A mind thus trained can enter into the very heart of life
and know it by experience.
=Things of the spirit.=--But education is a spiritual process, as we
have been told; and, therefore, education is without value unless it
touches the spirit. Indeed, it is only by the spirit that we may test
the quality of education. It is spirit that sets metes and bounds and
points the way to the fine things of life. A man may live in the back
alley of life or on the boulevard, according to the dictates of the
spirit. If his spirit cannot react to the finer things, his way will lie
among the coarse and bizarre. If he cannot appreciate the glory that is
revealed upon the mountain, he will gravitate to the lower levels. If
his spirit is not attuned to majestic harmonies, he will drift down to
association with his own kind. If he cannot thrill with pleasure at the
beauty and fragrance of the lily of the valley, he will seek out the
gaudy sunflower. If his spirit cannot rise to the plane of Shakespeare
and Victor Hugo, he will roam into fields that are less fruitful. The
spirit that is rightly attuned lifts him away from the sordid into the
realms of the chaste and the glorified; away from the coarse and ugly
into the realm of things that are fine and beautiful; and away from the
things that are mean and petty into the zone of the big, the true, the
noble, and the good. And so with body, mind, and spirit thus doing their
perfect work, he can, at least, look over into the promised land of
complete living.
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