Intellectual Without Moral Culture.
By Talmage
“KNOWLEDGE is power” for good if consecrated; but it is a power for evil if unrestrained and unguided by moral principle. Robespierre and Rousseau and Byron were illustrations of men with splendid intellect, but no moral culture. Better for them had they lived on the lowest round of ignorance than that they should have risen by their mental qualifications and cursed the world by their cruelties. We want something more than geographies and grammars and vulgar fractions to prepare our youth for good citizenship. The curse of the land to-day is the educated villains. These men know enough; they know everything; they know too much. But they have no moral restraints. Intelligence without some kind of moral principle is a plague. There is nothing more wonderful than a locomotive. There it stands, axle, piston-rods, crank, cylinders, driving-wheel, throttle-valve. You let the steam on. The machine starts. After it gets under full headway, the engineer jumps off. Now that useful machine becomes an instrument of destruction. There is nothing more beautiful than the human intellect when its faculties are in full play. How active and how mighty! But if there be no moral principle to guide, control, and engineer it, then it works one long line of ruin and desolation through all the communities where it marches. Ignorance is bad. But intelligence is worse if immoral. There is hardly anybody who makes a speech who does not refer to the wonderful things in Greece and Rome. Well, they had great philosophers and great poets and orators; but how about their morals? Why is it that when a man is traveling in Italy to-day with his family he is stopped at the door of the museum by the janitor, who tells him, “You may come in, sir, but not your family”? It is because the sculpture and paintings of those boasted times were abhorrent to all decency, and learned Greece and Rome, and splendid Corinth, and magnificent Pompeii, were worse than “Five Points” in their worst days. It is not what you knew, it is what you are. You might better multiply the moral and religious influences in your school rather than subtract from them. Instead of driving the Bible out, you should drive the Bible farther in.—Talmage.