Means and Ends of EducationSpalding, John Lancaster
Philosophy
Means and Ends of Education
Spalding, John Lancaster
Culture; Education
sees with love and pity His all-enduring and all-hoping children; it is
His voice we hear in the words of Christ, "Misereor super turbam." I
cannot but wish to be myself, and therefore to be happy; but when I
think of God as essential to my happiness, I feel it is enough for me
to know and love Him; for to imagine I might be of service to Him would
be the fondest conceit. But He makes it possible for me to help my
fellows, and in doing this, I fulfil the will of Him who is the father
of all. The divine reveals itself in the human; and that religion
alone is true which, striking its roots deep into humanity, exerts all
its power to make men more godlike by making them more human.
They who in good faith inflicted the tortures of the Inquisition were
led not by the light of reason, or that which springs from the
contemplation of the life of Christ, but by the notion that the rack
and fagot are instruments of mercy, if employed to save men from
eternal torments; and tyrants, who are always cruel, gave encouragement
and aid to the victims of fanaticism. Why should the sorrow or the sin
or the loss of any human being give me pleasure? Is it not always the
same story? In the fall of one we all are degraded, since, whoever
fails, it is our common nature which suffers hurt.
Whether or not we have come forth from a merely animal condition, let
us thank God we are human, and bend all our energies to remove the race
farther and farther from the life over which thought and love and
conscience have no dominion.
In the presence of the mighty machine, whose wheels and arms are
everywhere, whose power is drawn from the exhaustless oceans and the
boundless heavens, the importance of the individual dwindles and seems
threatened with extinction. At such a time it is good to know that a
right human soul is greater than a universe of machinery.
We feel that we are higher than all the suns and planets, because we
know and love, and they do not; but when, in the light of this
superiority, we turn to the thought of our own littleness, being
scarcely more than nothing, such trouble rises in the soul that we
throw ourselves upon God to escape doubt of the reality of life. If we
believe that man is what he eats, his education is simply a question of
alimentation; but if we hold that he is what he knows, and loves, and
yearns, and strives for, his education is a problem of soul-nutrition.
The child is made educable by its faith in the father and mother, which
is nothing else than faith in their truth and love; and the
educableness of the man is in proportion to his faith in the sovereign
and infinite nature of truth and love, which is faith in God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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