be devoured by a secret melancholy which breaks through all its
smiles and all its gayety and games?

But even one step farther our infidelity has gone. It appears that some
doubt is felt by good and wise men whether really the happiness
and probity of men is increased by the culture of the mind in those
disciplines to which we give the name of education. Unhappily too the
doubt comes from scholars, from persons who have tried these methods.
In their experience the scholar was not raised by the sacred thoughts
amongst which he dwelt, but used them to selfish ends. He was a profane
person, and became a showman, turning his gifts to a marketable use, and
not to his own sustenance and growth. It was found that the intellect
could be independently developed, that is, in separation from the man,
as any single organ can be invigorated, and the result was monstrous. A
canine appetite for knowledge was generated, which must still be fed but
was never satisfied, and this knowledge, not being directed on action,
never took the character of substantial, humane truth, blessing those
whom it entered. It gave the scholar certain powers of expression, the
power of speech, the power of poetry, of literary art, but it did not
bring him to peace or to beneficence.

When the literary class betray a destitution of faith, it is not strange
that society should be disheartened and sensualized by unbelief. What
remedy? Life must be lived on a higher plane. We must go up to a higher
platform, to which we are always invited to ascend; there, the whole
aspect of things changes. I resist the skepticism of our education and
of our educated men. I do not believe that the differences of opinion
and character in men are organic. I do not recognize, beside the class
of the good and the wise, a permanent class of skeptics, or a class of
conservatives, or of malignants, or of materialists. I do not believe
in two classes. You remember the story of the poor woman who importuned
King Philip of Macedon to grant her justice, which Philip refused: the
woman exclaimed, "I appeal:" the king, astonished, asked to whom she
appealed: the woman replied, "From Philip drunk to Philip sober." The
text will suit me very well. I believe not in two classes of men, but in
man in two moods, in Philip drunk and Philip sober. I think, according
to the good-hearted word of Plato, "Unwillingly the soul is deprived of
truth." Iron conservative, miser, or thief, no man is but b