Page:Jesuit Education.djvu/428

408 in reading and writing; but this last is exactly what they need. From this it appears that it was in part disadvantageous to replace theologians in the gymnasia by philologians and mathematicians, a change which for a long time was wished for, undoubtedly not without good reasons. The theologian, owing to his whole training, had a tendency towards caring for the souls; an interest in the whole man was the centre of his calling, – if indeed he was an honest theologian, – not an interest in science, nor an interest in the student as student. Everything leads the theologian and the true philosopher to be an educator; the scholar, the learned specialist, may content himself with being an instructor. Add to this that the theologian through his studies was everywhere led to view things philosophically. And, after all, it is philosophy and religion alone that impel a man to communicate what he knows. He who has no philosophic views of life and of the world, has nothing to communicate; it is only the relation to some such ultimate object which gives learning pedagogical power and motives. Be it remembered that the man who says this is no ecclesiastic, but a layman, one of the foremost professors of the University of Berlin.

In his latest important work, he speaks still more emphatically on the drawbacks and dangers that menace teaching, even in the university, from scholarship. The professor, he says, considers himself in the first place not so much a teacher as a scholar, as the man