The conviction of the church at this point has not always come to definition; nor has it always risen even to consciousness. For all that, it has risen to practical life and has struggled always for outward expression. Feeling that the empire of God is over all of life, man must submit his mind to the divine rule. Hence it follows that the man who is intellectually lazy, as well as the man who is intellectually dishonest, is a sinner. This statement may shock those who have a surplus of caution, but these may reassure themselves with the conviction that any theory may be fearlessly accepted, if it brings us face to face with God at any point of our total life. The failure to follow this biblical idea has brought a penalty always. No denomination that has fought or slurred education has led a large and victorious life; on the contrary it has invariably become one of the fading and dwindling forces of God’s work. The God of wisdom is evermore against the promoters of ignorance. So do we find that, by the examples of its greatest characters, by the life of its Greatest Teacher and its ruling Lord, by the vision of its supreme ideal, by the assertion of its inclusive theory of consecration, and by the divine dynamic which it brings to bear upon the mind, the Bible has become the steadfast friend of proper education. It has opened the doors of countless schools and has bidden the children of men to enter the portals of learning with the assurance that all truth is of God.
The Bible renders education the service of inspiration, and it renders it the service of proper restraint. When any one faculty of human life becomes a monarch it always makes for trouble. Zeal without knowledge tends to breakage; knowledge without zeal tends to waste. The Bible does not make intellect all. Man has mind, and he must use that. Man has sensibility, and he must use that. Man has will, and he must use that. Man must get the truth out of his integral self rather than out of his fractional self. The man who does not use his heart and will in the gaining of truth is just as faithless as is the man who will not use his mind. Without attempting to use psychological terms with exactness, we may say that Jesus brought in the reign of the practical intellect, which gets truth from all there is of man. Even as truth comes not from the naked will of God, nor yet out of his cold thought, but rather out of the full nature of the Infinite, so truth finds man, not at some one point of his being, but in the glowing center of his whole life.
We may assert, also, that the Bible saves education from frigidity. Tennyson speaks of “the freezing reason’s colder part.” We all know the meaning of the phrase. Jesus put into the search for truth the mood of humility. The method of learning was obedience. Obedience is the organ of intellectual vision as well as of spiritual vision. The method of Jesus was not merely for the spiritual life, as men speak in their fragmentary way; it was a universal method. It takes humility to make the beginnings of a scholar, and weariness and shame of ignorance, and faith in an intellectual empire, and a high trust that the mind is made for truth, and the truth for mind. Ere we have done, we have a huge creed wrapped up in our intellectual processes. But the creed has been saved from its cold pride. The Bible says in one of its marginal readings, “Knowledge puffeth up; love buildeth up.” Knowledge alone may be swollen with pride, and the higher demand of the Bible would save from that disaster. This gives us the clue to more than one biblical sentence. There is a “science falsely so called.” There is a sense in which “not many wise after the flesh are called.” These implied warnings are not the cries of prejudice. They stand for the effort to touch learning with humility, which alone can save it from being distant and icy.
The good Book rescues education from a selfish inaction. There was a living and serving element in Jesus’s relation to the intellectual life. He did not deal in barren metaphysics or in helpless abstractions. His truth went to work. He fastened it to life’s burdens, and they were lifted. He dropped it amid life’s problems, and they were solved. He cast it against life’s temptations, and they were defeated. He attached it to life’s duties, and they were fulfilled. He sought those truths with which men had to dwell. He never attempted to set forth the essential mystery of things. He was no dealer in an intellectual cure-all. He spoke with authority and yet with reverent limitation. There was a great reserve in his explanations. Yet in the realm where men must live their present lives, Jesus gave enough truth to keep men busy all their days. Here again comes in the question of dynamic. Men sometimes prate about their “love of truth.” The intellectual life, like the religious life, may be guilty of cant. It takes more than an open mind to get the truth; it takes a working mind. Truth does not come to the passive man by way of transfer. One teaching of the parable of the virgins is that, while the coarser goods of life may be transferred, the finer goods of life must be won by spiritual effort. It takes dynamic to secure a real intellect. Perception may see a truth, but only inward power can use the truth. Jesus conferred that power. He gave us the truth in the doctrine about God. He gave us the way in the spirit of obedience. He gave us the life in the willingness to make the truth the servant of the world for the sake of Christ.
This leads us to the biblical idea of consecrated intellect. As we have often failed to indicate the sin of needless ignorance, so have we failed to point out the sin of an unconsecrated mind. All truth can be dedicated to Christ. His great call to-day is for more men with the highest culture placed under the thrall of his grace and under the guiding power of the Spirit whom he sends—more Luthers from Wittenberg, more Wesleys from Oxford, more Pauls from Gamaliel’s school; more men from all our modern seats of learning who will know that gifts of learning can be placed at the service of the King and that all science and philosophy and literature may be placed at the foot of the Cross. In the coming day of the Christian intellect
Mind and heart, according well
May make one music as before,
But vaster.
CHAPTER V
The Bible and Work