176. You would certainly have gone, at least, the third of the way towards educating him. Then the next thing to be contrived would be that he should be able to see a man rightly, as well as a bird; to understand and love what was good in a man, so that supposing his master was a good man, the sight of his master should be a joy to him. You would say that he was therein better educated than if he wanted to put a gun through a hedge and shoot his master. Then the last part of education will be--whatever is meant by that beatitude of the pure in heart--seeing God rightly, of which I shall not speak to-day. 177. And in all these phases of education, the main point, you observe, is that it _should_ be a beatitude: and that a man should learn "χαίρειν ὀρθῶς:" and this rejoicing is above all things to be in actual sight; you have the truth exactly in the saying of Dante when he is brought before Beatrice, in heaven, that his eyes "satisfied themselves for their ten years' thirst." This, then, I repeat, is the sum of education. All literature, art, and science are vain, and worse, if they do not enable you to be glad; and glad justly. And I feel it distinctly my duty, though with solemn and true deference to the masters of education in this university, to say that I believe our modern methods of teaching, and especially the institution of severe and frequent examination, to be absolutely opposed to this great end; and that the result of competitive labour in youth is infallibly to make men know all they learn wrongly, and hate the habit of learning; so that instead of coming to Oxford to rejoice in their work, men look forward to the years they are to pass under her teaching as a deadly agony, from which they are fain to escape, and sometimes for their life, _must_ escape, into any method of sanitary frivolity. 178. I go back to my peasant and his egret. You all think with some horror of this man, beating the bird to death, as a brutal person. He is so; but how far are we English gentlemen, as a body, raised above him? We are more delicately nurtured, and shrink from the notion of bruising the creature and spoiling its feathers. That is so far right, and well. But in all probability this countryman, rude and cruel though he might be, had some other object in the rest of his day than the killing of birds. And very earnestly I ask you, have English gentlemen, as a class, any other real object in their whole existence than killing birds? If they discern a duty, they will indeed do it to the death; but have the English aristocracy at this moment any clear notion of their duty? I believe solemnly, and without jest, their idea of their caste is that its life should be, distinctively from inferior human lives, spent in shooting. And that is not an idea of caste with which England, at this epoch, can any longer be governed.