For our purpose this morning, learning may be divided into four provinces: literature, history, science and philosophy, to which must be added in any complete topography of the realm, pure mathematics. By pure mathematics I mean arithmetic, algebra, geometry, logarithms, the calculus and the like. But pure mathematics is simply an instrument by which the scientific mind reaches certain results. I shall not therefore consider this department at all; it is not necessary for our purpose. Some one must look through the telescope, some one must know how to use the spectroscope in order to tell us what is the size of the sun and its constituent elements; but we do not need to examine the telescope or the spectroscope. Some one must be skilled in pure mathematics in order to tell us how many miles the sun is distant from our own earth, but we may take the result without going through the process. This instrument must always be left in the hand of the specialist. I wish to show you that all that is best, highest and most important in literature, history, science and philosophy lies within the power of your acquisition. I wish to show you the spirit with which you must study, and the purpose with which you must acquire it; and I wish to show you that if you acquire in that spirit and with that purpose you can not but gain in your religious nature.
I. In the first place, then, what is literature, and why do we study it? Literature is the expression of human life, in its innermost experiences, and in its outward forms. Sometimes it is the expression of social life, sometimes of the intellectual life, sometimes of the emotional life; but always and everywhere literature is a mirror held up either before society or before the human heart; no, not a mirror, but the sensitized plate in a photographic apparatus; and the picture, now of society, now of the brain, now of the palpitating heart with its fears, hopes, joys and experiences, is given upon the plate; and literature is the picture brought out for us to examine. To study literature is not to study language. Language is merely the instrument which we use for the study of literature. To study literature is to study life—life in its outward semblance or life in its inward experiences. It is to study the life of the community and of society as we study it in Thackeray; or it is to study the life of the brain and the thought as we study it in Plato and Bacon; or it is to study the life of the inward emotions as we study it in Tennyson or Wordsworth. Now, in order to study life as it is portrayed in literature it is not necessary to know the original language in which that life was portrayed. Some one must have studied the Greek language in order to bring Homer to our intelligence; some one must have studied Latin and brought Horace within our horizon; some one must have studied French and brought Molière within our knowledge; some one must have studied Italian in order to introduce Dante to our acquaintance; but it is not necessary for us to do so. Some one must have taken the negative and printed the picture on the paper for us; but we need not all be photographers in order to get the picture for our own enlightenment. I hold a silver dollar in my hand. Some one must have gone to the mines and dug out the ore with a pick; some one must have put it under the great stampers and beaten it out in the stamping mill; some one must have put it in the sieve and shaken it and shaken it until the grosser dross was washed away; some one must have put it into the furnace and heated it until the finer dross was eliminated; some one must have carried it to the mint and put the stamp of the United States authority upon it; but we need not all be miners digging in the mines; we need not all be workers in the stamping mill; we need not all be toilers in the furnace room; we need not all be masters or mechanics in the mint. The money was coined by those who have wrought for us, and to whom our gratitude is due, but the coin is ours; it is not merely for those who worked in producing it.
I hold in my hand an extract from Taine which expresses that which I desire to express better than I can perhaps express it myself. Let me read it: “What is your first remark on turning over the great leaves of a folio, the yellow sheets of a manuscript, a poem, a code of laws, a confession of faith? This, you say, did not come into existence all alone, it is but a mould like a fossil-shell, an imprint, like one of the shapes embossed in stone by an animal which lived and perished. Under the shell there was an animal; and behind the document there was a man. Why do you study the shell, except to bring before you the animal? So you study the document only to know the man. The shell and the document are lifeless wrecks, valuable only as a clue to the entire and living existence. We must get hold of this existence and endeavor to re-create it. It is a mistake to study the document as if it were isolated. This were to treat things as a simple scholar, to fall into the error of the bibliomaniac.”
You do not need to have traversed the ocean beach or climbed the mountain-top and gathered the shells; you may go into the museum where they have already been gathered, and study their history there. You do not need, with dictionary and grammar, to work out the secrets of the language; you may take the products of those who have thus wrought, and learn the man that lies behind the document.
