I assume that
man is a calculating animal, not a thinking one.

And the point of this sermonette is that truth is not monopolized by
universities and colleges; nor must we expect much from those who parade
degrees and make professions. It is one thing to love truth and it is
another thing to lust after honors.

The larger life--the life of love, health, self-sufficiency, usefulness
and expanding power--this life in abundance is often taught best out of
the mouths of babes and sucklings. It is not esoteric, nor hidden in
secret formulas, nor locked in languages old and strange.

No one can compute how much the bulwarked learned ones have blocked the
path of wisdom. Socrates, the barefoot philosopher, did more good than
all the Sophists with their schools. Diogenes, who lived in a tub,
searched in vain for an honest man, owned nothing but a blanket and a
bowl, and threw the bowl away when he saw a boy drinking out of his
hand, even yet makes men think, and so blesses and benefits the race.
Jesus of Nazareth, with no place to lay his tired head, associating with
publicans and sinners, and choosing his closest companions from among
ignorant fishermen, still lives in the affections of millions of people,
a molding force for good untold. Friedrich Froebel, who first preached
the propensity to play as a pedagogic dynamo, as the tides of the sea
could be used to turn the countless wheels of trade, is yet only
partially accepted, but has influenced every teacher in Christendom and
stamped his personality upon the walls of schoolrooms unnumbered. Then
comes Richard Wagner, the political outcast, writing from exile the
music that serves as a mine for much of our modern composing, marching
down the centuries to the solemn chant of his "Pilgrims' Chorus";
William Morris, Oxford graduate and uncouth workingman in blouse and
overalls, arrested in the streets of London for haranguing crowds on
Socialism, let go with a warning, on suspended sentence--canceled only
by death--making his mark upon the walls of every well-furnished house
in England or America; Jean Francois Millet, starved out in art-loving
Paris, his pictures refused at the Salon, living next door to abject
want in Barbizon, dubbed the "wild man of the woods," dead and turned to
dust, his pictures commanding such sums as Paris never before paid; Walt
Whitman, issuing his book at his own expense, publishers having refused
it, this book excluded from the mails, as Wanamak