n are secured, men are sure to remain low,
debased and grovelling.

It was the apprehension of this great truth which led Melancthon, 400
years ago, to declare--"Unless we have the scientific mind we shall
surely revert again to barbarism." He was a scholar and a classic, a
theologian and a philosopher. With probably the exception of Erasmus, he
was the most erudite man of his age. He was the greatest Grecian of his
day. He was rich "with the spoils of time." And so running down the
annals of the ages, he discovered the majestic fact, which Coleridge has
put in two simple lines:--

"We may not hope from outward things to win
The passion and the life whose fountains are within;"

which Wordsworth, in grand style, has declared,

"By the soul only the nations shall be free."

But what is this other than the utterance of Melancthon,--"Without the
scientific mind, barbarism." This is the teaching of history. For 2,000
years, Europe has been governed, in all its developments, by Socrates,
and Aristotle, and Plato, and Euclid. These were the great idealists;
and as such, they were the great progenitors of all modern civilization,
the majestic agents of God for the civil upbuilding of men and nations.
For civilization is, in its origins, ideals; and hence, in the loftiest
men, it bursts forth, producing letters, literature, science,
philosophy, poetry, sculpture, architecture, yea, all the arts; and
brings them with all their gifts, and lays them in the lap of religion,
as the essential condition of their vital permanance and their
continuity.

But civilization never seeks permanent abidence upon the heights of
Olympus. She is human, and seeks all human needs. And so she descends,
re-creating new civilizations; uplifting the crudeness of laws, giving
scientific precision to morals and religion, stimulating enterprise,
extending commerce, creating manufactures, expanding mechanism and
mechanical inventions; producing revolutions and reforms; humanizing
labor; meeting the minutest human needs, even to the manufacturing
needles for the industry of seamstresses and for the commonest uses of
human fingers. All these are the fruits of civilization.

Who are to be the agents to lift up this people of ours to the grand
plane of civilization? Who are to bring them up to the height of noble
thought, grand civility, a chaste and elevating culture, refinement, and
the impulses of irrepressible progress? It is to be done by