human education mean? Does it not mean the
unfolding, the development of our faculties in such a way that in the
intellectual sphere we can come into contact with and possession of the
reality of things, the truth? Intellectually, is there any other object
of education than to fit a man to find the truth? And yet let me give
you a case. Here is a man, I take it as an illustration simply, not
because I have anything particular against the Catholic Church any more
than against any other body of believers, who has been through a
Catholic college, has made himself master of Catholic doctrine, become
familiar with theological and ecclesiastical literature; suppose he
knows all the languages, or a dozen of them, having them at his
fingers' ends. Do you not see that as a truth-seeker in a free world he
may not be educated at all? He may be educated, as we say, or trained
is the better word, into acceptance of a certain system of traditional
thought, that can give no good reason for itself; for his prejudices,
his loves and hates may be called into play. He may be trained into the
earnest conviction that it is his highest duty to be loyal to a
particular set of ideas.

Take the way I was educated. I grew up reading the denominational
reviews, and the denominational newspapers. I was taught that it was
dangerous and wicked to doubt. I must not think freely: that was the
one thing I was not permitted to do. I went to a theological school,
and had drilled into me year after year that such beliefs, about God
and man and Jesus and the Bible and the future world, were
unquestionably true, and that I must not look at anything that would
throw a doubt upon them. And I was sent out into the world graduated,
not as a truth-seeker, but to fight for my system, as a West Point
graduate is taught that he must fight for his country without asking
any questions.

Do you not see that this, which goes under the name of education,
instead of fitting a man to find the truth, may distinctly and
definitely unfit him, make it harder for him to find any truth except
that which is contained in the system which has been drilled into him
from his childhood up and year after year? Education, in order to fit a
man to be a truth-seeker, must be something different from this merely
teaching a man a certain system, a certain set of ideas, and drilling
him into the belief that he must defend these ideas against all
corners.

A good many people, then, who a