Current questions for thinking men...

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PR 7

LIBRARY QF CONGRESS. ^r?&

Chap.P.\.. Copyright No. __.

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I. The Scholar in the World 1 1

II. Characteristics of True Culture .... 38

II

MR. PRESIDENT and Christian Friends : I thank you for your cordial greeting. It is with many and conflicting emotions that I rise in this place and on this occasion, in response to the call of the chairman. Many and tender memories of honored instructors and beloved fellow-students who have finished their course and have entered upon their rest, crowd upon me to-day. Twenty-three years ago I left this place to embrace the opportunity for a broader culture than was possible here at that time. Coming back to you to-day thoughts of gratitude to God for his mercy, mingled with the memories of which I have spoken, cluster about this spot. I congratulate you all upon this beautiful day. With no part of the very kind introduction just given me by Dr. Rand do I so heartily agree as with the reference to the wisdom shown in the selection of the day for this memorable observance. It is surely right for us to regard this day as an expression of the kindness of our Father in Heaven. We are certainly warranted in seeing in the glorious sunshine which now floods

1 Delivered October 22, 1886 at Woodstock, Ontario, at the laying of the cornerstone of the New Hall, the gift of Senator and Mrs. McMaster, of the Woodstock College. 38 the world with its splendor, the reflection of his uplifted countenance ; and in the balmy air which kisses our cheek, we recognize his paternal benediction.

It is my profound conviction that this day marks an era in the history of our beloved denomination in Canada ; that the laying of this cornerstone is an epoch-making event in our educational work. Senator and Mrs. McMaster, I am quite well assured, will be remembered in the years to come ; not so much because of his business success ; not so much because of the political honors which have been showered upon him ; not so much because of social distinction on the part of both, as because of the part which they have taken in the education of young men and women in our denomination in Canada. If there were no higher motives for generosity to literary institutions than the consideration of the worthy fame which they give their promoters, this might be one reason for the exercise of benevolence in this respect.

The honor of founding and aiding the great colleges and other institutions of learning in the Old World and the New, will endure after all political and social successes have passed away. These schools will outlive the glory of kings and queens. Firm as is the British throne to-day, it is not so firm as are the great institutions of learning which are the pride and glory of Britain. Amid political conflicts the British throne may totter and even fall, but these great colleges will stand, whether under a monarchy or in a republic ; their foundation is sure and their immortality is certain. The founders of such institutions of learning will live in honored memory while time lasts. Those who contribute to the establishment and to the endowment of institutions of learning should have higher motives than these. As a rule they have higher motives ; as a rule the considerations named are only secondary, if they are present at all. But they certainly are not unworthy of mention on an occasion of this kind. All honor to the noble men who have given so largely of their wealth ; all honor to the scores and hundreds of men and women who have given out of their comparative poverty for the founding of this institution. Their names shall shine as the stars forever in the galaxy of noble, intelligent, and consecrated Canadian Baptists.

Permit me on this occasion to call your attention to the " Characteristics of True Culture," as the special topic for remark.

FIRST CHARACTERISTIC.

We may say at the outset, that true culture must be comprehensive. It is evident that true culture implies the development of all the faculties of our complex being. A very little consideration will make this truth perfectly clear. What is culture ? Look at the derivation of the word. It is tilling. To till you must plow or delve ; you must rake or harrow. You have culture in a field only as you have tilling. Parts of the field that have not been tilled are not cultured. That cannot then be a cultured field in which large portions have been neglected. New World farmers are astonished when they see the fields of the Old World farmers. With the latter every spot is tilled, every mountain side is cultured.

No man can claim that his is a well-tilled farm when much of it has never felt the plowshare or the spade. So no man can fairly claim the honors of culture, portions of whose nature lie fallow. What would you say of a man who would claim to be cultured simply because his muscles were well developed. You say, " Yes ; he has physical culture, let him limit his claim to that." But you rightly demand more. The intellect also must have culture. Now more of the territory has been gone over ; now more may be rightly claimed by the man. But why stop there ? The man is more than muscles and mind. You must go higher. All things below man look up to man as their center. Shall he have no upward look ? All faculties within look to the heart, the soul, the conscience.

The word conscience suggests this upward look. It is a solemn word. It is knowing together with another. Who is that other? There stands God. The literal meaning of one Greek word for man is "The upward-looking one." A man who has no upward look is unworthy of the name ; he is denying his dignity ; he is stripping himself of his glory. Language itself witnesses for its author.

