Page:The future of Africa.djvu/85

Rh has a physical existence, as well as a mind. Forgetfulness of this fact has greatly injured the cause of learning. Men have idly supposed that to cultivate manhood was to cultivate the brain merely. True, cultivation of men is the bringing out, harmoniously, all their powers—mental, moral, and physical: hence we shall fail in our attempted cultivation of manhood here, if we do not raise up and train useful, practical men. Our youth must be trained to be active, and useful, and enterprising. For of what use, I ask, will they be to the heathen, with all their Latin and Greek, and science and history, if they come up into life and society with hands of baby softness, be-booted and be-strapped, be-muffled and be-scented—so delicate and gentlemanly that they cannot handle a hoe or wield an axe, if needed, and with no heart, if they become missionaries or commissioners, to build a hut in the "bush" or to cook, with their own delicate hands, a meal of victuals. Out upon such creatures, I say, in a land like this! They are men-milliners, popin-jays, ladies-maids—or, as the poet paints them—

And these, too, are the men who bring learning and scholarship into ill-repute; not true scholars indeed, not men of erudition, not the men who, by close thought and laborious, painful study, seek the ground of things, but your dilettante students, your amateur scholars! For never, in all the world's broad history, has such ill desert fallen upon learning through the