Life is not monastic.  It is very lively.  We scarcely get, in all our post-collegiate life, a chance to sit and muse.  We go through sensations, experiences, and incongruities, which stir a sense of fun.  A man reads (I notice) in his seminary, St. Leo, Ad Flaeirmum, and makes his first pastoral call on a woman who proudly brings out her first baby for him to see. Ad Flaeirmum indeed!  What does St. Leo tell the youth to say?

What should be breathed into a man in the seminary, is not the mere facts of ecclesiastical history, but the warm pulsating currents of human life; the profound significance of the founding and the progress of the Church; a deep psychological understanding of human desires, motives, joys, ambitions, griefs; the relentlessness of sin; the help and glory of Redemption; the quickening of the Christ; the vigor and the tenderness of faith.  Coincident with these must be a growth in depth and dignity of life.  No one likes to take spiritual instruction from men who are themselves crude, foolish, sentimental, or conceited.  Many social snags on which young ministers are sure to run, are simply the rudiments of social conduct, as practised by the world.  Noble manners are one’s personal actions as influenced and guided by the great behavior of the race.  Under the impulse of ideals, much that is untoward or superficial in one’s bearing will disappear.  It is impossible to think as noble men and women have thought—­to dream, love, and work as they have dreamed, loved, and wrought—­and not have pass into one’s mien the high excellence of such lives.

The first education is spiritual.  Until mind and heart are swept by the spirit of God, chastened, purified, ennobled, and inspired, vain is all the learning of the schools!  To this end, there should be a more deeply spiritual atmosphere in our seminaries, less of the mere academic impulse.  In every age, there are men just to come in contact with whom is a benediction and a help for years.  Such a man was Mark Hopkins, Noah Porter, James McCosh.  Such the leading men in every seminary should be.

The plan of education must be of principles, not of facts.  The university research-men gather facts, and scientific men everywhere collect, analyze, and classify them.  But each small department of human learning—­each minute branch in that department—­needs a lifetime for the mastery of that one theme.  Hence the work of the college is quite apart from that of the school of theology.  It is the place of the school of theology, not to ignore the New Learning, but to group, upon the basis of a thorough college training, certain great interests and pursuits of mankind, in such a way as to afford, by means of them, a leverage for spiritual work.

After all is said and done, it is not the grammar-detail of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic dialects that makes a minister’s power.  It is the strange language-culture of the race which should enter in; the inner vitality of words, the beauty of poetic cadences, the strong flow of rhythm, noble themes, great thoughts, impressive imagery and appeal.  We should know the Bible as literature, not as one knows a story-book, or a dialect-exercise, but as one knows the melodies and memories of childhood.