THE TEACHER I HAD

I am passing briefly through the educational period of my life. It was relatively unimportant. Textbooks may furnish a good setting-up exercise for the strengthening of the mind; but if one takes them seriously, or imagines they furnish him with the things he should know along the way he must go, they are injurious. It is a fearful thing to be stitched up and certified in a common-school education and later sold out of a university into the markets for what you are worth or not worth to the world. You have really no wisdom of your own. Your mind is a short or long pattern of other men’s thoughts, theories, and convictions. You aren’t anything but an addled egg of information, or a good one that must be hatched later into a mind of your own.

I am not opposed to education, you understand, but to the way we get it. The best ones in my opinion are obtained as a man makes his own living, by work and experience. I would rather learn from a great man or woman traveling a wind-swept road than to study all the textbooks in a school taught by a little fellow who knows the whole course. This is my objection to schools, all the way from the primary grades through the universities. The teachers may be scholars, but they are rarely great men. They have nothing of themselves to impart that is worth emulating. If so they do not impart it. Teaching is a business, not a process of inspiration.

The teachers I had must have been amazingly patient with me, but never in the way of discipline. I reeked with learning in those days; I was at the puppy-leg stage of my intellectual development, not steady in my mental wobblings, but ravenous for the bones of other men’s thoughts and too much absorbed to practice the pranks of the average young person in school.

I read more Latin than now is required in a college course, but it was only a way I had of making the ancient dust fly through Virgil, Horace, and the rest of those orators and poets who lay so safely buried centuries deep in their fame. I doubt if I dealt honestly with the moods and tenses of their verbs. There was some mystery about the dative case which I never tried to fathom. If I derived any benefit from these remarkably free translations, it was the practice I had in the valiant and unscrupulous use of words for translating my own thoughts later on. However it may be for others, this has been for me more difficult than translating the most obtuse Latin sentence. Horace was dead and could not protest; but being alive and exacting, I fared worse at my own hands. To find the right words for an idea that ought to have wings and tail feathers is an art I have never mastered. But if by chance one such thought does rise living and winged, I have an inkling of how the Lord must have felt when the first lark He made rose upon its wings with a song in its throat.

No human has the right to feel so gratified with his own performance, but our real feelings are rarely governed so strictly by modesty as we pretend they are when another man praises us. Modesty is often the hand we throw up to ward off his smashing blow if he should suspect how conceited we are. What I mean is that thoughts really are miracles, and it gives you a secret sensation of amazement and joy to get one of the things out of the far reaches of wisdom, disentangled from your past and your hereafter and set down in a few simple words which bequeath it to mankind.

I have done a lot of presumptuous thinking along this line, sneaking around the outer edges of creation, trying to stretch up to sensations not really lawful to know. Sometimes, taking a look above and abroad in a star-blossoming night, I miss the prideful humility of David when he exclaimed, ‘When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man that thou visitest him?’ What I am tempted to wonder is how the Almighty feels when a brand-new star slips out into his infinities and swings obedient forever to the first sun that draws it. And how does He take it when one of these stars He has ordained wobbles in its orbit and shoots off into space until it is dissolved like a dust ball?

I do not suppose it makes much difference. The thing is not wasted, only a trifle more dust to be gathered in passing by the other planets. Some time has elapsed since we have had a certified measurement of the circumference of the earth. Apt as not it is a much larger heavenly body than it used to be, or smaller, packed tighter from revolving so fast for so many million years. We cannot rise far enough above it or scratch deep enough into it to find out much about it, and our thoughts remain as far from His thoughts as the East is from the West, and God still is the name of what we do not know, but must believe to live. Still, I have this hankering after the streaming glories of His mind. I do not care a thing about being a little lower than the angels and crowned with glory. These are competitive values. What I want is the power to think myself into the order and majesty of His peace, so filled with energy and what we call love, which undoubtedly must be the law of the whole thing.

Prophets always look ahead when they prophesy. No man can look behind him and tell what might have happened, because what did happen has obscured the view. I have no idea what kind of mind and life I might have had if I had enjoyed the same religious freedom in my youth that I had in choosing the texts I studied. My guess now is that I should have been a very different person, and not nearly so legible morally. Still, if I had had more religious liberty during these formative years, I might have escaped that tightening of the conscience into a sense of guilt from which I have suffered most of my life.