Man is not a god unto himself. A true culture includes the entire field ; it sweeps across every faculty. It has its earthward, its manward, and its Godward relation. If lacking in any of these directions it is partial, defective, and unauthoritative culture. It is like Ephraim, who is likened to a cake not turned — a cake baked only on one side.

Tried by this true standard many claimants for this honor will be found wanting. Sidney Smith thought it better not to read a book which he was to review — reading might prejudice his judgment. So do men of culture in some directions seem to act in regard to religion and the Bible. The religious side of their nature is neglected, other parts are cultivated. On science and art they would not make ignorance a claim to authority ; in regard to religion they act as if their ignorance especially fitted them for bold and authoritative statement. Such men would deserve our contempt did not our religion teach us to give them our pity. The apostles could say, "We speak that we do know" ; not so with these ill-cultured critics of divine things. Locke said, "It needs a sunny eye to see the sun." He is right. No man can see the ocean except he have oceans in his soul ; no man can truly enjoy the mountains unless he has mountains on his brain ; so no man knows divine love save as he has felt its constraining power. Flesh and blood cannot reveal the deep things of God to a man. The Lord's secret is with those who fear him.

To know bread and meat you must eat them.

A hungry man who should coolly pronounce on the life-giving qualities of bread and meat as the result of a chemical analysis alone would proclaim himself a fool. You would say of him that much starving had made him mad. So to be able to judge of religion you must have religion ; you must have the bread of heaven. This is not on the part of the religious teacher asking too much. If you are to demonstrate to me a problem in geometry you have a right to demand that I shall know enough of the science at least to follow you step by step. If I do not, how dare I dissent from your conclusion? Is my ignorance to give me authority? Geometrically I am, on this supposition, an utterly uncultured man.

Surely a man ought to be diffident in pronouncing an opinion on a subject which he has never studied. Sir Isaac Newton was right when he said to Dr. Halley, a man of science but an unbeliever in God's word : " I am glad to hear you speak about astronomy and mathematics, for you have studied and you understand them ; but you should not talk of Christianity, for you have never studied it." That is good sense. Dr. Halley was not a man of culture so far as Christianity was concerned ; that side of his nature was unbaked, uncultured. In recent discussions on the life and work of Emerson, the name of Thoreau has often been mentioned. He is a type of one class of men of culture, so called. In 1837 he graduated from Harvard College. For three years he was a teacher ;

he then occupied himself with various kinds of mechanical pursuits and with land surveying. He imbibed the spirit of Emerson's transcendentalism. In March, 1845, ne built himself a shanty on the shore of Walden Pond. There he lived a sort of hermit life. One object was to see how simply and cheaply a man could live ; and he demonstrated that it was possible to do this on seventy dollars a year. Noble achievement ! Grand ambition ! True, he wrote a little. But what did he really accomplish? How was he better than the miserable monastic hermits of an earlier day? Such culture is in its last analysis supreme selfishness, and selfishness is the essence of all sin.

Emerson, in a measure, fell into the same snare. He was refined, solitary, personally pure, and noble. But whose sorrows did he share ? Whose burdens did he lift? Carlyle's culture was painfully one-sided. He was crusted on the one side, he was crude on the other. The harsh, the crabbed, the unloving elements were unduly developed ; the tender, gentle, and winning graces were neglected. He broke the heart of Jane Welsh, who devoted her great powers and sacrificed her lofty ambition to be his household slave. She might have been the wife of Edward Irving, and if he had had her for a wife he would have had fewer dreams and visions and would have accomplished more for God and man. Garlyle held this woman almost exclusively to the drudgery of menial duties. If he had given her the position which her worth demanded and had helped her in her domestic burdens, he would have had less dyspepsia in his body and less savagery in his books. If a few more lives of Carlyle are published we shall begin to wish that one life had never been lived ; the iconoclast of shams, there is danger that he himself shall be proved a sham. The men who bless and save the world in the largest sense, are not men of Carlyle's stamp. His very greatness makes his weakness the more conspicuous.

It is also to be borne in mind that both Emerson and Carlyle seem to have come, in their later years, more fully into the light of Christ than in their middle life. Remarks made by Emerson plainly show that his pantheism gave way to theism, and that Christ became more and more an example and helper. Carlyle fully acknowledged, as he stood on the brink of eternity, that the old words learned in childhood came back with wondrous power — that the chief end of man was to glorify God and enjoy him forever. Culture? Yes, but let it be the culture of the whole man. Such was the culture of Howard, of Wilberforce, and of Lincoln. Those were men of broader sympathies, philanthropic impulses, and practical aims. All acknowledge the power of George Eliot as a thinker and writer. She was in some respects the most accomplished woman of her generation. A woman's pen stabbed to the heart the monster slavery in America, and George Eliot's pen was a mighty instrument for piercing many an evil in England and throughout the world. But she had a narrow outlook and almost no uplook. This world bounded her range of vision. She was a preacher of despair and an apostle of pessimism. She robbed herself of her noblest crown as a child of God and an heir of glory.

