ke. To know all religions is to escape slavery to any. In studying
the development of races these boys saw that a certain type of religion
fits a certain man in a certain stage of his evolution, and so perhaps
to that degree religion is necessary. An ethnologist is never a Corner
Grocery Infidel. The C.G.I. is very apt to be converted at the first
revival, outrivaling all other "seekers," and when warm weather comes,
falling from grace and dropping easily into scofferdom.

The Humboldts, like Thoreau, never had any quarrel with God, and they
were never tempted to go forward to the Mourners' Bench.

Origin and destiny did not trouble them; predestination and
justification by faith were not even in their curriculum; foreordination
and baptism were to them problems not to be taken seriously.

By studying religions in groups and incidentally, they learned to
distinguish the fetish in each. They read Greek mythology side by side
with Judean mythology and noted similarities. The intent of Tutor Campe
was to give these boys a scientific education. Science is only
classified commonsense. To be truly scientific is to know
differences--to distinguish between this and that. Every successful
farmer has traveled a long way into science, for science deals with the
maintenance of life. To know soils, animals and vegetation is to be
scientific.

But when the average farmer learns to transmute compost into grass and
grain, and these into beef, he usually stops, content. To be a scientist
in the true sense, one must love knowledge for its own sake, and not
merely for what it will bring on market-day, and so the Humboldts were
led on through the stage of wanting to make money, to the stage of
wanting to know the why and wherefore. It will be seen that the
education of the Humboldts was what the Boylston Professor of English at
Harvard calls "faddism, or the successful effort at flabbiness." Our
Harvard friend thinks that education should be a discipline--that it
should be difficult and vexatious, and that happiness, spontaneity and
exuberance are the antitheses and the foes of learning. To him grim
earnestness, silence, sweat and lamp-smoke are preferable to sunshine
and joyous, useful work so wisely directed that the pupil thinks it
play. He believes that to be sincere we must be serious. In these
latter-day objections there is nothing new. Socrates met them all;
Rousseau heard the cry of "fad"; Heyne, Pestalozzi, Campe, Knuth and
Fr