As Mr. Huss said these things he was uplifted by enthusiasm, and his
pain sank down out of his consciousness.
“What,” he said, “is the task of the teacher in the world? It is the
greatest of all human tasks. It is to ensure that Man, Man the Divine,
grows in the souls of men. For what is a man without instruction? He is
born as the beasts are born, a greedy egotism, a clutching desire, a
thing of lusts and fears. He can regard nothing except in relation to
himself. Even his love is a bargain; and his utmost effort is vanity
because he has to die. And it is we teachers alone who can lift him out
of that self-preoccupation. We teachers.... We can release him into a
wider circle of ideas beyond himself in which he can at length forget
himself and his meagre personal ends altogether. We can open his eyes to
the past and to the future and to the undying life of Man. So through us
and through us only, he escapes from death and futility. An untaught man
is but himself alone, as lonely in his ends and destiny as any beast; a
man instructed is a man enlarged from that narrow prison of self into
participation in an undying life, that began we know not when, that
grows above and beyond the greatness of the stars....”
He spoke as if he addressed some other hearer than the three before him.
Mr. Dad, with eyebrows raised and lips compressed, nodded silently to
Mr. Farr as if his worst suspicions were confirmed, and there were signs
and signals that Sir Eliphaz was about to speak, when Mr. Huss resumed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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