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of his own class, that he may rival in dress and social prestige the son of the millionaire. He is encouraged to disregard the relationship between the rigid economies of home and his own selfish extravagance. In the acquirement of expensive tastes and habits he lays the foundation of a bitter discontent with his limitations which will darken his whole life. He loses the practical purposefulness and manly economy which he so much needs in mastering his own life problem. Even if he comes from college with fair student record and unblemished morals, he has unfitted himself for real achievement in his own possible sphere. No success within his grasp will seem adequate to win his own ideals of comfortable living. If the middle-class boy must take his education side by side with the millionaire, let him learn a Spartan self-control when tempted by the luxuries near him. Let him assert for himself peership in intellect and character, and not in spendthriftiness. But this too often lies beyond the boy's force of character. His only safe course may lie in choosing an institution where the temptations to luxury are less insistent; for error at this point of choice has given rise to many of our most tragic failures among young collegians.

Evidently the obligation rests upon Methodism to provide for the great masses of our Methodist membership. Not attempting to rival Yale, or Harvard, or Princeton in social equipment or prestige, our host of small provincial institutions is doing an essential work for American youth; they are making for true American manhood. We must not lose faith in the value of democratic substance as compared with aristocratic display in college life. We must also maintain at highest possible effectiveness the scholarship and scholarly equipment of our college teaching. If Methodism will be true to such an educational program it cannot fail to increase the potent influence it has for many years exercised over American education.

Chat Hodell

ART. XI. THE MANY AND THE ONE 1

THE older I grow the more and more I become impressed with the thought of how completely we live on the surface of things. We go about our business from day to day, we eat, and drink, and sleep, relieving the monotony of the dull routine by means of the various forms of amusement offered by society or by those whose business it is to purvey to the play instinct of the human mind. Our eyes are kept fixed to the ground, our hearts are cold, and we act as if the whole world was bound in by our own narrow horizons. Yet think what marvelous things are happening all about us. At this very minute, far across the sea, the moon is shining on the snow-capped mountains of Switzerland and on the lonely campagna of Rome. Around the poles to north and south the desolate plains of ice and snow stretch endlessly away; the oceans are busy with their "priest-like task of cold ablution round earth's human shores;" of the great cities scattered over the world, some are hushed in slumber and some are busy with the multiplied industries of modern civilization, and everywhere is being played the eternal tragedy and comedy of human life. And all the while this earth of ours, with its freight of human souls, is sweeping through space with unimaginable velocity, in the midst of star-clusters, solar systems, and nebulous masses containing the germs of future worlds. All this sounds like a fancy sketch, a rhetorical period, a poetic outburst, and yet it is absolutely true-although, peradventure, not one of all the eighty million souls in the United States may have given it a single thought this day. It is only in times of deep experience that the veil of the commonplace is lifted and we catch a glimpse of the eternal and awe-inspiring verities that lie beneath the surface of our everyday life. When the terrible eruption of Mount Pelée overtook Martinique, in which 25,000 souls were annihilated in the twinkling of an eye, we felt for the moment the

'Address delivered before the Student Body of Wesleyan University, Sunday afternoon, March 25, 1906.

awfulness of the forces of nature amid which we tread with such airy nonchalance. When President McKinley uttered his dying words the whole country was swept by a wave of spiritual uplift before which the ordinary events of life faded into insignificance. When a fearful disaster like the burning of the General Slocum or the Iroquois Theatre in Chicago occurs, and we learn how even young boys risk their lives to save others, we see below the hard exterior of unlovely man the elemental feelings of love and pity which lie at the heart of humanity. It is the high task given to poets, prophets, and seers, but above all to religion, to teach men to look beneath the surface and see the world of beauty, truth and goodness which there exists. Moncure Conway says of Thoreau, that every plant, flower, fish or lizard was transformed by the wand of his knowledge into a mystic beauty. Wordsworth in those lines declared by Tennyson to be the noblest in the English language has interpreted for all time that spiritual presence in nature which "disturbs us with the joy of elevated thoughts," and "whose dwelling is the light of setting suns;" while Shelley, in his high ethereal flights, has opened a wide breach in the flammantia moenia mundithe flaming ramparts of the world-and has shown us the vision of life against the background of eternity.

