The training of the soul is scarcely recognised as any proper part of public education. Nor is the place of the public teacher always efficiently supplied in the home. We seem to expect that our children should do well naturally.
1 We are sometimes greatly pained when we detect in our young children pride, cruelty, falsehood, dishonesty, selfishness, avarice, and other vices ; but it is a mistake to lay this fact too much to heart and to begin prophesying evil concerning them. Beginning with the piano, children make such sad work of it; when they first try a pen, the characters are exceedingly ambig- uous and the page liberally blotted ; and when for the first time they essay some task in art, the work of their pencil is utterly grotesque. But we do not therefore despair of them, and write bitter things against them ; they were sent to school to learn, and we reasonably hope that by and by their senses will be exercised and developed, that they will shed their barbarisms, and take a worthy place with scholars and artists. They must learn goodness as they learn music, mathematics, languages, and art.
But is not the education of the soul the same thing as the education of the mind ? That is just another way of saying, is not cleverness goodness ? And we know that cleverness is not always goodness. On the contrary, great intellectual gifts are often found associated with great moral vices. The intellectual and moral organs are so closely related that it is impossible to separate them in thought; yet the light of the one is often eclipsed by the darkness of the other.
IF Astronomers have recently made very interesting discoveries respecting what are known as binary or companion stars. They tell us that the two stars are in close proximity ; indeed, they are so close together that no telescope could separate their images ; and yet one of them is dark and the other brilliant. The two orbs are intimately related, and revolve round each other at slight distances ; yet whilst one is bright the other is dark, and the dark star is perpetually eclipsing its luminous companion.^
^ It is easy to understand the failure of " goody goody "
,' , ^ The Bane arid the Antidote, p. 168.
ISAIAH 13
literature. It is "goody goody" rather than good, because it means well, but is not true either in the lower real or higher ideal sense. Its minor heroes pale and are ineffective, while George Eliot's Adam Bede, and Mary Garth, and Dinah live with us like friends, and move us by their virtues, — while the heroic self-devotedness of Jean Valjean, and the infinite goodness of the good Bishop in Les Misdrables, shine in our minds and hearts as beacon lights of virtue, made visible in the atmosphere of genius. Thus, in order that the examples of literature may work within the mind, the literature must be good in the literary as well as in the ethical sense.^
II.
How then are we to learn to do well?
I. We need Power. We need the gift, the genius. The man who has no music in him will never learn to be a musician. Those who visit the chapel in Milan which contains Leonardo da Vinci's fresco of the Last Supper see a copy of it first on the wall opposite the entrance door. But when they have seen the original on the wall at the end of the building, they have no hesitation in preferring it. The copy shows traces of careful workmanship, but the original has the stamp of genius.
IT Sir Joshua Eeynolds was taken by a friend to see a picture. He was anxious to admire it, and he looked it over with a keen and careful but favourable eye. "Capital composition; correct drawing; the colour, tone, chiaroscuro excellent; but — but — it wants, hang it, it wants — That!" snapping his fingers; and, wanting "that," though it had everything else, it was worth nothing.2
IF I once knew a man who had apparently no ear for music. Possessing every opportunity for travel and culture, he resented the fact that others enjoyed what was a closed world to him. So he set to work to study music from the foundation. He became so expert that he could take to pieces a Wagner opera and recompose its motifs. He enjoyed hearing such an opera rendered, but his pleasure involved scarcely any appreciation of music. It was the pleasure accompanying the intellectual process of analysis and synthesis, the kind of joy one has in work- ing a difficult problem in calculus ; but the man remained almost as deaf to music as before he undertook the course of training.^
* S. Bryant, Short Studies in Character, p. 71. ^ John Brown, Rah and his Friends, p. 392.
• E. H. Griggs, Moral Education, p. 22.
14 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
The man of genius, we say, has " the gift." The power to do well is also a gift.
This, nor gems, nor stores of gold. Nor purple state, nor culture can bestow ; But God alone, when first His active hand Imprints the secret bias of the soul.
Or, to put it in another way, as the poet is born, not made, so we must be born again before we learn to do well. " The wages of sin is death ; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." St. Paul says, " I learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content" He does not say, " I have learned," as though it had been the result of daily discipline ; he goes back to the moment of the vision of Christ. " It pleased God to reveal his Son in me," and I learned that day to be content. It flashed upon him, says E. M. Pope,^ in the great moment of his history. When he knew the power of Christ's resurrection, the true explanation of life dawned upon him ; the world suddenly wore a new expression.