the London
Lodges you should not try to take a leaf out of our French neighbor's
book, and why one Lodge at least should not try, if only for one six
months, to bring to that Lodge some leader in the world of thought,
who shall tell it what he believes, and explain the lines of his work.
If you could persuade specialists along the many lines of study,
religious and philosophical, to give you the fruits of their work, you
would learn more rapidly, you would learn the spirit of a school in a
more satisfactory manner, than when you are only studying books, and
then giving out the books you have read. You value, and rightly value,
the knowledge that Mr. Mead brings you along his special lines of
study, but why should you not have that same advantage similarly from
others who follow other lines of thought, and would speak similarly
from first-hand knowledge? There is a life in it that there never is
in second-hand knowledge, a vigor and strength in it that you can
never get when it has only been learned second-hand, and then poured
forth. Men who study deeply are glad to find audiences who are willing
to listen to the results of their study, and who will give them glad
hearing when they come out into the world from the study to tell what
by labor and toil they have learned. And so I suggest that some of you
should see whether you might not make your Lodges more valuable if,
instead of always going round the same wheel of a few local lecturers,
you tried to win to each locality now and again a really learned and
well-trained man, and then, with your own Lodge as a nucleus of
hearers, gather round them others also who would be only too glad of
the opportunity that your Lodge would give in the place where it
happens to be. You have Lodges in the suburbs, Lodges in the towns
outside the area of London, and how glad many of these would be, if
you made yourselves the channels for knowledge of that sort to be
poured out amongst them. There is one line of work you might well take
up, and the country Lodges might do the same, winning down from London
now and again some thinker who would come and give the benefit of his
study; and if you were known all over England as the places where such
knowledge might be gained, and the bringers of such within the reach
of your fellow-townsmen, the Society would profit by your labor as
well as those who immediately benefit by the effort. And wherever you
deal with the study of a religion, learn it