I.KTTEns TO A FRIEND AT COLT. EOF.. 153 



be fitted to practice any profession. You design to practice law, and 

 are to be engaged in the administration of justice ; but how can you se- 

 cure justice to your client, unless you know what justice is ? You have 

 your array of facts, and the opposing counsel has his conflicting array of 

 facts, and how are you to clear away the dense clouds of ignorance and 

 of error from the minds of your empanneled jury unless you can show 

 the true relations of all these seemingly inconsistent facts with the eter- 

 nal principles of truth and justice ? So with the theologian ; unless he 

 can penetrate beyond the mere letter into the spirit of religion, and can 

 rest his faith upon its unchangeable realities, he must ever remain a no- 

 vice liable to be "cast to and fro and carried about with every wind of 

 doctrine," floating as a weed upon the boundless sea of speculation, 

 unable with his short line to reach the ground in which the anchor of 

 his hope may repose. 



Now the mind must be disciplined for study. Do you not see it 

 every day whenever you attend recitation ? What is the reason that 

 some members of your class habitually acquit themselves so wretchedly? 

 Why is it that they fail to answer some of the plainest questions that 

 are proposed to them in any of their studies ? Some, you will say, have 

 not studied. But why have they not studied .? Because they cannot fix 

 their minds upon the subject or the book that is before them. Nay, 

 some will tell you that although they have read a proposition in Geom- 

 etry, or a demonstration over and over again, they do not understand it. 

 Yet you have known a child of ten years of age, to whom the same 

 thing was as clear as the noon-day sun. What is the cause of this dif- 

 ference ? Not any organic dillerence in the minds of those who appear 

 so vastly difierent in their mental ability. "It is notorious," says Dr. 

 Arnold, in one of his lectures,* "that minds of equal power are most 

 unequal in their practical efllciency, and that many persons with consid- 

 erable talents and favorable opportunities are unable to avail themselves 

 of either to any good purpose, because the cultivation of their mind 

 has been wholly neglected." And what is this cultivation that is pos- 

 sessed of this wonderfully invigorating ]iower ? Why, manifestly, that 

 ability of the mind to grapple with and to understand the subject pre- 

 sented to it by which it makes the thought, however conveyed, its own. 

 Mere memory is not sufiicient for this ; for, as is often seen, memory 

 may take only the words without reaching the idea. Study is more 

 than memorizing. It is more than acquiring the ideas of another. It is 

 the incorporation of those ideas with our own, so that we can not only 

 reproduce them when we have occasion for them, but can trace them 

 * Miscellaneous Works, p. 297, Am. Ed., 1845. 

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