Means and Ends of Education

by John Lancaster Spalding

As the merchant keeps journal and ledger, so should he whose wealth is truth, take account in writing of the thoughts he gains from observation, reflection, reading, and intercourse with men. We become perfectly conscious of our impressions only in giving expression to them; hence ability to express what we feel and know is one of the chief and most important aims and ends of education.

What thou mayst not learn without employing spies, or listening to the stories of the malignant or the gossip of the vulgar, be content not to know.

Our miseries spring from idleness and sin; and idleness is sin and the mother of sin. "To confide in one's self and become something of worth," says Michelangelo, "is the best and safest course." Life-weariness, when it is not the result of long suffering, comes of lack of love, for to love any human being in a true and noble way makes life good. Whatever mistakes thou mayst have made in the choice of a profession and in other things, it is still possible for thee to will and do good, to know truth, and to love beauty, and this is the best life can give. Think of living, and thou shalt find no time to repine.

The character of the believer determines the character of his faith, whatever the formulas by which it is expressed. What we are is the chief constituent of the world in which we now live, and this must be true also of the world in which we believe and for which we hope. For the sensualist a spiritual heaven has neither significance nor attractiveness. The highest truth the noblest see has no meaning for the multitude, or but a distorted meaning. What is divinest in the teaching of Christ, only one in thousands, now after the lapse of centuries, rightly understands and appreciates. It is not so much the things we believe, know, and do, as the things on which we lay the chief stress of hope and desire, that shape our course and decide our destiny.

They alone receive the higher gifts, who, to obtain them, renounce the lower pleasures and rewards of life. Those races are noblest, those individuals are noblest, who care most for the past and the future, whose thoughts and hopes are least confined to the world of sense which from moment to moment ceaselessly urges its claims to attention. Desire fanned by imagination, when it turns to sensual things, makes men brutish; but when its object is intellectual and moral, it lifts them to worlds of pure and enduring delight.

When we would form an estimate of a man, we consider not what he knows, believes, and does, but what kind of being his knowledge, faith, and works have made of him. He who makes us learn more than he teaches has genius. Whoever has freed himself from envy and bitterness may begin to try to see things as they are.

Each one is the outcome of millions of causes, which, so far as he can see, are accidental. How ridiculous then to complain that if this or that only had not happened, all would be well. It is ignorance or prejudice to make a man's conduct an argument against the worth of his writings. Byron was a bad man, but a great poet; Bacon was venal, but a marvellous thinker.

Books, to be interesting to the many, must abound in narrative, must run on like chattering girls, and make little demand upon attention. The appeal to thought is like a beggar's appeal for alms,—heeded by one only in hundreds who pass; for, to the multitude, mental effort is as disagreeable as parting with their money.

A newspaper is old the day after its publication, and there are many books which issue from the press withered and senile, but the best, like the gods, are forever young and delightful.

"Whatever bit of a wise man's work," says Ruskin, "is honestly and benevolently done, that bit is his book or his piece of art. It is mixed always with evil fragments,—ill-done, redundant, affected work; but if you read rightly, you will easily discover the true bits, and those are the book." Again: "No book is worth anything which is not worth much; nor is it serviceable until it has been read and re-read, and loved, and loved again; and marked so that you may refer to the passages you want in it."