58 SELECTED ESS A YS FROM LA Y SERMONS 



middle age, can afford to smile at such a suggestion. Eng- 

 land can show now, as she has been able to show in every 

 generation since civilisation spread over the West, individual 

 men who hold their own against the world, and keep alive 

 the old tradition of her intellectual eminence. 



But, in the majority of cases, these men are what they are 

 in virtue of their native intellectual force, and of a strength 

 of character which will not recognise impediments. They 

 are not trained in the courts of the Temple of Science, but 

 storm the walls of that edifice in all sorts of irregular ways, 

 and with much loss of time and power, in order to obtain 

 their legitimate positions. 



Our universities not only do not encourage such men; do 

 not offer them positions, in which it should be their highest 

 duty to do, thoroughly, that which they are most capable of 

 doing; but, as far as possible, university training shuts out of 

 the minds of those among them, who are subjected to it, the 

 prospect that there is anything in the world for which they 

 are specially fitted. Imagine the success of the attempt to 

 still the intellectual hunger of any of the men I have men- 

 tioned, by putting before him, as the object of existence, the 

 successful mimicry of the measure of a Greek song, or the 

 roll of Ciceronian prose! Imagine how much success would 

 be likely to attend the attempt to persuade such men that 

 the education which leads to perfection in such elegances 

 is alone to be called culture; while the facts of history, the 

 process of thought, the conditions of moral and social exist- 

 ence, and the laws of physical nature are left to be dealt with 

 as they may by outside barbarians! 



It is not thus that the German universities, from being 

 beneath notice a century ago, have become what they are 

 now — the most intensely cultivated and the most productive 

 intellectual corporations the world has ever seen. 



