168 SELECTED ESSAYS FROM LAY SERMONS 



understanding of one another by the men of science on the 

 one hand, and the men of literature, and history, and art, 

 on the other. It is not a question whether one order of 

 study or another should predominate. It is a question of 

 what topics of education you shall select which will com- 

 bine all the needful elements in such due proportion as to 

 give the greatest amount of food, support, and encourage- 

 ment to those faculties which enable us to appreciate truth, 

 and to profit by those sources of innocent happiness which 

 are open to us, and, at the same time, to avoid that which 

 is bad, and coarse, and ugly, and keep clear of the multi- 

 tude of pitfalls and dangers which beset those who break 

 through the natural or moral law^s. 



I address myself, in this spirit, to the consideration of 

 the question of the value of purely literary education. Is 

 it good and sufi&cient, or is it insufficient and bad? Well, 

 here I venture to say that there are literary educations and 

 literary educations. If I am to understand by that term 

 the education that was current in the great majority of 

 middle-class schools, and upper schools too, in this coun- 

 try when I "was a boy, and which consisted absolutely and 

 almost entirely in keeping boys for eight or ten years at 

 learning the rules of Latin and Greek grammar, constru- 

 ing certain Latin and Greek authors, and possibly making 

 verses which, " had they been English verses, would have 

 been condemned as abominable doggerel, — if that is w^hat 

 you mean- by liberal education, then I say it is scandalously 

 insufficient and almost worthless. My reason for saying 

 so is not from the point of view of science at all, but from 

 the point of view <Df literature. I say the thing professes 

 to be literary education that is not a literary education at 

 all. It was not literature at all that was taught, but science 

 in a very bad form. It is quite obvious that grammar is 



