The Teacher: Essays and Addresses on EducationPalmer, Alice Freeman
Philosophy
The Teacher: Essays and Addresses on Education
Palmer, Alice Freeman
Education; Education, Higher; Women -- Education
Yet it is easy to mistake the nature of this change of standard, and in
doing so to run into grave moral danger. If we content ourselves with
the imperfect rather than with the perfect, we are barbarians. We are
not Christians nor are we Greeks, we are barbarians. But that is not the
spirit of Jesus. He teaches us to catch the future in the instant, to
see the infinite in the finite, to watch the growth of the perfect out
of the imperfect. And he teaches us that this delight in progress, in
growth, in aspiration, in completing, may rightly be greater than our
exultation in completeness. In his view the joy of perfecting is beyond
the joy of perfection.
Now I want to be sure that you young women, who are preparing yourselves
here for larger life and are soon to emerge into the perplexing world,
go forth with clear and Christian purpose. For though what I have been
discussing may appear dry and abstract, it is an extremely practical
matter. Consider a moment in which direction you are to seek the
interests of your life. Will you demand that the things about you shall
already possess their perfection? Will you ask from life that it be
completed, finished, beautiful? If so, you are doomed to dreary days. Or
are you to get your intellectual eyes open, see beauty in the making,
and come to rejoice in it there rather than after it is made? That is
the question I wish to present to-day; and I shall ask you to examine
several provinces of life and see how different they appear when
surveyed from one point of view or from the other.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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