In age we are by second nature prone.’”
“Most happy; but don’t you see, Dr. Oldcastle, I began by admitting that people have always had a notion that they must bring up their children in good habits, and suppress faulty ones. But now, they have something more than a notion; they have scientific certainty. And, instead of dawdling through the whole period of childhood with spasmodic efforts to get a boy to tie his shoe-strings fast, they take it in hand once and for all, keep incessant watch for the week or two it will take to form the habit, and then the thing is done with for a lifetime. The new habit once formed, the parent’s part is no more than to watch against chance returns to the old ways until the habit is ingrained in the stuff of the child’s character. Now, don’t you see that this is a very different thing from the desultory way in which a child was allowed to try off and on for a habit all his days, and never got it?”
“I admit there’s a difference; it tallies, too, with what I notice in the young boys who enter with us. You mean that their mothers have definitely set themselves for a month or two, say, to form a habit—now obedience, now truthfulness, now attention, and so on—and that is why the boys come to me with character, not mere disposition?”
“Yes, that’s what I mean; and it’s on these lines we have been advancing for a whole century. In another direction, too, education has been going forward; but, here, we have only analogy to guide us, not yet certainty. It cannot be predicated as yet, whether we are simple or complex beings, whether in each of us is bound up one life or several. It is not impossible, for instance, that, just as our physical life is sustained because multitudinous organisms come to life, feed, grow, multiply, and die, perpetually in our substance, so, perhaps what we may call our immaterial life is sustained by multitudinous lives such as our philosophy has never dreamed of. An idea, for instance, what is it? We don’t know yet; but this we know, that every idea we get is quick within us as a living being, that it feeds, grows, multiplies, and then, behold it is no more! There are bodies natural and there are bodies spiritual. Perhaps this sort of thing is too immature to be pressed into service. But of other parts of us, to which names and ideas of something like personality are attached—conscience, will, our spiritual being—this it is quite safe to assert: they thrive upon their appropriate meat and work, they perish of inanition and idleness. This, too, we take into our scheme of education, and with great results.”
The Dean got up:—
“I, for one, must heartily thank Dr. Brenton for his most suggestive lecture. No, don’t look ‘castigated’ Doctor; ’tis a lecture for weight and worth, but of commendable brevity. Speaking for the ‘cloth’ I should like to say how much we owe to this educational revolution. A century ago, our Church was supposed to show some signs of decadence; to-day she is quick to her remotest extremities. And why? simply because she has gone with the times in following up the advances of the ‘New Education.’ She, with the rest of you, perceives that the world has ever one great thing to do—to bring up the young in advance of the generation before them; that the sole valuable inheritance the present has to leave behind is—exalted national character. Wherefore, she has laboured assiduously on the two lines Dr. Brenton emphasises to-night—‘that Habit is ten natures’; and, that the spiritual life must flourish or decay as it is duly fed and exercised, or allowed to lie idle and unfed. Therefore, is every clergyman instructed, above all, to minister to the young of his parish—of all classes. The growing soul cannot thrive upon husks—therefore must the truth be divested of the husks of the past, and clothed upon with the living thought of the present. The young soul must be taught its work, the spiritual exercises of prayer and praise, the bodily exercise of service; and as no man can teach what he does not know, the minister to the young must be qualified and ever active in these. Seeing these and kindred truths, our clergy are raising up about them a body of ardent young spirits to whom self-sacrifice is a law; labour in spiritual uplands a necessity. And for much of this progress, I say, we are indebted to the labours of the ‘New Educationists,’ whom we therefore gladly hold up with both hands.”
“This is very gratifying hearing; we have all along been very sensible of the cordiality and helpfulness of the clergy, who so commonly throw in their lot with us. But that we should be doing them some service all the time—this is news indeed. May I imitate the Dean, and say a word professionally. We doctors have reaped where we sowed—and abundantly. In the old days, families had each ‘their doctor,’ who was called in now and then to do battle with disease which had already made headway. But now, people are beginning to see that low vitality, poor physique, and even organic disease—hereditary or other—are very commonly the results of faulty education, or bringing up, if that is the better way of putting it. What is the consequence? Why, the doctor is retained, like husband or wife, for sickness and health; he is the medical adviser by the year, or usually by the lifetime. He thrives not on sickness, but upon health. Drops in on his clients unawares, finds one girl doubled up over a book, another standing on one foot, notes the hectic flush and bright eye of this child, the tendency to drowsiness in that—the flabby arms and quick intelligence of the little town-bred family, the stolid dulness of the farmer’s boy—for rich and poor come in course to him. He does not wait for disease to be set up, but averts the tendency; and though he has found no elixir of life, nor means of averting death—this, he may almost venture to promise his clients, that so long as they live, they shall live with eye not waxed dim, nor natural force abated. And all this because he knows that the body, too, must have its education, its careful regulation, and that bone and muscle and vital organs alike grow to the habits you set up in them.”
Mr. Hilyard had been using his pencil for the last few minutes, and was evidently preparing to show on what lines the schools, too, had been advancing during this age of many revolutions, when—“’Tis eleven o’clock, and the ladies!” brought the discussion to an end.
NOTE
(To Page 111, [Translation.])
Hobbes followed, to the letter, the philosophy which derives ideas from sense impressions; he did not fear the consequences, and said boldly that the soul was as subservient to necessity as is society to despotism. The cultivation of noble and pure aspirations is so firmly established in England, by political and religious institutions, that speculation moves round these mighty pillars without ever shaking them. Hobbes had few supporters in his country, but Locke’s influence was everywhere felt. He was moral and religious in character, and he never admitted any of the dangerous arguments which naturally follow in the train of his theories; the majority of his fellow-countrymen, in accepting his theories, were inconsistent enough to separate cause from effect, whilst Hume and the French philosophers, admiring his system, have applied it in a much more logical way.