18 MICHIGAN STATE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 



the religion which tends to make men staunch, robust in practical 

 affairs, good at need, good in all winds and weather, is the 

 kind which comes through the experiences of shepherds and 

 tent-makers and fishermen. 



3. But the youths that have had this training in the pastoral 

 and home-bred virtues, can they keep it in the larger life which 

 opens before them ? No doubt the life of freedom and oppor- 

 tunity endangers these virtues. They were never more sympa- 

 thetically portrayed than in the "Cotter's Saturday Night," 

 and yet Burns went out from such a home to encounter the 

 temptations of luxurious society and to fall before them. The 

 son of the man whom God called from the sheepcote to leader- 

 ship lost the fundamental virtues of which we have spoken, 

 lost his strenuous manhood and became a voluptuary, lost 

 domestic virtue, lost national pride and loyalty in a lax cosmo- 

 politanism, lost the fear of God, and in consequence descended 

 from the high place he ought to have kept to be a roui, a cynic, 

 a trifler, a virtuoso in " ivory and apes and peacocks." Men 

 doubtless moralized on it as men do now, and said, " See what 

 has befallen the son of the man whom God called from the sheep- 

 cote to be leader of Israel, and know that wealth and prosperity 

 and power are not good for man ; they ensnare and corrupt him, 

 it were better for him to have followed the sheep." 



But is this so ? Is such moralizing just ? Were it not strange 

 that God has made this life full of things of beauty and made us 

 eager to get them — has made us capable of manifold lovely arts 

 and high adornments and enrichments of life, and made these 

 things the rewards of virtue, of earnest striving and patient well- 

 doing, and then has put his curse on them and made them agen- 

 cies for our corruption and undoing ? Shall we bid the shepherd 

 lad remain in his sheepcote, the blacksmith stick to his forge, the 

 poet live on in his cottage, lest in the great world they come to grief ? 



No — but we will say, "Be the king if you can, but be the 

 shepherd king. Be the United States senator if you can, but keep 