Better the rounded life, symmetrical culture, and practical labors of Florence Nightingale. Born in the same year as Queen Victoria, she also is a queen. Born in the beautiful city of Florence, she therefor received her beautiful name. Taking the name of Nightingale, because of family and property considerations, she has proved herself to be truly a nightingale, singing songs of hope and love in the loneliness of grief and in the darkness of the midnight hour. She possessed even in her infancy that undefined and undefinable something which has been called "the nurse's touch." Beginning in the humblest way by carrying warm food, gruel, and tea to children of sick neighbors ; going with flannels and bandages to the hospitals to aid the distressed ; going later in life to Germany to perfect herself for such a noble ministry in a famous school devoted to instruction in the healing art, she went from strength to strength, being faithful in that which was least, and ready to enter the door of a wider opportunity when, in the providence of God, it should be open.

That opportunity soon came. The soldiers of Britain were found in the Crimean War marching in deep snow in boots without soles. They laid their weary bodies down at night in tents whose floors were wet with melted snow, and whose sides were but poorly protected from the driving storm. Never did the soldiers of Britain fight under more disadvantageous circumstances. The letter of Dr. Russell to the " London Times," describing these horrible conditions, aroused all England ; every heart was stirred with pity and with righteous indignation, coupled with profound sorrow. All eyes were turned in the direction of some practical helper. Then up rose Florence Nightingale. She went. The world knows her history ; the world will never forget her deeds of heroism and of noble consecration. Thousands of soldiers soon called her blessed, and her name soon took the place among the noblest women of the noblest nations of the earth. When in the American Republic the fiercest civil war of the world was raging, the example of Florence Nightingale aroused her American sisters all over the loyal North, and on scores of battlefields and in scores of hospitals these loyal women ministered to the sick and soothed the pillows of the dying. The American Nightingales made the dark night of many a terrible scene musical with the song of hope, of love, and of patriotic devotion.

There is more power in the sweet and blessed life of " Sister Dora," with her strong body, her clear head, and her consecrated heart, ministering to the sick, instructing the well, and caring for the dying, than in the lives of all the sentimental hermits, transcendental philosophers, and snarling critics. It is a touching and beautiful fact that almost at this moment a monument is being unveiled to the memory of Sister Dora, and Florence Nightingale is invited to participate in the ceremonies. The beautiful letter whicR she has written in reply to the invitation is now being read in the newspapers of two continents, and the memoirs of these two women will hereafter be united by the tenderest of sisterly ties. Give us this stalwart sister Dora ! Give us the fragile and fragrant Havergal, whose songs, inspired by genius and Christian consecration, will be sung for many generations as samples of the culture which the world needs and which only the spirit of Christ and his cross can give ! True culture develops all the faculties of the soul. True culture must be comprehensive also, covering a very broad field. Not only all the faculties of the soul are to be developed, but true scholarship must include a very wide range of subjects in our day. Every man who is made is, in a true sense, self-made. The term scholar, unfortunately, is not synonymous with the term college graduate. 1 There are scholars who are not college graduates ; there are college graduates who are not scholars. Some graduates have not the habits, tastes, and instincts of scholars. It is not the business of a college to furnish brains. A college is a mill, and the character of the flour depends upon the qual-

1 At this point a few of the thoughts expressed in the first paper are repeated. They are retained because of their importance in their present connection. — [Ed.]

ity of the grain which, goes into the hopper. No college faculty can get something out of nothing. You can polish maple or marble ; you cannot polish cheese or chalk. It has been often and conclusively demonstrated that money cannot purchase capacity. The fool brayed in the college mortar, with however good a presidential pestle, is a fool still. Doubtless he will profit by the braying; doubtless some of his foolishness will have departed from him by the time of his graduation. If after the advantages of the college course there is so great stupidity as we sometimes see, how great would that stupidity be had there been no college course? The stupidity is in spite of, not because of, the training received. On the other hand, those who are scholars but not college graduates, are such in spite of their disadvantages. Given a college training and how much more complete, symmetrical, and polished their scholarship would be. The colleges simply help men to make themselves. The college training sharpens nature's tools and teaches their right use. You may with one hand hold on the grindstone a chisel with which you are to carve out fame and fortune ; you may turn the stone with the other hand, but if you could hold the chisel with both hands while the college faculty turned the stone, your chances for a fine-edged tool would be wonderfully improved.

