The Bible renders education the service of inspiration, and it renders it
the service of proper restraint. When any one faculty of human life
becomes a monarch it always makes for trouble. Zeal without knowledge
tends to breakage; knowledge without zeal tends to waste. The Bible does
not make intellect all. Man has mind, and he must use that. Man has
sensibility, and he must use that. Man has will, and he must use that. Man
must get the truth out of his integral self rather than out of his
fractional self. The man who does not use his heart and will in the
gaining of truth is just as faithless as is the man who will not use his
mind. Without attempting to use psychological terms with exactness, we may
say that Jesus brought in the reign of the practical intellect, which gets
truth from all there is of man. Even as truth comes not from the naked
will of God, nor yet out of his cold thought, but rather out of the full
nature of the Infinite, so truth finds man, not at some one point of his
being, but in the glowing center of his whole life.
We may assert, also, that the Bible saves education from frigidity.
Tennyson speaks of "the freezing reason's colder part." We all know the
meaning of the phrase. Jesus put into the search for truth the mood of
humility. The method of learning was obedience. Obedience is the organ of
intellectual vision as well as of spiritual vision. The method of Jesus
was not merely for the spiritual life, as men speak in their fragmentary
way; it was a universal method. It takes humility to make the beginnings
of a scholar, and weariness and shame of ignorance, and faith in an
intellectual empire, and a high trust that the mind is made for truth, and
the truth for mind. Ere we have done, we have a huge creed wrapped up in
our intellectual processes. But the creed has been saved from its cold
pride. The Bible says in one of its marginal readings, "Knowledge puffeth
up; love buildeth up." Knowledge alone may be swollen with pride, and the
higher demand of the Bible would save from that disaster. This gives us
the clue to more than one biblical sentence. There is a "science falsely
so called." There is a sense in which "not many wise after the flesh are
called." These implied warnings are not the cries of prejudice. They stand
for the effort to touch learning with humility, which alone can save it
from being distant and icy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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