The late Baron Alderson, writing to his son, says: “I have sent you to Eton that you may be taught your duties as an English young gentleman. The first duty of such a person is to be a good and religious Christian; the next is to be a good scholar; and the third is to be accomplished in all manly exercises and games, such as rowing, swimming, jumping, cricket, and the like. Most boys, I fear, begin at the wrong end, and take the last first; and, what is still worse, never arrive at either of the other two at all. I hope, however, better things of you; and to hear first that you are a good, truthful, honest boy, and then that you are one of the hardest workers in your class; and after that, I confess I shall be by no means sorry to hear that you can show the idle boys that an industrious one can be a good cricketer, and jump as wide a ditch, or clear as high a hedge, as any of them.”
[80]. Thring’s Sermons delivered at Uppingham School.
ADVICE TO THE STUDENT.
Dr. Arnold has given this sound counsel: “Preserve proportion in your reading, keep your view of men and things extensive, and, depend upon it, a mixed knowledge is not a superficial one; as far as it goes, the views that it gives are true; but he who reads deeply in one class of writers only, gets views which are almost sure to be perverted, and which are not only narrow but false.”
It is a great mistake to suppose that full employment shuts out leisure. The secret of leisure is to have eight hours a day entirely devoted to business, and you will then find you have time for other pursuits; this for some time to come will seem to you a paradox; but you will one day be convinced of the truth, that the man who is the most engaged has always the most leisure.
KNOWLEDGE AND WISDOM.
That Knowledge is not True Wisdom cannot be too strongly urged upon youth. “There is a heaping up of knowledge just as amenable to this censure as the ignorance of the unlearned, not indeed so censured by man, but equally worthy of it in a true judgment. The intellectual fool, full of knowledge but without wisdom, whose way is right in his own eyes, is no less a fool, nay, more so, than the ignorant fool, and as far from true wisdom. For knowledge is a very different thing from wisdom; knowledge is but the collecting together of a mass of material at best, whilst wisdom is the right perception and right use leading to further riches. The mere heaper-up of knowledge digs, as it were, ore out of the earth, working underground in darkness; whereas the wise man fashions all his knowledge into use and beauty, praising and blessing God with it, and receiving from Him a fuller measure in consequence. Wisdom is knowledge applied to life and to the praise of God,—a thing of the heart, the heart controlling and using all the head gathers; knowledge by itself is a mere barren store of the head, quite separable from goodness and love,—a thing capable of being possessed by devils. For this we must mark, the humblest good heart which loves God alone can attain to the knowledge of God. No mere intellectual power and pride can do that. And hence we may see why the man whose way is right in his own eyes is a fool.”[[81]]
Montaigne thus points out an educational error, common in our time as well as in that of this charming writer, whom a gentleman is ashamed not to have read: