God creates the material, and impresses upon it his own laws.
Man, in education, simply seeks to give those laws scope for action. The
uneducated person, by a favorite figure of the old classic writers, has
often been compared to the rough marble in the quarry; the educated to
that marble chiselled by the hand of a Phidias into forms of beauty and
pillars of strength. But the analogy holds good in only a single point.
As the chisel reveals the form which the marble may be made to assume,
so education unfolds the innate capacities of men. In all things else
how poor the comparison! how faint the analogy! In the one case you have
an aggregation of particles crystallized into shape, without organism,
life or motion. In the other, you have life, growth, expansion. In the
first you have a mass of limestone, neither more nor less than insensate
matter, utterly incapable of any alteration from within itself. In the
second, you have a living body, a mind, affections instinct with power,
gifted with vitality, and forming the attributes of a being allied to
and only a little lower than the angels. These constitute a life which,
by its inherent force, must grow and unfold itself by a law of its own,
whether you educate it or not. Some development it will make, some form
it will assume by its own irrepressible and spontaneous action. The
question, with us, is rather what that form shall be; whether it shall
wear the visible robes of an immortal with a countenance glowing with
the intelligence and pure affection of cherub and seraph, or through the
rags and sensual impress of an earthly, send forth only occasional
gleams of its higher nature.
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