The universities are not always the first discoverers of wisdom, but they are the storehouses of the wisdom of the ages, and the distributing points. They are not a substitute for nature and real life, but they help to interpret both. They are not a substitute for practical experience, but they bestow the instruments with which to do better the work of practical experience. They do not create power, but they develop power.
A few geniuses have in strong degree the intellectual impulse and follow it until they become original and creative, and contribute to the world’s insight. But the average youth needs all that the formal training of the schools can give him. When the student is once aroused by the sense of his privileges and duties, he will select no easy goal to attain. He will not be satisfied until he has learned the secrets of nature’s processes, has examined his own nature, has made use of the recorded experience of the ages—thereby taking a giant stride in knowledge that he could not have taken alone—has given himself the power to help in the work of his own time.
Justice was regarded by Plato as the ground of social uprightness; Christian justice recognized the brotherhood of man, with all that follows in moral conduct; “moral ideals” for us has the same significance. This is not the place for the discussion of ethical theories, but it is of the highest importance for the young man, after wandering more or less vaguely over the field of ethical doctrines, to turn to the nature of his own being and find there written the supreme fact of moral obligation, with its implications of freedom of will, a personal God, and immortality of the soul.
Every man knows that even in his ordinary approvable acts he does not work to the end of pleasure, but that he has impulses that reach out in fellowship and compassion toward others, impulses that reach out toward the Truth and Beauty and Supreme Goodness of the world. Every man knows that he possesses a power to choose amongst and regulate his impulses; that such aims are to be employed as will conduce to the perfection of his being and of all human being; that his reward lies in this perfection, in a noble and approvable character, which is not to be completed in this life, but is to attain its full realization in a future life. And hence is revealed to him the rational necessity of that life, without which the present struggle and growth would lack meaning.
If there is moral order in the universe, then man will be successful as he conforms to that order. If he goes against the great silent forces moving in the direction of Right, his life can but result in failure. Men who show a disregard for moral law are held to possess a dangerous malady slowly decaying the tissues of the soul. They are treated with suspicion in business relations and condemned in the minds of others and by their own judgment. Sound to the core must a man be who would make the most of life and receive the approval which the world bestows upon character.
A true man is bold; he feels that for him all the forces of right will contend. He has courage for his work, because he knows he is on the right path and is moving toward ever higher attainments and a supreme result.
The subject is old as man, the thoughts are trite; why not utter your maxim and proceed, or rather say nothing? While there are lives empty of purpose and hearts that bleed in contrition and tragedies that fill prisons and madhouses, there is much to say and more to do. Have we no further use for wisdom? Have we ceased to erect perennial monuments to the memory of saints and reformers? If the subject is old, the generations of men are new, and the race has not attained its perfection. The best men and the best thoughts reveal us to ourselves, are the source of our aspiration; and we of the present, not half-way toward the goal, have need of our Socrates, Augustine, Luther, and supremely of the divine Christ. We still have need of our Pilgrim’s Progress.
The aim of Plato’s philosophy was the Supreme Good, or God. The Cardinal Virtues were framed in the light of religious faith. Reverence is the sentiment whose object is God. Says the Sage of Chelsea: “All that we do springs out of Mystery, Spirit, invisible Force.” Some, well-versed in Spencer’s works, have failed to note this passage: “One truth must grow ever clearer—the truth that there is an Inscrutable Existence everywhere manifested, to which the man of science can neither find nor conceive either beginning or end. Amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the more they are thought about there will remain the one absolute certainty, that he is ever in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed.” Add to this the Faith which is the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” and you have the origin of all religions, of all temples of worship. It is the conception of the philosopher and the insight of the poet; it is held most strongly by the most profound. Few great men, though they may reject formal creeds, are without the feeling of Reverence. Carlyle’s “Everlasting Yea” is the vision of a true seer, and it reveals, in the spontaneous language of earnest thought, the breadth and depth of a possible Christian experience. He speaks through the hero of the “Sartor Resartus.” By disappointment and dim faith the universe had become to him a vast merciless machine; he was filled with an indefinable fear. But over his soul came the spirit of Indignation and Defiance, and he shook off fear of all that is evil, and all that may happen of evil. In his words: “The Everlasting No had said: ‘Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast; and the Universe is mine (the Devil’s)’; to which my whole Me now made answer: ‘I am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!’” This is but the first step, and only by the “Annihilation of Self” does he awake to a “new Heaven and a new Earth.” Now nature is seen to be the “Living Garment of God.” The Universe is no longer “dead and demoniacal,” but “godlike and his Father’s.” He looks upon his fellow man with an “infinite Love, an infinite Pity,” and enters the porch of the “Sanctuary of Sorrow.” Happiness is no longer the aim; happiness cannot be satisfied. “There is in man a Higher than Love of Happiness; he can do without Happiness, and instead thereof find Blessedness!” “Love not pleasure; love God. This is the Everlasting Yea.” The Temple of Sorrow (the Christian Temple) is partly in ruins, but in a crypt the sacred lamp still burns for him, and for all. Applied Christianity is action. He says: “Do the Duty which lies nearest thee: thy second Duty will already have become clearer.” Thy opportunity is in whatever thy condition now and here offers thee. “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy whole might.” Christianity “flows through all our hearts and modulates and divinely leads them.” Of immortality he says: “Know of a truth that only the Time-shadows have perished, or are perishable; that the real Being of whatever was, and whatever is, and whatever will be, is even now and forever.... Believe it thou must; understand it thou canst not.”