Four years of college life, with the methods of to-day, more than quadruple the capital of the graduate of the secondary school. They broaden the field of knowledge, and enlarge the capacity for doing. The world is full of demands for men of knowledge and power. There is to-day a lack of men sufficiently equipped in knowledge, power, and character to take the direction, for instance, of important college departments. Men of power and skill are in demand everywhere, and not enough can be found for responsible positions. One half the fault is insufficient education.
There is another phase of power that must not be neglected, the power to enjoy, to be rich in emotional life. Knowledge, properly pursued, is a source of rich and refined intellectual emotions. There is joy in discovery, joy in the freedom and grasp of thought.
Æsthetic power, based upon fine discrimination, finds a perpetual joy in sky and sea, and mountain and forest, in music and poetry, in sentiment and song. Our Teutonic ancestors were better seers than we. The morning sun and the midnight darkness were perpetually to them a new birth. The leaves whispered to them divine messages; the storms and the seasons, the fruitful earth, were full of wonder and sacred mysteries. They were poets. This matter-of-fact age will yet return to the primitive regard for nature, a regard enlightened and refined by science. Men will yet find in the most commonplace fact of nature mystery, poetry, ground for reverence, and faith in a God.
The power of enjoyment alone does not give a fruitful life. It is in the moment of action that we gain the habit that makes power for action. As a philosopher recently expressed it: Do not allow your finer emotions to evaporate without finding expression in some useful act, if it is nothing but speaking kindly to your grandmother, or giving up your seat in a horse car.
There has been a weak and harmful philosophy in vogue for years that would place the natural and the useful in the line of the agreeable. Even extreme evolution fails signally to show that the agreeable is always teleological, that is, always directed toward useful ends. The latest teaching of physiological psychology takes us back to the stern philosophy of the self-denying Puritan, and shows that we must conquer our habitual inclinations, and encounter some disagreeable duty every day to prepare for the emergencies that demand men of stern stuff. George Eliot proclaims the same thought with philosophical insight, that we are not to wait for great opportunities for glory, but by daily, drudging performance of little duties are to get ready for the arrival of the great opportunities. We must prepare for our eagle flights by many feeble attempts of our untried pinions.
If one but work, no matter in what line of higher scholastic pursuit, he will in a few years waken to a consciousness of power that makes him one of the leaders. There is every encouragement to the student to persevere, in the certain assurance that sooner or later he will reach attainments beyond his present clear conception.
Our inheritance is a glorious one. The character of the Anglo-Saxons is seen throughout their history. Amid the clash of weapons they fought with a fierce energy and a strange delight. They rode the mighty billows and sang heroic songs with the wild joy of the sea fowl. Later we find them contending earnestly for their beliefs. Then they grew into the Puritan sternness of character, abounding in the sense of duty. Their character has made them the leaders and conquerors of the world. It finds expression in the progress and influence of America. This energy has gradually become more and more refined and humanized, and, in its highest and best form, it is the heritage of every young man; and by the pride of ancestry, by the character inherited, by the opportunity of his age, he is called upon to wield strongly the weapon of Thor and hammer out his destiny with strong heart and earnest purpose.
MORAL TRAINING.
We shall not discuss the philosophical systems which underlie ethical theories, nor the theories themselves which consider the nature of the moral sense and the supreme aim of life, but shall treat practical ethics as a part of didactics, and as a part of that unspoken influence which should be the constant ally of instruction. It is not the purpose to present anything new, but rather to give confidence in methods that are well known and are successfully employed by skilful and devoted teachers.