—that is, the Bible; but he never displayed or employed any critical
or literary knowledge respecting it. He never discussed questions of
authorship, he never debated questions of origin or date, he did not
touch that which lay on the surface. He read the interior and spiritual
truth. He saw in that which to their mind was a mere annal, and a
mere law the beating heart of the inspired prophet telling of God. He
tore off the wrapping and made the world see it. He plucked from the
psalm of David this bud, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,”
and in his hand it blossomed into the parable of the Good Shepherd.
He plucked from the psalm of David this utterance, “Like as a father
pitieth his children,” and in his hand it blossomed into the parable of
the Prodigal Son. He knew the life back of literature. He invented no
machine, gave no hint of any, suggested no steam engine, no steam boat,
no electric light. What he _knew_ I say not. I may say what he used,
and knowledge of nature as a mechanism he never used; but he looked
into nature as a book, read her teachings, and interpreted them; in the
sower going forth to sow, in the fisher gathering his fish from his
net; in the bird’s song in the air he heard the sweet note of trust;
in the flowers blossoming from the ground he read the sweet promise of
God’s providing care. Things which men having eyes saw not and ears
heard not be brought to their vision and their hearing. He propounded
no scheme of political philosophy, none of psychology, or theology, but
he taught that “One is your father, even God in heaven, and ye all are
brethren;” and the great laws that are to bind together, rather the one
great law of order, the law of love, this law he expounded. The son of
the carpenter lived that he might teach, among the other lessons, this
lesson of the democracy of learning; that learning, in its higher and
more valued forms, is for the mechanic busy at his bench, for the smith
grimy with toil at his forge, for the mother busiest of all, with hands
and brain and heart filled with her children.
Kings of the earth have fought that they might hold the power in their
own hands, and the many might be subject to them. The people have
risen, and grown strong, until at last they have trampled the king
and the army under their feet, and have rushed into the citadel and
the palace and taken possession, and the citadel of oppression and
the palace of luxury have become the temple of liberty. The priests
have fought long that they might keep the people out of the temple and
hold the mysteries of religion an exclusive possession. But the people
have surged up against the priests and trampled them under foot, and
occupied the temple of religion. The temples of earning are open; the
kings of learning stand at the door, and with their scepters beckon
you to come and share their coronation and their crown. The priests
of learning bid you come, that they may open to you the mysteries of
literature. For in the republic of letters there is no aristocracy but
that of service. And they only are great who have learned how best to
serve their fellow-men.
The triumph that I read in your eyes is not a false triumph. You have
plucked the first fruits, and all the other brightest and best are
before you for your plucking. The expectation that I read in your eyes
is not a delusive expectation. The fruit is yours. The desire that
I read in your eyes is not a cheating desire. The aspiration that
burns within you for learning may have its gratification. You have no
money? Literature is cheap. You have no time? You have as much time as
Schliemann had, who stood in the long line before the postoffice and
studied his Greek while waiting for the letters. You have as much time
as Mary Somerville had, who wrote the volume which gave her a princely
reputation among astronomers, while tending with motherly care the
children in the nursery pulling at her skirts. The forces of nature
come out of the ground and offer themselves to you to do the drudgery
which aforetime was left to human hands, that you may have time to
learn the truth of God, and the works of God, and the will of God. We
stand to-day on the mountain height. We look just across the valley.
The Jordan is no longer overflowing its banks, but is a narrow and
shallow stream. The promised land lies there in all its richness and
brilliance, and God’s providence utters its promise to us Americans in
this nineteenth century: “Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid,
neither be thou dismayed; for the Lord thy God has given thee this
land for a possession forever.”
* * * * *
Another immense audience assembled in the Amphitheater at two o’clock
to listen to the addresses delivered to the graduating class by
President Lewis Miller, and Dr. J. H. Vincent.
ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT LEWIS MILLER.
_Chautauquans_:—In these days of popular education, it may be
profitable to examine the different sources of culture and development.
First among these are books—the treasures that lie hidden in them may
well awaken our inquiry and admiration, may well be worth the many
hours of toil spent in preparing the mind, so that it can converse
with the masters of the past and present. I do not wonder at hunger
after the hidden treasures of books, for in them are power, wealth and
pleasure. We need but watch the interested audiences that gather in
this Amphitheater, to realize the power there is in the rostrum, how
in all ages peoples have been confirmed or changed in their opinions
by that mere persuasive power of words. Your mind now runs over the
histories you have studied, and you recall the orators who, through the
power of speech alone, have revolutionized empires, advanced or checked
civilization. What pleasure to the mind and heart, to be able in our
leisure hours to sit with Herodotus, Macaulay, Motley, Bancroft, and
a host of others, and hear them tell their historic stories! or with
David, Homer, Shakspere, Whittier and Bryant, and let them fill our
minds with the beautiful and soothing words of poetry! Does not art, in
a still more condensed form, give us the history of the nations of the
past? Does it not give us a clearer idea of thought? What descriptive
words could give us so clear a view of the golden candlestick, around
which clusters so much of interest to the Bible student, as can be had
by a look at the plaster mould of the arch of Titus, in the Museum?
