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Ruskin says that, ID England and Europe, " a man is called edu- 

 cated if he can write Latin verses and construe a Greek chorus." 

 We may here be permitted to ask for something which to many may 

 appear of more practical application and utility, and those who do 

 not agree with us should remember that liberal education is ever 

 tolerant of opposing views, and that there is no power in education 

 of any kind to make an imbecile clever, to give wit to the dull, or 

 genius to the brainless ; and it is by no means certain that any kind 

 will make a lazy fellow work ; but, a sound education ought to give 

 its recipients the control of all the forces with which they have been 

 blessed by their Creator, and even then eminence is not often won 

 without lifelong earnest work. 



Lovingly and religiously devoted to the highest ideals of beauty, 

 the Greeks selected the most perfect of human forms as models upon 

 which to base the creation of their divinities in marble representing 

 Zeus and Minerva, Apollo and Athena ; and, through all the rivalry 

 of succeeding ages, no prodigy of genius, no power of art anywhere 

 arises to challenge their royal supremacy. In the construction of 

 temples, theatres and monuments, the Greeks by their consummate 

 devotion to grand public structures appear to have established classic 

 standards of architecture, recognized and revered throughout the civ- 

 ilized world excepting only those recently infected places where the 

 Queen Anne craze prevails. 



But in comparison with the present state of the useful arts and sci- 

 ences, the great sources of human power, progress, and happiness, 

 it would seem that the ancient Greeks profited little by the early gift 

 of fire from Prometheus. 



Certainly it would be too much to look for an advanced state of the 

 sciences among those who devoted science chiefly to the study of pol- 

 itics, or to look for much superiority in the mechanic arts among those 

 apparently destitute of machinery. The treatment of such . subjects 

 as mechanics, physics and astronomy, even by Aristotle, was nothing 

 less than a complete failure. They had no idea of the kinship of 

 the Earth to the planetary system ; and the Homeric scientific knowl- 

 edge of astronomy was as scanty as that of the wildest American 

 Indians. The hatred of the Athenian democracy by Plato much dis- 

 turbed his philosophy, and made him the enemy of the great princi- 

 ples of human freedom which now we regard as essential to the health 

 of all modern political development. When the Apostle Paul encoun- 

 tered "certain philosophers of the Epicureans and of the Stoics" at 



