The Chautauquan, Vol. 04, July 1884, No. 10Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
History
The Chautauquan, Vol. 04, July 1884, No. 10
Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle
Chautauqua Institution -- Periodicals; Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle -- Periodicals
_My Dear Sir_:—Your letter of December 27 is before me. We have provided
a college outlook, a college outlook which touches every department
in the realm of culture. We give a bird’s eye view of this vast world
which appeals to every faculty of the soul. We touch the physical man,
the physical world in which he lives, above among stars, below among
stones, about among plants and animals. We study history, the history
of the earth as revealed in science, the history of man as unfolded in
the traditions and records of the race. We study political and social
economy. We also study somewhat (to a very limited degree) the phenomena
and laws of man’s moral and spiritual being. _It would be a strange
course of study that ignored faculties as real, as universal, and as
persistent in their operations as the religious faculties._ We avoid
scrupulously everything that tends to the promotion of sectarianism in
thought or spirit, but we believe in that profound philosophy, which all
leading educators of life have recognized, that “the fear of the Lord
is the beginning of wisdom.” A culture of muscle alone is a one-sided
culture. The culture of the reason alone is equally one-sided. A culture
of memory alone is folly. The true culture is a culture of body, mind
and heart, the soul in its entirety, with its many-sided relations to
the truths which belong to those relations: God, neighbor, home, life,
nation, time, eternity. The C. L. S. C. would indeed be a most narrow
and bigoted thing if it were to refuse attention to the religious world.
Now concerning Dr. Walker’s work on “The Plan of Salvation,” the name is,
I confess, quite misleading. It is a book written forty years ago, by
one of the ablest intellects of America. No American religious book has
had a wider circulation. It is profoundly philosophical, and it gives a
most original view of the old Jewish history; and a man’s education who
calls himself an infidel is incomplete without reading that book. There
is not the slightest tinge of sectarianism about it. It is a vigorous
classic which every student of the English tongue should read. Hundreds
of our readers, who are not members of any evangelical church, and who
are skeptical in their tendency, have read the book with great delight,
and though prejudiced somewhat against the title, have given words of
testimony to its wonderful power as a literary production, to say nothing
about the vigor of its arguments. You say you “find sermons in stones,
and _good in everything_.” Can you not, _if you find good in everything,
find good in a philosophical book written by a mighty intellect,
acknowledged by the scholars of the past forty years_? “The Plan of
Salvation” is not a discussion of the way a soul is to be saved. It is
a discussion of the philosophy underlying the biblical history. You can
not afford not to read it, even if you decline to prosecute our course
of study. I am a little surprised that a broad man should be “decidedly
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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