If the scales
could but fall from our eyes that we might behold the visions which our
food foretells, we could look down the vista of the years and see the
children grown to manhood and womanhood, happy and busy in their work of
enlarging and beautifying civilization.
=Agriculture the source of life.=--Agriculture is not the sordid thing
that our dull eyes and hearts would make it appear. In it we shall find
the romance of a Victor Hugo, the poetry of a Shelley or a Shakespeare,
the music of a Mozart, the eloquence of a Demosthenes, and the painting
of a Raphael, when we are able to interpret its real relation to life.
When the morning stars sang together they were celebrating the birth of
agriculture, but man became bewildered in the mazes of commercialism and
forgot the music of the stars. It is the high mission of the vitalized
school to lead us back from our wanderings and to restore us to our
rightful estate amid the beauties, the inspiration, the poetry, and the
far-reaching prophecies of agriculture. This it can do only by revealing
to us the possibilities, the glories, and the joy of life and causing us
to know that agriculture is the source of life.
=Synthetic teaching.=--The analytic teaching of agriculture will not
avail; we must have the synthetic also. Too long have we stopped short
with analysis. We have come within sight of the promised land but have
failed to go up and possess it.
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