I have evoked this golden legend (for it should be included among the golden legends of the race), a legend which is not as familiar as the stories that have come down from the mythological days of Greece and Rome, and I have copied it to illuminate, as with a golden letter, my page, in the story of the inauguration of this new Enochian president.
We have an intimation in this legend of the rich curriculum that should be presented for the training of those who are to incarnate the best that the race has aspired to and striven for in one generation (and there is nothing more important than their broad, thorough training) and to carry on those supreme gifts to the next generation. A recent report of the Carnegie Foundation says, in its summary of a survey of the professional preparation of teachers, that if “training of any sort can provide men and women who are equipped and willing to serve youth as youth should be served, their service is pre-eminent”—and it is “altogether a more difficult service than any other to render well.”
I remember to this day my feelings as a college student at Knox, when the president of the college, Doctor Newton Bateman, whom Abraham Lincoln called his “little friend, the big schoolmaster” of Illinois, spoke in chapel of the qualities and knowledges which a teacher should possess. They were so far beyond what I, an awkward farm boy, could hope to attain as to give me a sense of guilt that I had ever attempted to teach even a district school, and to confirm me in my purpose to enter another field of work. But as I look back now, I realize that the “little friend” of Lincoln out here on the prairies was but saying what educational surveys and foundation studies are setting forth in ponderous volumes. And long, long back of my prairie schoolmaster, another was saying in the so-called Eternal City words that should be written in flaming letters on the walls of every legislative hall and every banquet-room. Indeed, I am not sure that we need others than these on our Enochian pillars, if only they were heeded by the nation:
For not alone they are useful to the State who defend the accused, bring forth candidates for office and cast their vote for peace or war, but they who encourage the youth [the teacher was ranked with the senator] who in so great a scarcity of good teachers instruct the minds of men in virtue [there was a great scarcity of good teachers then as now, but who knows what the eternal influence of some unknown teachers of to-day may be, for the greatest of world teachers was then going, as the record has it, “among the villages of Galilee, teaching”] and hold them back from running after wealth and luxury [for so it was in the first century, as in this] and teach what is meant by honesty, patience, bravery, justice, contempt of death and how much freely given good there is in a good conscience.
How difficult it is to prescribe the training for this high office of incarnation and instruction is best intimated in the answer which the president of a Missouri normal school gave when asked the question as to how teachers can be best taught: “This is a question which only angels can answer.” But we do, indeed, need educational archangels (as the legend of Enoch intimated) as the teachers of our teachers. And there are many of us who have reason to thank the Lord that here, in this valley, even, in some of its little prairie colleges, there were and are such archangels who revealed things about heaven as well as earth, and angels as well as men. One of them, who was my teacher, is to be the next speaker.
But my thought is rather of the transmission to the new generation, as a whole, of what—to paraphrase George Edward Woodberry—has been built out of the mystery of thought and passion of the past, as generation after generation has knelt, fought, faded, and given the best “that anywhere comes to be” to the souls of Enochian urge to carry on, “letting all else fall into oblivion. ”
As the most primitive and picturesque visualization of the curriculum of this bequest of the race mind of one generation to the next, the pillars of Enoch stood on the verge of history against the Eastern sky of our civilization’s dawn. They have crumbled, or they lie buried in sands that have hidden their wisdoms. The excavator’s spade could uncover no more interesting record than that which would tell us what this great teacher thought should be saved from flood and fire out of the experience of the race.
I have tried to imagine what was written there. It must have been a very meagre list to have all been written in the large letters or symbols of primitive speech on a single column. But the earth was then young to human eyes. (It has since grown so aged as to have its years counted by the thousands of millions.) And man was but come upon it, or so he then thought. When I was a college student, I supposed that he came in the year 4004 B.C., but now we are informed that he has been here hundreds of thousands of years. Even so, in those days he was still living in what I have called the perinikian age; that is, in the age when he had conquered only the near, an age when the angels even were very near the earth and walked with man. The ideal being in that period was a creature with wings. I once turned to my Greek lexicon to discover how many far words there were in that perinikian period, whose world the Greeks had somewhat extended, and I found sixty-seven columns of “peri” (near) words and only about five, as I recall, of the “tele” (far) words, for the earth was only that which was within reach of the naked eye, the unaided voice. It was without the far-travelling printed word.
Out upon the shores of Phœnicia, in the days of the war, I imagined Cadmus, the legendary father of letters, who is reputed to have borne the alphabet to the Western world out of the Orient, as not entirely certain that he had blessed humanity with this last means of far conquest, in this our day of higher mobility and greater transmissibility of ideas. I seemed to hear him say:
“When I witness all the ravage