Sometimes pride of intellect disguises itself with a holy tone and reverential mien, as if education were a very solemn affair. When I was a school boy, there was in our town a woman librarian who presided over our little public library with deadly seriousness. She filled the place with a crushing and awesome silence, as with reverential whispers she quietly moved on tiptoe among the books like one ministering in the house of the dead. I have known people to behave in this spirit toward literature. I have seen school teachers and professors take such an attitude toward education. It characterizes the average baccalaureate address and is discernible in much that is said and written about education. I know several “prophets” of adult education who succeed in giving a similar impression. Their very souls creak under the weight of the world-mending “spiritual values” of adult education. If people will take their education as hard as the Kantians take morality, they are welcome to their “sublimities.” There are minds which seem to have been formed only for the service of the sublime and do not work well except when closeted in its presence. But I would rather dwell in the tents of the wicked than be a door-keeper in such a house of serious thinkers. Extravagant claims for education lead to pretense, to painful efforts at keeping up appearances, to exposure and ultimate disillusionment. Several times in history there has occurred a wide-spread reaction against education, followed by a long period of decline of interest in it. Usually such reactions have taken the form of a revival of religion and have followed upon a period of general intellectual awakening. The Augustan age is followed by primitive Christianity, the Renaissance by the Reformation, the eighteenth century, the age of “the Enlightenment,” by those distinctly anti-intellectualist movements, the Revival, the Revolution and Romanticism. May not one of the causes of such reactions be the fact that people have been led to expect too much of the prevailing education? Men for a time believe that education will disclose some wonderful secret which is about to transform the world, and when they find that the learned doctors do not reveal the secret because they have none to reveal, and that the world does not at once proceed to transform itself, they turn from learning to religion where the secret is kept from the wise and revealed unto babes. No one is more concerned than I that the interest in education be as wide-spread and as genuine as possible. But I would not force its growth lest we get all foliage and no fruit. It is better that in its due season the tree be known by the fruit it bears.