Page:Logic Taught by Love.djvu/70

66 unacquainted with Shakspere, or a Jew who has not read Isaiah.

And the vicious system which is sweeping away the frame-work of association by which we are connected with the past, is only consistent in its folly, in that it provides no substitute whereby the individual child may be connected with its own past. As soon as a child has passed an Examination in a certain "standard," he casts aside that standard, and learns something different. There is no formula which is solemnly repeated every day or every week throughout his school career. Suicidal blindness could no further go.

We may sum up the reflections suggested by the Logique of Gratry, by saying that the feverish feebleness of ephemeral Scientism is a part of that grand process of Natural Selection by which irreverence, impiety, and conceit are, in each age, weeded out, to leave room for something more worthy to endure. Excessive specialization is always more or less idolatrous. Those who alternate an intelligent interest in the Science of their own day with seasons of pious meditation on the aspirations of the mighty dead, renew their strength like young eagles, and their days shall be long in the land. They shall inherit the possessions of time-serving idolaters. They shall attract peoples that they know not, and nations who knew them not shall seek them; and great shall be the peace of their children; for such is the heritage of the servants of the Lord.