them as of no practical importance. We emphatically deny that any theological theories respecting the relation of Jesus Christ to the Father are a condition of acceptance with Christ. We condemn such a misconception respecting the relations of intellectual theories to the religious life as irrational, unscriptural, and pernicious. It is irrational because it substitutes theories about life for life it self; it is unscriptural because it substitutes a mediæval and scholastic test of character for the simple test which Christ prescribed, "If ye keep my commandments ye shall abide in my love;" it is pernicious because it shuts the door of the kingdom of God against the humble, the uneducated, the little children, and because it turns the zeal of men away from doing the work of the Master in simple loyal service and incites them to doubtful disputations about words and phrases which have different meanings to the different disputants, and to many mean nothing at all. To be a Christian is not to have a theory about Christ's relation to the Father, ancient or modern, conservative or liberal; it is to love him because he loves us, to give ourselves to him because he has given himself to us, and to set our feet to run for him, and our hands to work for him, and our lips and tongue to speak for him, because our whole heart loves him. THE END IN EDUCATION Address by Arthur T. Hadley, LL.D.' I I.—An President of Yale University. N the whole ordering of our educational life there are two tendencies against which we have to fight. One of these is the tendency to measure the value of knowledge by its utility to the individual; the other, the tendency to pursue knowledge for its own sake, without reference to its value to any one at all. The first of these dangers is perhaps the more universal. It is seen in our primary schools, in the demands for the teaching of science, which is supposed to be practical. It is seen in secondary education, in a call for the knowledge of those parts of language and history which the pupil is expected to be able to use, and those parts only; in methods of study of society which lay stress on the mechanism of politics instead of attempting to evoke the underlying habits of broad judgment and public spirit. It is seen in our colleges and our professional schools, in the constant demand for the increase of purely technical training in comparison with general education. Not that I would undervalue these things. Science-teaching and practical mastery of language, knowledge of governmental methods and technical preparation for professional work, are all good in 1 Delivered at the semi centennial of the Hill School, Pottstown, Pa., May 25, 1951. their way. The demand for their increased recognition is but the natural reaction against the errors of a time when they were hardly recognized at all. But when these things are made the whole aim of education, and when a school system is valued by these tests alone, we are in danger of making knowledge at the expense of character, and of training practitioners at the expense of principle. On the other hand, some of the teachers in our universities, in their protest against these utilitarian ideas of education, not only insist that knowledge is an end in itself, but make it the only end of education, and the summum bonum of intellectual and spiritual life. They look with compassion on the teacher who is occupied with the training of his pupils, as one who is debarred from the higher pursuits of classifying scientific phenomena or analyzing grammatical forms. Their ideal has, indeed, much that is noble. As a protest against prevailing commercialism it has special value at the present day. when we are told, as we sometimes are, that such work is the only true goal of university life, and that scholarship is impossible if we are bent on the teaching of men instead of the teaching of ideas, we are justified in raising the strongest protest. This conception of scholarship But is like the conception of medicine which makes a hospital the place for experiments in pathology rather than a place for the cure of disease. It is an intellectual Pharisaism, which insists that man was made for the Sabbath, and deplores as a misfortune the necessity of living in a community which holds to the doctrine that the Sabbath was made for man. There is a scholarship higher than that which is represented by either of these tendencies; a scholarship whose results are not valued for their own sake, and not for the sake of the utility to the individual, but for the sake of their effect on the community; a scholarship whose devotees regard themselves, and rightly regard themselves, as holding a trust for the benefit of the nation. Without this collective ideal, which in its political aspect is the foundation of true democracy and in its religious aspect the foundation of true Christianity, our practical studies will degenerate into selfishness, our scientific studies into microscopic isolation. It is not a misfortune, but a glory, to the colleges of America that they have, amid all their errors and failures, subordinated the individual to the community; that they have been less distinguished for the making of rich men or for the making of scientific specialists than for the making of citizens of a free commonwealth. But our colleges cannot maintain this position single-handed. They are even less