DEVELOPMENT OF EDUCATIONAL IDEAS 41 



The school is for the sake of a higher, richer, better life, for the sake 

 of conduct, and conduct is inspired and nourished, not so much by 

 knowledge as by feeling, by faith, and love, by the habitual contem- 

 plation and performance, not of what is pleasant or profitable, but 

 of what is right and holy. Hence, if the school is to promote a higher 

 life it must appeal to the consciousness of God's living, loving pre- 

 sence within the soul. It must enable the pupil to look beyond the 

 brutal fact and present advantage to truth and final results, to 

 project his efforts and longings into the future in which alone he can 

 hope to make his ideal real. In all progressive movements man is 

 impelled to lay stress not on what is, but on what ought and is to be. 

 The future dominates the present, as the infinite the finite, the eternal 

 the temporal; and the future for which we hope and strive, whether 

 consciously or not, is not a condition of body, but a disposition of 

 soul - - the ideal being not abundance of possessions, but a heavenly 

 kingdom in which truth, justice, and love shall prevail; in which 

 men shall be godlike, free, wise, and blessed. It is not economic and 

 social, but spiritual and personal; not the complete exploitation and 

 distribution of material things, but illumination of mind and eleva- 

 tion of soul. The supreme interests are those of the spirit, for the 

 loss of which a universe of matter could not compensate. This is 

 a fundamental principle of life and, therefore, of education. Could 

 some mighty genius reduce all knowledge to a system and firmly 

 grasp the whole, for him, as for the common man, the question of 

 vital and infinite moment would still be matters of faith and hope, 

 not of knowledge. The highest human good, therefore, is not intel- 

 lectual but moral - - a disposition of soul in which a divine faith 

 and hope beget perfect love, manifesting itself in the fulfillment of 

 righteousness. 



It is the purpose of education to make able men, to develop 

 capacity to see true and do right, to educe faculty from endowment, 

 will from impulse, intelligence from instinct, but the ideal and end 

 must be sought not in the doctrines of materialism, commercialism, 

 or secularism, but in faith in God and in the absolute worth of life 

 when illumined and controlled by the truth and love which are his 

 being. In vain shall we seek to prepare a more and more favorable 

 environment and to give opportunity to increasing numbers, if man 

 himself be a creature of circumstance, an excrescence on a dead 

 universe, a disease, a phantom, with nothing at the core of things 

 to correspond with his highest thoughts and deepest yearning ; if his 

 end is as the end of a dream and all that made him is senseless and 

 void. If the religious view of his life is not true, nothing is worth 

 while, and whether he take for his guide utility or worldly wisdom or 

 appetite, it matters little. Religious consciousness lies at the heart 

 of all human consciousness, and to it we owe the deepest insights 



