It is we who sit at home with evil
who remember, I think, and are warned and pity.
*
Look back now, for a moment, on your own brief experience
of life; and although you lived it feelingly in your own
person, and had every step of conduct burned in by pains
and joys upon your memory, tell me what definite lesson
does experience hand on from youth to manhood, or from both
to age? The settled tenor which first strikes the eye is
but the shadow of a delusion. This is gone; that never
truly was; and you yourself are altered beyond recognition.
Times and men and circumstances change about your changing
character, with a speed of which no earthly hurricane
affords an image. What was the best yesterday, is it still
the best in this changed theatre of a to-morrow? Will your
own Past truly guide you in your own violent and unexpected
Future? And if this be questionable, with what humble,
with what hopeless eyes, should we not watch other men
driving beside us on their unknown careers, seeing with
unlike eyes, impelled by different gales, doing and
suffering in another sphere of things?
*
The problem of education is twofold: first to know, and
then to utter. Every one who lives any semblance of an
inner life thinks more nobly and profoundly than he speaks;
and the best teachers can impart only broken images of the
truth which they perceive.
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