for
self-culture. It is not simply preparation for a position, but
development in it, for which I plead. There is much said in this age
about education for a position, and this education is all right; the
more thorough the better. But the trouble is, too many seem to think
that this is all. Here is the ruinous mistake. There is a world of
difference between being educated _for_ a calling, and being educated
_in_ it. That may be obtained in schools and colleges; this is a
work of subsequent life. That is important; this is indispensable.
Without that, this may be a grand success; without this, that is next
to worthless. Many men are highly educated in their calling who were
never educated for it. This is self-culture in its true sense.

Nor is the culture for which I plead derived simply from books. These
we need, but we need them simply as helps. We should make them our
servants, not our masters. A "bookworm" is sometimes a very inferior
kind of a worm. Some men that the schools call highly educated rely so
much on books that they are nothing in themselves. They have no mind of
their own. They deal altogether in second-hand goods. We need to lay
aside our books, and study men and things--commence with God and
nature. We must learn to _think_. To think much. To think accurately.
To do our own thinking, not have it done for us. Without this, we shall
make but little of our advantages; with it, we rise superior to
advantages.

Neither am I contending that we should all strive for the "learned
professions." It is just the reverse. We want to elevate and ennoble
the _un_learned professions. The American people, at least, should
learn that the calling does not make the man. We need to dignify all
the honest and legitimate vocations by intellectual and moral culture.
We not only need to dignify labor by culture, but, by so doing, we need
to dignify the mass of our common humanity. Personal worth consists not
in what one does, but in what one is. Better be a good barber than a
poor doctor, a good shoemaker than a poor lawyer.

I would not be understood as claiming that men and women in all the
vocations in life should be cultured in all directions. In this age of
short and intense life this is not practicable. It might have done
before the flood, when men lived a thousand years, but it is not
adapted to the nineteenth century. Remember I am speaking with
reference to the masses. Men can not know everything, neither can they