Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/41

Rh anything, it is that men serve God with their mind, heart, and soul; and this, of course, demands an education of mind, heart, and soul, not only in lawyers, physicians, and clergymen, but in all the sons and daughters of Adam. Men are to seek this for themselves; the public is to provide it, not because a man is to fill this or that station, and so needs the culture, but because he is a man, and claims the right, under the great charter whereby God created him an immortal soul.

Now, it is true that we have, here and there, an instructed man, all his faculties awake and active, a man master of himself, and thus attaining his birthright, “dominion over all flesh.” But still the greater part of men and women, even here, are ignorant. The mark they aim at is low. It is not a maxim generally admitted, or often acted upon, that this world is a school; that man is in it, not merely to eat and drink, and vote, and get gain or honours (as many Americans seem to fancy), but that he is here, and to do all these things for the sake of growing up to the measure of a complete man. We have put the means for the end, and the end for the means.

Every one sees the change education makes in animals. We could not plough with a wild buffalo, nor hunt with a dog just taken savage from the woods. But here the advantage is not on the animal's side. His education is against his nature. It lessens his animal qualities, so that he is less a dog or a buffalo than he was before. With man the change it produces is greater still, for here it is not against nature. It enhances his human qualities, and he is more a man after it than before. All the difference between the English scholar, with his accomplishment and skill, and the English boor, who is almost an animal; all the difference between the wise and refined Brahmin, and the debased and enslaved Pariah; all the difference between the best educated men of Massachusetts and the natives of New Zealand, ignorant, savage, cannibal as they are, comes of this circumstance: one has had a better education than the other. At birth, they were equally of the kingdom of heaven. The same humanity burns in all hearts: the same soul ebbs and flows in all that are born of woman. The peculiarity of each man—slight and