you that
the rounded rock marked with parallel scratches calls up as much poetry
in an ignorant mind as in the mind of a geologist, who knows that over
this rock a glacier slid a million years ago? The truth is that those
who have never entered upon scientific pursuits are blind to most of the
poetry by which they are surrounded. Sad indeed is it to see how many
men occupy themselves with trivialities, and are indifferent to the
grandest phenomena--care not to understand the architecture of the
heavens, but are deeply interested in some contemptible controversy
about the intrigues of Mary Queen of Scots are learnedly critical over a
Greek ode, and pass by without a glance that grand epic written by the
finger of God upon the strata of the earth!

If we examine the value of science as discipline, its priority is still
assured, whether for discipline of memory, or of judgment, or for moral
discipline. Also, the discipline of science is superior to that of our
ordinary education because of the religious culture that it gives.
Doubtless, to the superstitions that pass under the name of religion,
science is antagonistic; but not to the essential religion which these
superstitions merely hide; doubtless, too, in much of the science that
is current there is a pervading spirit of irreligion, but not in that
true science which has passed beyond the superficial into the profound.

Not science, but the neglect of science, is irreligious; devotion to
science is a tacit worship--a tacit recognition of worth in the things
studied; and by implication in their Cause. Only the genuine man of
science can truly know how utterly beyond not only human knowledge, but
human conception, is the Universal Power of which Nature and Life and
Thought are manifestations.

_II.--Intellectual Education_

While "believe and ask no questions" was the maxim of the church, it was
fitly the maxim of the schools. In that age men also believed that a
child's mind could be made to order, that its powers were to be imparted
by the schoolmaster; that it was a receptacle into which knowledge was
to be put and there built up after the teacher's idea. But now we are
learning that there is a natural process of mental evolution which is
not to be disturbed without injury; that we may not force on the
unfolding mind our artificial forms, but that psychology, like
economics, discloses to us a law of supply and demand, to which, if we
would not do harm, we must