Not only is it not necessary that a man should study language in order to study literature; in innumerable cases the study of the language has absolutely interfered with the study of the literature. In innumerable cases, men at college have ground away, day after day, and month after month, and year after year, over cases and nouns and parts of speech, and rules of syntax and rules of grammar—working only at the grammar, and utterly oblivious of the great light that lay behind it. Mr. Adams, of Massachusetts, has recently told us how hard a man may study Greek and how little he may know of it after he gets through with it, for he assures us that he does not know the Greek alphabet to-day, although he studied Greek six years, four years before college and two in it. I confess I should not have thought it possible for a man to have studied so much and yet know so little when he got through; but I am very certain of this, that my own experience reflects the experience of many college students. I learned more of Homer—of his life, of his character, of the lessons he has to teach, of the man himself—from reading in the “Ancient Classics for English Readers,” the Iliad and the Odyssey, and from reading Bryant’s translation, than I ever received from reading Homer himself in the original Greek in my college class. That which is highest, and supremest, and best in literature, you may obtain without a college education. You may learn the life, you may learn the man, you may learn the sacred truth; and you can not do that without broadening your sympathies and developing your charity. When you have read Homer and Virgil and Horace; when you have read Dante and Milton; when you have read Molière and Shakspere; when you have read Wordsworth and Tennyson, and when, out of all this reading, you have gathered their fruits, you will find this to be true, that, though you have one picture of Greek life, one of Italian life, one of French life, one of English life, one portraying the life of four centuries before Christ, and one portraying the life of eighteen centuries after; yet in all these languages, in all these epochs, in all these civilizations the great heart of hope and joy and love and fear and reverence and faith was one. And you will learn to know that humanity, in all its nationalities, in all its epochs, in all its civilizations,—aye, and under all the varied forms of its religions, true and false—that humanity is one in all its brotherhood, and one in its great Father in heaven.
II. What is the object of studying history? What is history? It is not a mere record of dates, not the mere annals of actions, not merely the account of what men have performed or what nations have wrought. A man does not know history because he can recite glibly, beginning with Alfred the Great and coming down to the present time, the dates of the chief events and the chief epochs in English history. History is the record of God’s dealing with the human race. History is the account of the great laws under which this human race has been evolved from its lowest condition to its highest condition. As the tree grows from the seed planted in the ground—first the little bud peering above the surface, then the stalk, and then the branches, and by and by the completed oak; as the child grows from the babe in the cradle, taking on one new faculty and one power after another till he comes into as yet incompleted manhood—for the completion of manhood lies afar off in the dim, distant and invisible future—so the nations of the earth, and so the whole race of man has been developed from the seed to the oak and from the babe in the cradle to manhood in its maturity; and to read history is to read the process of this development.
What, for example, is English history? To know English history is to know that in the Bible, way back years and years before the birth of Christ—fourteen centuries before—were planted all the seeds of a free representative government; to know that in the Mosaic statutes is to be found the outline of a perfect political economy; to know that the Mosaic commonwealth had in it all the elements of those institutions which have made America a free nation; popular suffrage, representative assemblies, political government divided into three departments, executive, legislative, and judicial; a carefully framed system of laws, with a carefully framed system of penalties, a universal system of education, and a religion that was national. To know history is to know that Alfred the Great was a devout believer in the Bible as the word of God, that he studied it and found in this Old Testament, fourteen centuries before the birth of Christ, these seeds of a free government buried and forgotten. It is to know that he gathered them out of this old book, as men have gathered wheat seeds out of old mummies in the tombs of Egypt, and planted them in the more fertile soil of an Anglo-Saxon community. It is to know how the Anglo-Saxon Witenagemote grew to be an English Parliament; it is to know how the people came to be represented in it under Simon de Montfort; and how they came to be supreme in it under Charles the First, and Cromwell. It is to know how the nation was at first a congeries of conflicting tribes, partially brought together by Alfred the Great, and consolidated together under one national sovereignty by William the Conqueror, and growing thence into unity under successive statesmen, until these latter days, when William Gladstone, the greatest statesman of them all, is perfecting the Christian unity of the empire by Christian justice and equity. It is to know how, in the earlier history of this nation, the Pope of Rome assumed authority and control over the nations. It is to know how, through the centuries, the war went on between the Anglo-Saxon love of liberty and this claim of the Church of Rome; how it was begun under Augustine, continued under Thomas à Becket, brought to the beginning of the end under King Henry the Eighth, until finally under Elizabeth the bonds that bound England to Rome were severed forever, and England was made free from every foreign prince and potentate. It is to know how this seed—the sovereignty of the people in the nation, the sovereignty of the nation against the anarchy of feudalism, and the liberty of the nation against the Pope—grew into a tree, as yet but a young sapling; it is to know how then God carefully dug this sapling up, and transported it three thousand miles across the ocean and planted it in the yet more fertile soil of America. It is to know that because of the battle and bloodshed, and the long suffering endured on that soil, to-day there floats over us the banner of liberty and justice. The seeds were there in that old Bible, the culture was there in that English history; the fruit we rejoice in here to-day.
One does not need to work in the Spanish libraries with Prescott, nor in the Dutch libraries with Motley, nor among the old manuscripts of the British museum with Froude, nor among the pamphlets of English literature with Macaulay, in order to gather for himself these highest and supremest fruits of historical learning. The processes of historical research must always be carried on by the few; we must always have in this country some men who have leisure to pursue them. Alas for us, if the time ever comes when we grow careless or indifferent respecting our colleges or universities, and the kind of culture which they give; but they give culture that the cultured may give us fruit. The few garner; the heaviest are for all.
Nor is it possible for one thus to study the history of the human race, to see how, little by little, liberty has grown, education has grown, humanity has grown, and not grow himself in faith in an overruling Providence, and in hope in the Supreme God.