This broad scholarship is needed to-day, not alone in professional and political, but also in business life. The relations of business life are more

D far-reaching to-day than ever before in the world's history. The world is both larger and smaller than ever before — larger in regard to its points of contact with our daily lives — smaller in regard to the facility with which the contact is make. Mr. Joseph Cook has said that there are now no hermit nations. Inspired by a unifying and sympathetic impulse the nations have risen above their former boundaries, and have mingled the results of their labor in one great ocean of national life and Christian endeavor. Steamships and railways make distant continents near neighbors ; telegraphs and telephones have made the world a whispering gallery. They have changed the business and the civilization of the century. They represent on a gigantic scale the marvels of each man's own nervous system.

With bowed head and palpitating heart, all Christendom, a few years ago, virtually stood by the bedside of General Garfield while he was fighting his terrible battle. In the capitals of the world his pulsebeats were counted ; princes and peasants listened with mingled hope and fear for his heart-throbs. Since that day all the world watched General Grant fighting the only enemy he could not conquer. Such kinship was impossible a generation ago ; such unity of knowledge and interest will do much to unite the world in the bonds of perpetual brotherhood. Every morning the ends of the world meet in the paper at our breakfast table. In this day merchants deal with peoples of various names, colors, languages, and conditions. Soon the Congo

CHARACTERISTICS OF TRUE CULTURE 5 I

Valley will be as familiar to our thought and speech as is the valley of the Mississippi to-day. Already goods are shipped from our ports to the corners of the earth ; already new branches of manufactures are preparing to enter these new and vast fields of commercial enterprise. India is as near us to-day as Liverpool was a generation ago. To-day the merchant and the manufacturer ought to know the history, the products, the needs, the habits and the conditions of at least half a dozen nations. To-day in the city of New York representatives of almost every nation under heaven may be met upon the street, and forty different languages and dialects are heard in a morning's walk. The same thing is true of London. The successful man of the past generation, if he should still follow the old methods, would be a helpless dwarf amid the tremendous giants of to-day.

Do you tell me that the business man of to-day does not need scholarship both vast and varied? Then I ask you, " Where have you lived? In what sunless hole have you burrowed, that you cherish such an opinion?" Our most kingly merchants, not to speak of professional men, find an ever-widening sphere for the employment of all their faculties in the tremendous rush and roar of the world-embracing possibilities of our time, in the march of trade, and in the general diffusion of knowledge in our day. Never was it more evident than at this hour that any scholarship, worthy of the name, must be comprehensive in the sense in which I am now

52 CURRENT QUESTJONS FOR THINKING MEN

using that term. No man may rightly lay claim to the honors of culture who does not cover a very wide and varied field in the use of his intellectual plow and harrow.

But scholarship must also be comprehensive in the sense of making a thorough examination of any particular topic. The time was when specialists were synonymous with quacks — when in the profession of medicine to speak of an oculist or an aurist, or of a man devoted to any one branch of medical practice, was confessedly or tacitly to speak of him as a charlatan, an empiric, a quack. That day is now past. Specialists are recognized with peculiar regard, and their opinions received with marked authority in their various professions. The field of inquiry is too large to be thoroughly canvassed by any one man, however vast and varied his erudition may be. However much we enlarge the boundaries of the known, we by so much, and by much more, enlarge the boundaries of the unknown. Every new discovery suggests a thousand truths not yet fully discovered ; every new acquirement impresses the student with the meagreness of his attainments, the paucity of his knowledge, and the blindness of his intellectual eyesight.

No man can know everything about everything. It is often a confession, not of ignorance, but of right knowledge and good common sense when a man says, " I do not know ; on that subject I am ignorant." The first step is taken in the direction of wide attainment when a man is distinctly conscious of his own ignorance. To draw the line then, between broad knowledge and special attainment is no easy matter. The true rule, perhaps, is that a man should know something of everything and everything of something. The farmer should be a chemist as far as a knowledge of soils and seeds and climates is concerned. So ought every mechanic and every professional man to be master of the special department of knowledge to which he devotes himself Let me urge you to be thorough ; to be able to speak with authority upon all the factors which enter into the problems with which your own life is specially concerned. In these three directions then, we earnestly urge that scholarship shall be comprehensive ; it must include all the faculties of the soul, it must cover a wide range of topics, and it must master all the facts of some one topic in order that it may claim the credit of comprehensiveness.

