Not always, indeed, does the Greek use so strong an ethical emphasis. For him the dominant idea is the unfolding of reason, the clarifying of the process of thought and imagination. His ideal is a man who sees things as they are, and understands their nature, and feels beauty, and follows truth. It is the Hebrew who hammers home the nail of righteousness. The foundations of his school are the tablets on which the Divine Law is inscribed. The ideal of his education is the power to distinguish between good and evil, and the will to choose the good, and the strength to stand by it. Life, to his apprehension, fulfils its purpose in the development of a man who walks uprightly and keeps the Commandments. Æschylus and Ezekiel lived in the same century.
Reason and Righteousness: what more can the process of life do to justify itself than to unfold these two splendid flowers on the tree of our humanity? What third idea is there that the third great race, the Anglo-Saxon, may conceive, and cherish, and bring to blossom and fruition? There is only one: the idea of Service. Too much the sweet reasonableness of the Greek ideal tended to foster an intellectual isolation: too much the strenuous righteousness of the Hebrew ideal gave shelter to the microbe of Pharisaism. It was left for the Anglo-Saxon race, quickened by the new word and the new life of a Divine Teacher, to claim for the seed an equal glory with the flower and the fruit: to perceive that righteousness is not reasonable, and reason is not righteous, unless they are both communicable and serviceable; to say that the highest result of our human experience is to bring forth finer and better men and women able and willing to give of that which makes them better to the world in which they live. This is the ultimate word concerning the School of Life. I catch its inspiring note in the question of that very noble gentleman, Sir Philip Sidney, who said, "To what purpose should our thoughts be directed to various kinds of knowledge unless room be afforded for putting it into practice, so that public advantage be the result?"
This, then, is what the education of life is to bring out: Reason, Righteousness, and Service. But if life itself be the school, what becomes of our colleges and universities? They are, or they ought to be, simply preparatory institutions to fit us to go on with our education. Not what do they teach, but how do they prepare us to learn?—that is the important question. I measure a college not by the height of its towers, nor by the length of its examination papers, nor by the pride of its professors, but chiefly by the docility of its graduates. I do not ask, where did you leave off, but are you ready to go on? Graduation is not a stepping-out; it is either a stepping-up,—gradu ad gradum,—a promotion to a higher class, or a dropping to a lower one. The cause for which a student is dropped may be invincible ignorance, incurable frivolity, or obstructive and constrictive learning.
"One of the benefits of a college education," says Emerson, "is to show a boy its little avail." Hamilton and Jefferson and Madison and Adams and Webster were college men. But Franklin and Washington and Marshall and Clay and Lincoln were not. A college education is good for those who can digest it.
The academic atmosphere has its dangers, of which the greatest are a certain illusion of infallibility, a certain fever of intellectual jealousy, and a certain dry idolatry of schedules and programmes. But these infirmities hardly touch the mass of students, busy with their athletics, their societies, their youthful pleasures. The few who are affected more seriously are usually cured by contact with the larger world. Most of the chronic cases occur among those who really never leave the preparatory institution, but pass from the class to the instructors chair, and from that to the professorial cathedra, and so along the spiral, bounded ever by the same curve and steadily narrowed inward.
Specialists we must have, and to-day we are told that a successful specialist must give his whole life to the study of the viscosity of electricity, or the value of the participial infinitive, or some such pin-point of concentration. For this a secluded and cloistered life may be necessary. But let us have room also in our colleges for teachers who have been out
