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r life, we could accomplish almost anything we wished, how we should guard it! With what delight we would make it work, to see w

ions, a few convolutions in the brain, acts of attention and observation, certain reactions following certain st

ttons. The philosopher strings God, angels, devils, brutes, men, and their appurtenances and deeds. Hence no real thought will quite go into wo

n the brain, a thought. We cannot see it, or touch it, or handle it. Yet we can give it, one to another, or one man to the race. It has an infinite leverage. One great thought moves milli

of the world's work. We are like a horse that balks and wi

ne and out-of-door play. They are catch-words of the universe. They are the implements by which each brain is to be trained to do great work for th

which will produce it. But just as marriage produces new lives, though we cannot say how, so study

eceive the inspired ideas and spend their lives in teaching them to

nfucius, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, the mediaeval philosophers, the Egyptian, Persian, and Arabian thinkers, Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Eckhart, William of Occam, Bede, Thomas à Kempis, Francis Bacon, Kant, John Stuart Mill, Spencer,-with what dignity the procession

baths, perfumes,-nor what his man-servant retailed to other retainers of the eccentricities and vanities of his master. But we know what Pericles and Plato said to the race. Her

intervene between conception and completion-to have thought of it is to have had in our lives a pleasure that can never die. For one blessed hour or year we have been lifted to the thoughts of God and have entered into the grea

wishes to stay always just where he is to-day? To be always what he is this mor

thought of God, The wish for growth is the wish to enter into the spiritual id

h, renown, acclaim? These things are not in themselves growth, nor its real index. Growth is not a form of avarice. Growth is a vital state of being. Growth is the assimilation of experience. Gro

, snow, vapor, care, anxiety, temptation, trial, joy, fear. Whatever touches the sense or the soul is something by which, rightly used, we may grow. There is nothing we need fear to take into our lives, if it receives the right assimilation

al variant of this common life. Thought is the power by which we make i

nd the growth of living things. He lived, ate, fought, but his thoughts were pr

about them. He was the first real Thinker, Then air-philosophy and element-philosophy grew up-beast-worship, animalism, fire-worship,

e, read, write, think, count, and to work; to love ideal

nt, he kept tally on his fingers, or with pebbles from the beach or brook. When he wished to communicate an idea orally, it was with glances, shrugs, gestures, and im

own up book-keeping, geometry, mathematical astronomy and a knowledge of the higher curves. Out of the prehistoric shrugs and sounds and grimaces we have oral speech-much of it worthless, and not all of it yet wholly intelligible. We are still continually being understood

as a man shows in himself traces of a long-dead ancestry, so words have the power to revive emotions of past generations and the experiences of former years. The man of letters, the Thinker, strews a handful of words into the air, breathes a little song. The words spri

e men read into noble words only their own silliness, vulgarity, prejudice, or preconceived ideas

shade. Literature is a mastery, not only of the moods of men, but of the moods of words. Corot takes a stream, some grass and trees, a flitting patch of sky. By means of a few strokes of his brush, he manages to present that tree, sky, stream, in a

common words that everybody knows. He puts them together: the result i

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reat work always impresses us as inspired. God did it. It is God who whis

ndly winter sky. To the rhetorician it suggests a figure of speech-the star of hope. To the mariner it suggests guidance and the homeward port. To the astronomer it means the world in which he lives. His life is centred in that star.

play, heroism. It took Carlyle to define Time for us. Emerson has defined Friendship. Let the lights and shadows of the thought of Carlyle and Emerson play upon these words, they are at once removed from mechanical defini

. It proceeds, it changes, it is iridesce

wise man can keep his learning to himself, and yet he cannot, though he teach a thousand years, transmit his deeper learning to another. The atmosphere, the casual information, the spiritual magnetism of a great

Until a pupil gets a glimpse of that relation, that dependence of which we have just heard, with all that has yet happened in connection with it, he is not yet quite master of his fact. He recites glibly the date of Thermopylae, and does not know that

upon an unhorizoned beach, more despairing than before. Education does not solve the problems of life-it

t necessary for him to know. The larger sage, the great Sage,

f my individual and personal knowledge, yet I may not necessarily be an ignorant man. The primitive hunter stood in the forest. For him to be a hunting-sage, was to know the weather, traps, weapons, the times, and the lairs and ways of beasts. He knew lions and monkeys, the coil

ash of wave, and the curling breaker's sweep. He knew the maelstroms and the aegir that swept into northern fiords; the thunder and wind and tempest; th

salmon, the perch, the trout, the tarpon, and the muscalonge. He says.

by grammars and by loci-paper, by electrical machines, and parsing tables and Grecian accents, by the names of noted authors and statesmen, and the thrill of historic battles and decisions. He may be placed under a rain of ethical and philosophic ideas, and may be forced to put on a System of Thought, as men put on a mackintosh. But his true education is what he makes o

a growing and attaching soul. We must not only attach information to ourselves, we must assimilate it. Else we

ool or university. One puts away Greek, and the other lays up football and college societies. A third gets all three, being a little more swift and alert. One stows away insubordination-another, order and obedience. One does quiet, original work of reading and research; the other stows away schemes for getting through recitations and examinations. No two students ever come out

man is not necessarily the educated man; he is the man at the top of some intellectual fence, who wishes to come down, but has absent-mindedly forgotten that he has legs. The legs are not absent, but his wit is. So with the impractical man in every sphere. Education has not really removed his common-sense, as some say, his power to connect passing events with their causes, and to act reasonably; but it has set his thought on some other thought for the time being, and the d

f horse or dog. They have just time enough in life to dress themselves up. Looking back over their years, they can only say, I have had clothes! In the same number of years, with no greater advantages or opportu

nd gold, and then weep that we are ignorant, and embeggared at the

whine. Throw out upon the world a free fearlessness of thought and word and deed. Courage, freedom, heroism, faith, ex

zard continuity of events-a cometary orbit, for the world. There are fixed rela

progress-a bigger something, a better something. Should annihilation be the truth of things, and all the race mortal, then some day there would be a Last Man. And after the Last Man, what? He would di

raising God, and singing forth His Name forever. Immortality broods over the great thought

the air. The longed-for wisdom of to-day shows a kaleidoscopic front, in which are turning the slum-dweller and the millionaire; the white man, the yellow, and the black; the town and the territorial possession. The slave-colony, garbage-laws, ma

ill on the run. This twentieth century will find new

s having a moral aspect, and men are looking for a Religion which

gravitation-a sinking to a Lower. This is sin-a contrariness of things-which makes the world an evil place to live in, instead of a good; which wrecks character and states, eats th

is not an intellectual toy, for philosophers to play with or define as "a limitation

lation, and decay. Death broods over the spirit of man, unless a Redeemer come. The unredeemed ages hang over history like a pall. In them there are monum

e, to arrive at some thought which will take hold of this primary fact

The watchword of yesterday was evolution. It explains progressive change: the mounting-up of life "through spires of form." The forms of the universe are seen in a series which is in the main ascendant, and in which the survivo

his future destiny. It is the great mystery of joy in which the race partakes; the s

h. It marks a world-balm, a world-change. It is in the spirit of man that it works, and not

o God. Zion is the Whole of things-the encompassment of space, an

sweeps through centuries as years! A day in His courts is as a thousand, and a thousand years are as one day, because they thrill with an immortal

it has told us the highest that it knows. The March of Sages is