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REV. H. COSTLEY WHITE, M.A., ON 



" If a man takes the lid off his mind and looks in he can inspect 

 its furniture. The equipment is roughly of three kinds, designed 

 for the understanding respectively of God, of man, and of the 

 physical universe. The first is provided by training in rehgion, 

 the second by training in the humanities, and the third by 

 training in mathematics and science. All three are equally 

 essential and interdependent. Up to the middle of the Victorian 

 Age the third kind of training was not recognised as generally 

 necessary to educational salvation ; the world of science was 

 as yet being only explored by a few pioneers. To-day popular 

 imagination endows scientific education with universal and almost 

 exclusive sacramental grace. The humanities are losing caste, 

 and particularly that part of them which is the foundation of the 

 whole structure — the study of the classics. If it be allowed, 

 from what has been said, that the humanities form an indis- 

 pensable, though not the sole medium of education, it is worth 

 while to consider, even with the baldest brevity, the integral 

 part that must still be played in modern education by the study 

 of Latin and Greek. 



These two are called dead languages ; nevertheless they are 

 a speaking parable of the survival of the spirit. For though 

 their body be dead, in the sense that they are no longer spoken 

 tongues, it is not too much to say that they are the creative 

 and sustaining force of the best of contemporary Western thought, 

 and the parents, still fruitful, of modern tongues. Living 

 languages — Arabic, Chinese, Russian, German — stand in less 

 living relation than they to English thought and speech. Philoso- 

 phy, history, law, poetry, art, spring from the culture of Greece 

 and Rome and are learned best when the learning is imbibed 

 from the original source. What the ancients thought, said and 

 did has a direct bearing on present-day problems, social, political 

 and theological, and often suggests the way of enlightenment. 

 The classics are therefore of immediate practical value to modern 

 life. That this view is by no means merely the prejudice of 

 schoolmasters or University tutors may readily be seen by those 

 who will do themselves and the nation the service of reading 

 the pamphlet on this subject issued by the Government. 

 Reconstruction Problems, No. 21, published by His Majesty's 

 Stationery Office. Price 2d. 



"It is not denied that something of the classical mind can be 

 possessed through translations. But a man is only too conscious 

 that he is not really at his best in second-hand clothes. More- 



