Page:Education and Life; (IA educationlife00bakerich).pdf/219

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original and creative, and contribute to the world's insight. But the average youth needs all that the formal training of the schools can give him. When the student is once aroused by the sense of his privileges and duties, he will select no easy goal to attain. He will not be satisfied until he has learned the secrets of nature's processes, has examined his own nature, has made use of the recorded experience of the ages—thereby taking a giant stride in knowledge that he could not have taken alone—has given himself the power to help in the work of his own time.

Justice was regarded by Plato as the ground of social uprightness; Christian justice recognized the brotherhood of man, with all that follows in moral conduct; "moral ideals" for us has the same significance. This is not the place for the discussion of ethical theories, but it is of the highest importance for the young man, after wandering more or less vaguely over the field of ethical doctrines, to turn to the nature of his own being and find there written the supreme fact of moral obligation, with its implications of freedom of will, a personal God, and immortality of the soul.

Every man knows that even in his ordinary approvable acts he does not work to the end of pleasure, but that he has impulses that reach out in fellowship and compassion toward others, impulses that reach out toward the Truth and Beauty and Supreme Goodness of the world. Every man knows that he possesses a power to choose amongst and regulate his impulses; that such aims are to be employed as will conduce to the perfection of his being and of all human being; that his reward lies