Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/469

Rh bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, "I won't count this time!" Well! he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less. Down among his nerve-cells and fibers the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptatontemptation [sic] comes. Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out. Of course, this has its good side as well as its bad one. As we become permanent drunkards by so many separate drinks, so we become saints in the moral, and authorities and experts in the practical and scientific spheres, by so many separate acts and hours of work. Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the final result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning, to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out. Silently, between all the details of his business, the power of judging in all that class of matter will have built itself up within him as a possession that will never pass away. Young people should know this truth in advance. The ignorance of it has probably engendered more discouragement and faint-heartedness in youths embarking on arduous careers than all other causes put together.



ET US now turn our attention to those higher seminaries of learning, which, though often assisted by public funds, or patronized in one way or another by the state, are not exclusively state institutions. Wherever a college or university happens to be under state control, precisely the same principles should obtain regarding the teaching of religion as we have found applicable in the case of inferior schools. Indeed, whether the institution be public or private, these principles equally apply, but there are some differences in situation of which we must take note.

Undoubtedly a religious organization has and should have the right to found and maintain schools to educate the young into its beliefs. Most of the New England colleges were established primarily to train 