HIS RELATIONS WITH STUDENTS 375 



latent significance that lay beneath the smooth-faced vacan- 

 cies of the youths that passed before him, and to such of these 

 as would submit to his guidance he was a born director of 

 souls. How many did submit is shown by the hundreds of 

 letters from students acknowledging the help he had given 

 them, the perverted ways abandoned at his stirring call to 

 lead the clean and wholesome life. His willingness to bother, 

 up to a certain point, with men of crooked ways, is all the 

 more remarkable since there was no one who had less call 

 for indulgence than he. Nevertheless, his long experience had 

 taught him to weigh a man's errors against his temptations, 

 and these he felt were to a certain extent involved in the pre- 

 vious conditions of the man's life. He therefore looked upon in- 

 dividuals tolerantly, with a discriminating eye as to their values 

 and their needs, and without being sermonic he sooner or later 

 imparted to them a sense of what was dross and what was gold 

 a lesson which he himself had so well learned. The fact is, 

 his influence for good was great because he lived on the plane 

 of right doing to which he directed others. 



Mr. Shaler 's relations with his students were the most vital and 

 interesting of the contacts that came to him. Young men of 

 all degrees and temperaments liked him, not because he spared 

 their faults, was truckling, or sought to be popular, but because 

 he met them on the broad level of humanity ; and if in his esti- 

 mate of them he sometimes gave them credit for what they 

 should be, rather than for what they were, in the long run his 

 judgment was as true as it was generous. The foundation of 

 the attractive power that drew men to him was his manliness 

 and outgoing sympathy ; he had a kind word to bridge the deeps 

 that lie between most human beings. Furthermore, when 

 he commended a student it was with whole-hearted liberality, 

 when he condemned him it was in a broad and catholic way. 

 Detesting anything like mechanical treatment of a human soul, 

 he refused to be hemmed in by rules or to raise authority to a 

 system of oppression. Each individual was to be treated with 



