The Expositor's Bible: The Pastoral EpistlesPlummer, Alfred
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Pastoral Epistles
Plummer, Alfred
Bible. Pastoral Epistles -- Criticism, interpretation, etc.
"We should be shrinking from a plain duty, did we leave out Literature
from Education. For why do we educate except to prepare for the world?
Why do we cultivate the intellect of the many beyond the first elements
of knowledge, except ... to fit men of the world for the world? We
cannot possibly keep them from plunging into the world, with all its
ways and principles and maxims, when their time comes; but we can
prepare them against what is inevitable; and it is not the way to learn
to swim in troubled waters, never to have gone into them. Proscribe (I
do not say particular authors, particular works, particular passages)
but Secular Literature as such: cut out from your class books all broad
manifestations of the natural man; and those manifestations are waiting,
for your pupil's benefit, at the very doors of your lecture room in
living and breathing substance. They will meet him there in all the
charm of novelty, and all the fascination of genius or of amiableness.
To-day a pupil, to-morrow a member of the great world: to-day confined
to the Lives of the Saints, to-morrow thrown upon Babel;--thrown on
Babel, without the honest indulgence of wit and humour and imagination
ever permitted to him, without any fastidiousness of taste wrought into
him, without any rule given him for discriminating 'the precious from
the vile,' beauty from sin, the truth from the sophistry of nature, what
is innocent from what is poison."[75]
Many Christians are apt to forget that all truth is of God; and that
every one who in an earnest spirit endeavours to ascertain and to teach
what is true in any department of human knowledge, is doing God's work.
The Spirit, we are promised by Christ Himself, "shall lead you _into all
the Truth_," and "the Truth shall make you free." Our business is to see
that nothing claims the name of truth unlawfully. It is not our business
to prohibit anything that can make good its claim to be accounted true.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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