able to do so to-day than they were in times gone by. In spite of their growth in numbers, they now form a relatively smaller part of the educational world than they did two generations ago. At that time the work of the public schools was elementary, that of the private schools undeveloped. The college course was looked to as the thing which constituted education. The secondary school work was arranged to lead up to what the colleges did. The opening years of professional life were arranged to take the college graduate as they found him. But with the growth of high schools on one side and schools of theology and law and medicine on the other side, a different state of things has developed. Co-ordinate powers in the educational world have arisen, which demand that the colleges shall recognize that which they are doing, and adapt its work thereto. Thus crowded on both sides, the American college has become a place of intellectual experimentation, whereby a boy already well grounded in the rudiments shall find out the line to which he is best adapted before committing himself irrevocably to his profession. In this new state of things the colleges have not the overwhelming power for character-building which they possessed under the old system. The range of choice of study interferes with the closeness of the community life. The possibility of specialization allows some men to be misled by commercial standards, and others by too narrow scientific ones. These dangers are increased by the current direction of the demand in the world outside, which, in the increasing specialization of trade and industry, is calling more for that knowledge of detail which will fit a man to take his place in a machine, and less-in the early stages of professional or business life-for that power which is necessary to keep the social order running without stoppage or revolution. Here it is that the colleges find their strongest need for help from the schools, and here it is that they gain their strongest support from an institution like this. When every other department of life is being organized into combinations, we cannot escape the same tendency in the world of teaching. If we are to preserve our independence as educators, we must as educators stand together. We must organize an educational trust, if we are to preserve our position in the modern world. The beginnings of this movement are already seen. The relations of the schools to the colleges, and of different schools and colleges to one another, are closer than they were ten years ago. more completely the colleges are involved in the problem of regulating the intellectual experiments of the young men of the country, the more most of them rely upon the schools to train up, in the years immediately preceding, a body of men with that basis of intellectual and moral character which shall render such experiments profitable. The Now as never before there is a need for schools which shall give to their boys the habit of valuing what is permanent as distinguished from what is transient. It is not necessary that their course should be classical in the narrow sense, but classical it must be in the broad sense, in laying stress on those things which have impressed themselves upon the world's experience as distinguished from those which are merely ephemeral. It is not necessary that their training should be predominantly religious in the sense of laying undue tension on any theological doctrine or any series of outward obser vations; but religious it must be in the sense that it teaches them from one day's end to the other to regard life as a trust held for the benefit of the community, and exercised with that regard for one's fellowmen which is the mark alike of the gentleman and the Christian. Thus shall we build up a race of men whose money and whose knowledge shall be made subservient to the good of the people. II.—A Baccalaureate Sermon by T HE world is God's workshop, and men and women are the products of his industry. The chips are all about us, and the products are far from finished-some perhaps never will be; we cannot tell. But we are in the world to be made: this is the end of life-the development of true men and true women, worthy to be called children of God. The process begins at the cradle; so far as this life is concerned, it ends when we drop the body into the grave, at what we call our day of death, but should call our day of resurrection, and rise up and go out from the school of earthly life to some other life, for some other preparation or for some possible achievements, we cannot tell what. In this process we have to develop what we call our intellectual powers. We must learn to see, to hear, to touch; we must understand something of this outer world in which we live. We must know how to interrogate our own consciousness and understand something of the inward world, the world of thought and feeling. And we must learn how, by our reason, to draw conclusions from the things which we have learned from observation and from self-consciousness. This triple process, studying the outer world, studying the inner world, and deducing conclusions from what we have observed in both worlds, gives us what we call knowledge. And this which we call knowledge is acquaintance with God. It is acquaintance with the works which he has made and with the life which he has inspired. Our creeds are not