Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/54

50 it well. Books, too, those “ships of thought” that sail majestic on through time and space, bear their rich treasure down to old and young, landing them upon every shore. Their magic influence reaches all who will open their arms. The blessing they bring may quicken the labourer's mind, and place him where he did not stand before. The thought of others stirs his thought. His lamp is lit at some great thinker's urn, and glitters with perennial glow. Toil demands his hands; it leaves his thought fetterless and free. To the instructed man his trade is a study; the tools of his craft are books; his farm a gospel, eloquent in its sublime silence; his cattle and corn his teachers; the stars his guides to virtue and to God; and every mute and every living thing, by shore or sea, a heaven-sent prophet to refine his mind and heart. He is in harmony with nature, and his education goes on with the earth and the hours. Many such there are in the lanes and villages of New England. They are the hope of the land. But these are the favoured sons of genius, who, under ill-starred circumstances, make a church and a college of their daily work. To all, as things now are, this is not possible. But when all men see the dignity of manual work, few will be so foolish as to refuse the privilege of labour, though many are now wicked enough to shrink from it as a burthen. Then it will be a curse to none, but a blessing to all. Then there will be time enough for all to live as men; the meat will not be reckoned more than the life, nor the soul wasted to pamper the flesh. Then some institution, not yet devised, may give the mass of men a better outfit of education, and art supply what nature did not give, and no man, because he toils with his hands, be forced to live a body and no more.

The education which our people need, apart from strength and skill in their peculiar craft, consists in culture of mind, of the moral and the religious nature. What God has joined can never safely be put asunder. Without the aid of practised moral principle, what mental education can guide the man? Without the comfort and encouragement of religion, what soul, however well endowed with intellectual and moral accomplishments, can stand amid the ceaseless wash of contending doubts, passions, interests, and fears? All partial education is false. Such as would