"The One remains, the many change and pass;

Heaven's light forever shines, earth's shadows fly:
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,

Stains the white radiance of eternity."

Professor William James, in his Psychology, says that to the newborn child the world is a big, buzzing confusion. And so it remains to most of us all through life. The highest ideal of education is not to enable us to make fortunes, or to win power and fame-all of which is good in its place-but to get order out of this confusion, to catch the music behind the apparent discord. It is to train the intellect, the imagination, and the spiritual sense, to satisfy the innate yearning after truth, and so to give peace unto our souls. The child is born; the years pass away. Little by little the "big, buzzing confusion" is brought into

some kind of order, enough for our daily tasks and needs. We go to school, and then to college, and take up the study of many things that apparently have little to do with the mere business of life. We read history and see the progress of mankind from a state of savagery to the present. We turn over the annals of Greece and Rome, of the Middle Ages, and the Modern world, and at first sight it seems a hideous picture—an orgy of bloodshed, and rapine, tyranny and lust.

We study science and catch a glimpse of the process of evolution, we see something of the wonders of stellar space and the equal wonders of the microscopic and inframolecular world. But the whence, the why and the whither of it all, who knows?

We turn to philosophy and see men vainly striving to find some key to the riddle of the universe. We see the conflicting schools of Plato and Aristotle, of Nominalist and Realist, the Idealism of Schelling and the Pessimism of Schopenhauer, and again we wearily turn away with our minds confused. Our knowledge increases-yes-but the big, buzzing confusion still remains. What is truth? What is the difference between right and wrong? All around us we see pain and suffering, sin and shame; the humble and virtuous crushed, and the wicked prosper.

Yet in spite of it all we feel there must be some explanation. There is an ineradicable instinct within us to synthesize the Universe; to overcome the antinomies which rise like the Pillars of Hercules on the outermost limits of Time and Space, saying to the adventurous soul of man as he navigates strange seas of thought, "Thus far shalt thou go and no farther!" Whatever we may think of the reality of the spiritual life, the fact of the religious consciousness is indubitable. Born with the first man who turned his wondering gaze about him, in those far-off days when the world was young, it is destined to endure until the last inhabitant of the globe shall see with his dying eyes this earth of ours fall into the icy grip of the cosmic cold. What St. Augustine says in his Confessions, "Thou, Lord, hast created us to be thy own, and our heart cannot be at rest till it find peace in Thee," has been repeated times without number

by poet and prophet, down to the day when Wordsworth wrote these lines:

Whether we be young or old,

Our destiny, our being's heart and home,

Are with infinitude, and only there.

And so all earnest, seeking souls-your soul and my soul, if we will-endowed by God with intellectual powers, with imagination and sympathy, with love for the good, the beautiful and the true, may develop from year to year, may see more and more clearly through the mists of doubt, may rise out of the big, buzzing confusion into the light of eternal truth; until

The lovely members of the mighty whole,
Till then confused and shapeless to our soul,
Distinct and glorious grow upon our sight,
The fair enigmas brighten from the night.

Not the learning of the pedant, or the practical skill of the selfish seeker after gain, is the real object of education in its highest form. The only knowledge that counts when we stand face to face with the eternal silence of those infinite spaces which chilled the heart of men so different as Pascal and Herbert Spencer is the knowledge that builds up the soul, which makes us wise and serious, and which gives us the peace that comes from a conviction that amid all the apparent conflicts of life rules the kind and loving heart of an all-powerful God.

And so this afternoon, on this Sunday of Eastertide, as the skies are blue and a faint stir of spring is abroad in the land, telling us that nature is joining with our own hearts in preparing to celebrate the resurrection of our Lord, I bring you this message the true end and aim of all higher education. I hold up to you the ideal of a man seeking truth in all its forms: in science, philosophy and literature; striving to gain an adequate conception of God's thoughts as manifested in creation and making all things work together toward an insight into the meaning of the Divine will; growing day by day, not alone in knowledge and power, but in reverence and in charity; and, as we see the truth more and more clearly, feeling in the uttermost recesses

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