too long; they are too short. They do not * Preached at Wellesley College Sunday, June 23, 1901, on the text. "Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be.' -1 John iii., 2. Lyman Abbott' contain too much; they contain too little. They are not too complicated; they are too simple. We cannot depend on the theologian alone to tell us about God. We must go to the artist to tell us what is beauty, and to the musician to tell us what is harmony, and to the poet to tell us what is imagination, and to the father and the mother and the friend to tell us what is love; and all these are revelations of God. The difficulty with the creed is that it contains too little. Too few men have been working at it. It is made up of crystals; but all our beliefs should be seeds that are ever growing larger and bursting the shell within which they are placed. For we shall not begin to understand what knowledge is until we understand something of what God is, and we shall not begin to understand what God is so long as we confine our notions of divinity to those which are given to us by philosophers. But we are not only thinking creatures; we are emotive. We have appetites and passions, desires and aspirations. Appetite, passion, acquisitiveness, approbativeness, self-esteem, ambition, as well as faith and hope and love- these are all impelling us in one direction or another. To be educated is not merely to know how to see the outer world, is not merely to interrogate the inner world, is not merely to deduce right conclusions from what we have observed: it is to know how to regulate this ill-regulated, passionate life within us; it is to understand how to be full of passion and yet keep it controlled, as the engineer keeps the fire controlled that makes the steam. A passionless creature is a poor, useless, ineffective creature. It is to know how to have the self-esteem that shall protect us, and yet that shall not make us hard and careless of others; how to have the love of approbation that shall make us care for the opinions of others and yet not make us a reed that is shaken with the wind; it is to know how to have the faith that shall see the invisible, and yet not to look so absorbedly at it as to overlook the world in which we live, a faith that shall never degenerate into fanaticism or superstition; it is to know how to have the hope that shall not so look into the life beyond as to allow us to scorn the life that is; and to have a love that shall never be mere sentimentalism. And this education which gives us knowledge and which trains our moral powers gives us, if it be a true education, strong, resolute will. I have heard sometimes of fathers resolved to break the will of their children-they might better break their backs. The will is the very citadel of life. I have heard of men who think that strong wills are needed for men, but weak and pliable ones for women. No! The strong will is the essence of a strong character. The will is often compared to the helm of a ship. If one could only set the helm when he starts out from New York, and steer a straight course to Liverpool, navigation would be an easy matter. But that we cannot do. The helmsman must stand with his hand on the helm and must turn it to meet the deviation of the compass, the shifting currents, the baffling winds. It is not possible to steer an undeviating course, but only a steady one, and one must be always shifting his helm in order to keep a steady course. An obstinate man is one who ties the helm and goes to sleep. The strong-willed man is he who holds the helm and knows when to change it, in order to meet the changing currents of life. This is education; to get knowledge, to get regulated passions and appetites and desires, and to get the strong will that gives us power over ourselves and masterful control in life. And all life is educative, for every stage in life is only preparation for another stage, and every problem in life is achieved only to have a more difficult problem given to us. The question came to the American colonies, Will you be free? Then you must fight for freedom. For seven years we fight and win our freedom, and then we say, Now we shall have peace. Again the question comes, Do you love freedom for yourselves only and not for others? For a score of years the question is presented; finally comes the Civil War; slavery is abolished, and again we say, Now we shall have peace. Then God straightway opens other territories, and says, You have won freedom for yourselves, now make other peoples free. The boy brings the solution of his problem on the slate to his teacher, and asks, Is the answer right? The teacher says yes, rubs the figures off, hands the slate back, and says, Now you can take a harder problem. So in life; every task is the preparation for a harder task, every achievement opens the way for greater achievement, every epoch is but the beginning of a new epoch. The whole history of life shows that education is itself the end of life. The little child lies in the cradle; the mother cares for it, the father provides for it, they try to educate it, they send it to school and to college, and then their child goes out into the world ready to take up life himself, and presently he is married, and a second home begins, and little children are given to him, and he trains them in turn, and the parents wait a little while to have as