What more rapidly moulds, and more powerfully influences, the present
age than do the pictures on the walls, and the books in the libraries
of our homes?
May I venture to bring before your mind that other phase of art, known
as the mechanic art? That art, on which the educator has placed so
small an estimate that when an apparently dull boy is found in the
school or family, he is turned over to it, in the notion that stupidity
can here find subsistence and compensation.
Now, give this art the power to express itself in words and in the fine
arts, and I will bring back to you the days of Raphael and Michael
Angelo, in which thought was expressed in words and on canvas and
stone, in such purity that the student in the schools of to-day is
carried back to these times, to study the perfection and beauty of
expression. In the line of a better educated labor lies the settlement
of the great labor question. Will it be as Garfield suggests, for
Chautauqua to provide not only for the leisure, but secure the leisure
by some system of education that will make it possible?
If by any means the mental energies can be combined with the muscles,
the product of labor will be greatly increased, and the time producing
the same quantity lessened. Struggling labor hardly sees that in
the short space of about thirty years the time has been lessened
from thirteen and fourteen hours to ten hours per day, and the wages
enhanced from fifty and seventy-five cents per day to an average of two
dollars per day. In most of the prominent manufacturing establishments
throughout the North we are at a near approach to a reduction of
time to eight hours—_and may God speed the day_. Take the advance in
quantity of products for ten years only, and by the aid of machinery,
and more intelligent labor, we have gained more than two hours. Why
should not labor get its due proportion? We are fast turning the
drudgery of labor to pleasure. You need but visit the dish-washing and
laundry-rooms at the Hotel Athenæum to witness the truth of what I
state.
Some years ago I made an estimate of the number of inhabitants it would
require to do by hard labor that which was done at that time by twelve
thousand inhabitants by the use of steam and water power. It reached
the enormous number of three hundred thousand inhabitants. From this we
may learn that it will not be a great hardship to give to labor more
leisure and more pay, not rashly as by strikes, but by prudent and
gradual measures.
Ah, the wealth of nations rests in this art! The power to subdue
forests and belt empires with railroads and telegraphs, and ignore
distance is in its hands.
This art sends forth its missionary in its manufactured products to all
quarters of the globe; every different product is a copy of a volume on
some subject, carrying with it some Christian’s impress and prayer. So
true is this that it needs no great expert to tell an article made by
Christian hands from that made by heathen.
This power of the individuality impresses with interest and wonder.
How readily thoughts in words are detected from others, even on the
same subject. Every workman of a manufactured article in some such
sense makes his individual impress on the work he performs, and it is
as readily told. The Christian, liberty-loving intelligence is pressed
into every article and sent forth on its mission of preaching the
gospel to every creature, even gaining entrance where the missionary
is refused. With this truth in mind, with what renewed pleasure must
the liberated laborer make still greater impress of his individual
mind. This thought can be carried into all that we do. Our walk, our
talk, and the expression of our faces all enter into our products of
whatever kind. How important that it should be imbued with the spirit
of intelligent Christianity.
Class of ’83, you have only opened the doors to wider range, to fields
of greater usefulness. All about you lie sleeping elements to be
quickened into activity. Have your accumulated mental development well
stored, and constantly add more. The purpose of the study was more to
create an appetite for knowledge than to give a thorough or finished
education.
We are glad as officers of the C. L. S. C. to present you with diplomas
having places for many seals. May there be no laxity of effort until
the crowning seal will emblazon over the whole its rays.
* * * * *
The Rev. Dr. Vincent said:
A large number of salutations from members of the C. L. S. C. have
been received, some of them breathing a simple prayer of benediction
on the Circle and its officers, others testifying to the value of the
Circle to them intellectually, socially, and spiritually; many are too
long to read at this time, but every line has been carefully read by
the Superintendent of Instruction, and a few of the sentences are here
reported:
From Sacramento, Cal.: “We long to be with you at the Assembly; but
since we can not be, be assured that as we read of Commencement Day our
hearts beat in sympathy with those of the C. L. S. C.”
From Washington, D. C.: “Hearty thanks for so splendid an opportunity
of living more abundantly, as I have enjoyed through the noble
conception and sensible management of the C. L. S. C. I hope to add
many of its seals to my diploma.”
From St. Paul, Minn.: “The day in which ’83 passes through the Golden
Gate you, who are present amidst the jubilee, will most likely forget
the distant ones; but I for one will put on my C. L. S. C. badge, take
out two faded maple leaves, kept in remembrance of last summer, and in
imagination march with the proud class under the Arches, while I will
pray the good Lord to bless Chautauqua.”