Never Coming to the Knowledge by R. B. Thurber

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D.C. · Apr 1, 1909

Never Coming to the Knowledge

By R. B. Thurber

The great missionary who sewed tents to pay expenses once wrote to a young man who knew the Scriptures from his youth, about some people who are “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge.” This is the class who are very willing to wait, but not to work meanwhile. You have heard of being “comfortably sick.” This ever learning and never getting is a sort of comfortable stick-to-it-ive-ness, an agreeable patience. It is altogether possible for a person, especially a student in school, to find it easier to stick to a lesson than to get it or forget it. Stability without accomplishment is like trying to get to a distant point by constantly riding on a merry-go-round.

But how can one really be ever learning and yet not knowing? However paradoxical it may seem, it is nevertheless true. In the grammar class we would call learning a present active participle. It means present, active participation in the acquiring of knowledge. So the expression clearly indicates that progress is made toward knowledge by those who are ever learning. Then the advancement must be unmade as fast as it is made, or it is made in the wrong direction. In each separate lesson either the student has not really learned the lesson or has forgotten it.

There are several reasons why lessons are not really learned by students. Lack of concentration is one. It is safe to say that there is scarcely a lesson assigned by teachers in the academic and college grades that could not be mastered in half an hour were complete concentration brought to bear upon it. A focused mind can do wonders. But a concentrated intellect is developed by a concentrated will. Are you willing?

Another cause for studied but unimpressed lessons is what I will call acute incapacity; that is, the mind is capable enough in itself, but it is so nearly full of literary rubbish or passing-events trash that it will not hold any more than the surface glaze of a lesson. In truth,

the facts are treated by the mind just as it has learned to treat the bulk of its contents, and so they do not stick long enough, even with careful balance, to gravitate and fall into the teacher’s hands in the next class recitation, but slip quickly, to give room for more of the same kind that comes pouring in ad nauseam. And soon, as some one has said, truth goes in at one ear and out at the other because there is nothing between to stop it. The student always finds out, sometime, by experience that such a brain-sieve can not hold facts any better than it does fiction. But experience is a slow school; how much more sane it is to unload — unlearn — to make room for better things.

Lessons are forgotten because the underlying principles of each truth are not mastered. Principles are as trunks to every branch of learning. Principles learned build a “gray matter” brain cell, from which direct and related facts can always be secured. Bare facts do not seem to go farther than the nerves. Perhaps this is what makes nervous wrecks of the fact-crammers. There is a philosophy even in history, and other like memory studies. Fact is a nail driven through a board; reason is the clinch on the other side.

Lessons are forgotten because they are studied for the daily class recitation, and not to be recited in the life experience. A student should consider as a danger-signal a sigh of relief when that class recitation is over which has witnessed his being reproached for a poor lesson or for getting through on a “bluff.” In his case there is something wrong not only with the mind but also with the character. Each student should require of himself all that is required of any one in the class, else the lesson is not mastered. Answering correctly every question that is asked is not the sign of a perfect lesson. Each student leaving a recitation should have a mental or written note of every requirement which was met in the class better than he could meet it, and the deficiency should be made up before the next day’s lesson is touched. The beginning of such procedure would mark the end of “cramming” for examination.

No one, without “coming to the knowledge” every day, can hope to reach the acme of happiness and joy in knowing. The pagan philosopher, the evolutionist, the higher critic, the infidel, all are in the throes of “ever learning.” It remains for the Christian to enjoy the supreme satisfaction of “coming to the knowledge.” R. B. THURBER.