The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-dayUnderhill, Evelyn
Religion
The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day
Underhill, Evelyn
Spiritual life
Last: we must hand on to it all those refinements of life which the past
has given to us--the hoarded culture of the race.
Only if we do these four things thoroughly can we dare to call ourselves
educators in the full sense of the word.
Now, turning to the spiritual interests of the child:--and unless we are
crass materialists we must believe these interests to exist, and to be
paramount--what are we doing to further them in these four fundamental
directions? First, does the average good education train our young
people in spiritual self-preservation? Does it send them out equipped
with the means of living a full and efficient spiritual life? Does it
furnish them with a health-giving type of religion; that is, a solid
hold on eternal realities, a view of the universe capable of
withstanding hostile criticism, of supporting them in times of
difficulty and of stress? Secondly, does it give them a spiritual
outlook in respect of their racial duties, fit them in due time to be
parents of other souls? Does it train them to regard humanity, and their
own place in the human life-stream, from this point of view? This point
is of special importance, in view of the fact that racial and biological
knowledge on lower levels is now so generally in the possession of boys
and girls; and is bound to produce a distorted conception of life,
unless the spirit be studied by them with at least the same respectful
attention that is given to the flesh. Thirdly, what does our education
do towards preparing them to solve the problems of social and economic
life in a spiritual sense--our only reasonable chance of extracting the
next generation from the social muddle in which we are plunged to-day?
Last, to what extent do we try to introduce our pupils into a full
enjoyment of their spiritual inheritance, the culture and tradition of
the past?
I do not deny that there are educators--chiefly perhaps educators of
girls--who can give favourable answers to all these questions. But they
are exceptional, the proportion of the child population whom they
influence is small, and frequently their proceedings are looked
upon--not without some justice--as eccentric. If then in all these
departments our standard type of education stops short of the spiritual
level, are not we self-convicted as at best theoretical believers in the
worth and destiny of the human soul?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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