The prison mirror. [volume] (Stillwater, Minn.) 1887-1894, 1891-09-10
What Is EducatfOn?

The feebleSt thing God ever makes is an
infant man. the babe. He does not know
how to see. nor to feel, nor to hear, nor to
walk. nor to reason; he does not know any,
thing. He is less capable than the infant
of any other one of the animal creation. He
can simply coo and kick and cry. That is
the one extreme. At the other extreme is a
Newton. who reaches out his hand and
takes the planets in his palms and weighs
them; tells you what are the constituent
elements of yonder blazing sun; reads the
message of the falling fruit and discovers
the secret force that binds all the worlds in
one magnificent system. What is the diff
ference between the babe in his cradle and
the astronomer in his observatory? The
path that has been trOdden is education.
And all the processes of life are educating.
The family begins the education of the child:
the school takes it up when the family
drops it; life takes it up when the school and
family drop it; while the Church takes the
questions of moral life and of his relation to
God and to eternity throughout childhood,
youth, and manhood.
Education is character. building; 1t is man.
making; and it we take education in it's
large. profound sense we shall be able to see
that all true education promotes true and
Bacon. lis power" knowledge IS good for
nothing it it is not power; it amounts to
naught. AS we cultivate the soil that we
may get fruit in harvest, so we cultivate the
mind that we may get fruit in action and in
life. So put again the question which 1
ask you to look at with me, How shall we
cultivate this mind of ours so as to get fruit
in action, in life. in character? shall not
attempt, in the brief time which may prop
erly occupy, to cover the whole ground of
education. but l shall ask you to look at it
with me in three branches, in science. in
literature. and in history.
Nature is vast and magnificent machine
stored full of sublime forces. Science
teaches us how to lay our hands upon these
forces and make them Obedient to US; it is
because science has taught us the laws of
nature that we can make them do our bid
ding. But nature is more than machine;
nature is also book. In its pages are writ
ten transcendent truths. To study nature
is not merely to learn the laws and forces
which we can make to grind our flour for US.
or transport us across continent or flash
intelligence to us under the depths of the
sea. TO study nature is also to understand
what has been written in this book, what is
revealed in the pages of this book. We
come to nature as we come to the HERO
glyphs in ancient lands, strange inscriptions
which we study for a while aud out of
which. by and by. bit by bit. make out some
old history. So we come to the footprints
of the Creator in the rocks; to the record of
life long gone by inscribed in carbonifer-
GUS strata. So we come to the record of
the activities God has in the world to day,
in flower. in herb, in tree. in manifold mani
testatiOns; and as we look to see what it is
that is written in this book. we draw aside
the veil and behold the soul that palpitates
beneath it.-Rev. Lyman Abbot in The
ChatauOuan