grandparents the joy of children without the care of children, and then their work is done, and they depart to enter upon some other work, in some other sphere, we know not where. We are not in life for purposes of probation; we are not here to be tried to see whether we are fit for heaven. There is probation, but probation is not the end of life. As in college there are examinations, not to show how much we know, but to ascertain whether we know enough to enter the next class, so in life our trials are to ascertain whether to-day we are ready for a new lesson to-morrow. We are not here for achievement. We are not here to do things, we are here to grow by the doing of things. We are in the workshop to learn industry. For life is an industrial school, and the purpose its industry is to make us men and women. The end of life is not achievement, but life itself. of Now let me tell you why I have said this. A friend not long since read to me a very pathetic letter which he had received from a Christian woman, which ran something like this: "My husband has but a narrow income. We are not able to keep a servant unless we spend all his income, and I think now is the time to lay by a little for our old age. My boys are at school, and I want to spend a little time with them, entering into their studies, giving them what little help I can, assuring them at least of my sympathy. When my husband comes home at night, he is tired out, and I really do not see what better thing I can do then than to read to him, for his eyes are rather weak. And so with the housekeeping and the children and the husband, I have no time left to serve the Lord." I think there are many such women and a few such men-more women than men, for the simple reason that women are more conscientious. You have gone through your college course. You are going out into life, and the temptation is to say to yourself, Now I must do something to justify the expenditure which has been put upon my education; I must find some mission to accomplish, some place to fill, some deed to do, else the time and money spent in school and college will have been spent in vain. This is an honorable feeling, but it is a mistaken one. We are not put into life for a mission; we are not put into life to do great things. We are put into life to be made men and women, and to do the things which God has put into our hands to do, be they great or be they little. No person can do a great work who says to herself, Go to, I will do a great work. Great work is not done in that way. All great work is spontaneous. I was standing before a picture last week with an art critic, who said, She paints better than she used to; she has gotten through worrying about details. She had lost self-consciousness, and the loss improved her as an artist. The other day a literary critic said to me, No man can write a moral novel purposely; if he is a moral man, his novel will be moral; if he is an immoral man, his novel will be immoral, and that is the end of it. Out of our character grows our life; we do as we are. This is the reason of the popular feeling against the professional reformer. The man who says, I will be a reformer, generally lacks common sense; the man who says, I will be a prophet, is apt to lack common morality. Columbus starts to sail across the ocean that he may find a passage to the East Indies, and he stumbles on America. Luther is a monk, never purposing to revolutionize Europe, only determined that he will follow his conscience wherever it may lead him. Morse is an artist, and while on shipboard the idea of the telegraph comes to him, and he works it out. Lincoln is a politician in Illinois, with no thought of emancipating the slave, but he resolves that he will be true to himself, whether he wins or loses a Senatorial contest. All truly great men are spontaneously great. More than that, great men are not great merely because they succeed. A great man may fail. We revere the man who endeavors to do a mistaken thing, if he carries into his endeavors a noble character. We honor Robert E. Lee, though had he succeeded in what he wished to do, he would have inflicted incalculable injury on the human race. We honor him for what he was, not for what he did or tried to do. But did not Jesus Christ have a great mission? And did not Jesus Christ tell us to follow him in this great mission? Can we be following him if we do not ourselves take up some great mission of our own? Look and see. In his first sermon he say's practically this: I have come to give sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, speech to the dumb, solace to the suffering, emancipation to the slave. I have come to make the world a purer world and a better world. And then all his biography is written in the one sentence, "He went about doing good." Did he do great things? Forget your preconceived ideas and read the story of his life, and answer what one great thing this man did, as men count greatness. He wrote no great book, led no great army, founded no great State, organized no great Church, made no great oration. He talked to the Twelve about him at the supper with quite as much eloquence as he talked to the thousands in the Sermon on the Mount. He healed, but not so many as in one single year are healed in the Massachusetts General Hospital. He preached to a few hundreds, but not to as many as Whitefield or Wesley or Beecher |