Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/24

14 thaumaturgical aids. It is beginning to hear God in the still small voice; not in the tempest, or in the earthquake, or the fire; not in the marvelous, the extraordinary, the irrational, but in the quiet and familiar facts of Nature and of life. The vulgar mind asks for a sign, a wonder; but science has no sign, no wonder to show. It points to the simplest fact. Its relation toward the old theology is like that of Elisha toward Naaman. When Naaman came to the prophet to be cured of his leprosy, he expected Elisha to do some wonderful thing, some miracle. "Behold, I thought, He will surely come out to me, and stand, and call on the name of the Lord his God, and strike his hand over the place, and recover the leper." Instead of which the prophet simply told him to go and wash seven times in the Jordan and be clean. "My father," said his servant to the indignant Naaman, "if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? how much rather then, when he saith to thee, Wash, and be clean?"

The leprosy of the miraculous which taints men's minds is to be got rid of in the same way: wash and be clean in the current of the sweet-flowing Nature that is always near at hand, and that is always and everywhere the same.



HE recent action of the Harvard College authorities, in striking Greek from the list of studies required for the degree of A. B. marks an era in the history of college education in this country. The long struggle, which has been carried on at times with much bitterness between the classical and modern party, has been distinctly advanced one stage toward a final settlement. The adherents of the classical course have strenuously claimed for it a marked superiority over all others, and have uniformly resisted any attempt to change or supplant it. The friends of the new studies have as vigorously contended that it is perfectly possible to construct a curriculum which, while omitting some of the specific subjects before included and substituting others for them, should still as fully deserve the name liberal as the old course.

The struggle has assumed different forms at different times. At one period it was simply an attempt on the part of those who thought modern subjects worthy of recognition beside the antiquities to secure for them some place in the college curriculum. This demand, modest as it was, was resisted with the same obstinacy as that which has characterized the opposition to later and far more sweeping demands. It was a great day for American education when modern subjects, such as the natural and physical sciences, history, English and other modern 