racter is formed
very early, very shortly before the boy leaves the high school. Just how it
is formed I do not know, but I know one thing, that while I cannot tell
anything about how successful a man will be intellectually in life from
what he does in college, or, sometimes, I cannot tell very much about how
large he will grow mentally, I know that boy will not rise very much higher
morally than he stands in college when you send him there. If, then, he has
secured a moral training and influence, I firmly believe he will stay so.
If he does not come to us in that shape the probability is that he never
will change for the good, but if he is filthy he will remain filthy still.
His character is made very largely in the high school.

How can you reach it? I think you can reach it a good deal through
literature. I do not see how anybody can read Mr. Hawthorne or Mr. Emerson,
and not long to be a gentleman, and feel as if he would like to be worthy
to kiss the hem of the garment of those literary gentlemen. You can read
history. You can make history a dreary chronicle. You can learn of kings
who never ought to have been born, and when they died, when they ought to
have been dead fifty years before, and all the long list of battles fought
which never ought to have been fought. You can make it just such a weary
chronicle. You do not, nowadays, thank fortune; I have seen teachers that
did. Or you can make that history the Eleventh Chapter of Hebrews, and you
can write your own Eleventh Chapter of Hebrews, if you will, for that
chapter never was intended to be finished; and if you cannot add to it with
your pioneer history of those who fought their way across the plains here
fifty or more years ago, then you are teaching history to mighty little
effect to this generation here in Utah. The whole story is just this, if
you can saturate your pupils with the character of just such men and women
as that, then you have trained a generation of heroes and nobody can spoil
them.

That is what, it seems to me, Mr. Martineau means in that dark passage, "We
shall never have a proper system of education until we have a proper
religion." We are a good deal lacking in the study of the Bible nowadays.
We go to it to prove the text, to "break the scales" of our adversaries,
and for other purposes. I do not use it for that purpose myself. If you
will read that old book until you can walk the street arm in arm with
Gideon and David and Jepthah and