SECOND CHARACTERISTIC.

But let me remark, in the second place, that true culture must manifest itself in noble character. Culture is not an end in itself; it is the means to an end. That end is noble character. What is character? As the word implies, it is the man's distinctive mark. Reputation is what a man seems to be ; character is what a man is. Reputation is what men think we are ; character what God knows us to be. Reputation is seeming; character is being. There are circumstances under which men of good character may have a bad reputation ; there are cases also when men of good reputation may possess a bad character. Sometimes to be thought ill of by some people is the highest compliment ; you would be degraded if they thought well of you. But seeming and being cannot long contradict each other ; no man can long play the hypocrite. The being will soon give color to the seeming. What a man is in the sight of God, he will soon appear to be even in the sight of man. What is in the man must come out. No man falls suddenly. There is a sudden crash and the world is startled, but the man long leaned before he fell. The man's sin was long seen by God before the world discovered his character.

To-day character of high order is in constant demand. Whatever will tend to its cultivation is worthy of our earnest thought and continued endeavor. We are startled by the number of defalcations whose accounts fill the newspapers. Defaulters are found in high places, as well as in low ; they are found in the church as well as in the world. Defaulters are multiplying so rapidly that men sometimes ask, " Can honesty be found anywhere? " But let us not give way to pessimism of this sort. The world is not growing worse. The church was never more intelligent, benevolent, and consecrated than it is to-day. For every man who is a defaulter there are scores and hundreds and thousands who stand firm as a rock amid the strongest temptations. Men by the thousand can readily be found in banks, in offices, and in other positions of trust, who would rather die than betray any trust. You in Canada harbor some American merchants, aldermen, and others, who find it necessary for their convenience and comfort to live across the border ; but we have millions who do not come, except now and then you invite some of them ; and they go back whenever they choose without the company of a sheriff's officer. While you are thinking of one defaulter, do not forget the thousands of true and honest men who would rather be shot than defraud God or man.

Perhaps we have made too much of the devil. We owe him nothing but disrespect, contempt, and disobedience. But there is enough in the dishonesty practised to suggest earnest inquiry and to lead to earnest effort to secure character of a high order. Such character is wanted to-day as never before. Every man in God's world will, in the course of time, get all that he is worth. We have no sympathy with men who complain that they are not appreciated. There is no corner in the universe sufficiently obscure to hide a man of power ; God wants such men ; the world wants such men. The world seeks them ; God sends for them. They find their level ; some far above the position of the average man. God has a hook, in a different sense from that in which he had it in the nose of Sennacherib, in the nose of every man. God reaches out his hand after such men and says, "Come up higher," and they go. Now, culture, education, scholarship which does not develop character of the highest order, is not culture, education, scholarship of the highest order. We want the ripest products which all these influences can possibly produce.

We must remember that character of the highest order is not formed amid the rush of the street. The whole trend of college and church effort to-day is apt to be too much in the direction of work. The cry at our religious and educational conventions is, Work, work, work. The song we constantly hear is, "Work, for the night is coming" ; the text we frequently quote is, " A workman that needeth not to be ashamed " ; the command which we constantly utter is, "Son, go work in my vineyard." We love to represent our Christian life as a battlefield and the Christian as a soldier. There is truth in this representation ; there is in it a truth we must never forget ; a truth, on the contrary, which we must often and emphatically urge. Nevertheless this is not the whole truth. In the word of God we find constant reference to walking, growing, fruit-bearing. Amid the hurry and bustle of the present day we do not give sufficient time to the building of the noblest forms of character. Every life must have its time of secret communion with God, when it may receive in secret that which it shall bestow in public. Christ's life was spent partly in the closet and partly in the crowd ; partly in communion with God and partly in labor for man. He swept into the hemisphere of communion with God, receiving the Spirit without measure ; and he then swept into the hemisphere of active work, bestowing upon man blessings without measure. In proportion as we live over again Christ's life in this, as in all respects, we shall attain to the highest Christian possibilities, we shall develop the most symmetrical character. The physical life requires relaxation that it may enjoy wholesome exercise ; not less does the spiritual life require profound meditation and careful and consecrated Bible study. Like Martha many are cumbered with much serving ; we do not object to the much serving, but like Mary we must find time also to sit at the Master's feet. Sitting there we receive strength to run in the way of Christ's commandments. Hearing his word, we learn best how to speak with wisdom to men. Christian character is to be exalted by combining wholesome activity with reposeful contemplation.