Where Shall We Go for Our Education? by E. C. JAEGER

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Mar 12, 1908

Where Shall We Go for Our Education?

By E. C. JAEGER

E. C. JAEGER

ONE reason why God's true church, both here and in eternity, dwells in unity is that every man shall know the Lord: “for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord.”

Through faith, we know God. Rom. 5: 1, 2. Then faith is necessary for salvation. How does faith come?—“Faith cometh by hearing.” Rom. 10: 17. But what shall we hear?—If we are of God, we hear his words, and through them have faith. John 8: 47. If, then, we wish our youth in our schools and colleges to “grow in grace” and in the knowledge of God, from what source shall they draw their knowledge? It is essential that we give them as food for thought and meditation only the best of literature, and the best can be no less than that given by the great Master of wisdom, Jehovah, the God of gods. In his Word there lies the best subject-matter we can use as a basis for our studies. In its sacred pages lies the world's greatest literature, second to none. As a work of literature the Bible stands complete in every way. In contradistinction to a great share of literature, it contains only the purest and most elevating types of thought.

Richard G. Moulton, professor of literature in English in the University of Chicago, and late university extension lecturer (Cambridge and London), most

pertinently says: “It is one of the curiosities of our civilization that we are content to go for our liberal education to literatures which, morally, are at an opposite pole from ourselves,—literatures in which the most exalted tone is often an apotheosis of the sensuous, which degrade divinity not only to the human level, but to the lowest level of humanity. Our hardest social problem being temperance, we study in Greek the glorification of intoxication; while in mature life we are occupied in tracing law to the remotest corner of the universe, we go, at school, for literary impulse to the poetry that dramatizes the burden of hopeless fate. Our highest politics aim at conserving the arts of peace; our first poetic lessons are in an Iliad that can not be appreciated without a bloodthirsty joy in killing. We seek to form a character in which delicacy and reserve shall be supreme, and at the same time are training our taste in literature which, if published as English books, would be seized by the police. . . . Prudish fears may be unwise, but there is no need to put an embargo upon decency. It is surely good that our youth, during the formative period, should have displayed to them . . . a people dominated by an utter passion for righteousness, a people” in “whom ideas of purity, of infinite good, of universal order, of faith in the irresistible downfall of nations,” reigned supreme. The Hebrew people were the only people who had a high moral and spiritual ideal. The deities of all the other nations, and hence their devotees, were either non-moral or immoral. With such conceptions of God, what could we expect but that their literature should abound in all that is immoral, lustful, dishonest, deceitful, and supremely selfish? But over against all these literatures, place the Bible, freighted with its ideas of love, purity, and holiness. Looking at its sacred pages, the student can not but imbibe the spirit of its holiness. Hence it is not surprising that Ruskin should say, “All that I have taught of art, everything that I have written, every greatness that has been in any thought of mine, whatever I have been in my life, has simply been due to the fact that when I was a child, my mother daily read with me a part of the Bible, and daily made me learn a part of it by heart.”

But we go to the Bible not for literature alone; it is God's Word, his great, unfailing guide, chart, compass, his message to men of a salvation proffered and needed, his revelation of himself, his character, his purpose on our behalf. It is a mirror in which we see our own imperfections and sins, and it reveals to us also God's remedy therefor. It contains the only solution of the great problem of good and evil. More than that, it contains God's last message to this world before the culmination of its history. It is worth while to study it; it is worth while to send our children to schools where it is taught.

Riverside, Cal.