rry that through. Now, to be downright stupid in a man's
natural intellects is sad enough, but to be stupid in the intellects of
the soul and of the spirit is far more sad. You will often see this if
you have any eyes in your head, and are not one of the stupid people
yourself. You will see very clever people in the intellects of the head
who are yet as stupid as the beasts in the stall in the far nobler
intellects of the heart. You will meet every day with men and women who
have received the best college education this city can give them, who are
yet stark stupid in everything that belongs to true religion. They are
quick to find out the inefficiency of a university chair, or a
schoolmaster's desk, but they know no more of what a New Testament pulpit
has been set up for than the stupidest sot in the city. The Divine
Nature, human nature, sin, grace, redemption, salvation, holiness, heart-
corruption, spiritual life, prayer, communion with God, a conversation
and a treasure in heaven,--to all these noblest of studies and divinest
of exercises they are as a beast before God. When you come upon a man
who is a sot in his senses and in his understanding, you expect him to be
the same in his spiritual life. But to meet with an expert in science, a
classical scholar, an author or a critic in letters, a leader in
political or ecclesiastical or municipal life, and yet to discover that
he is as stupid as any sot in the things of his own soul, is one of the
saddest and most disheartening sights you can see. Much sadder and much
more disheartening than to see stairs and streets of people who can
neither read nor write. And yet our city is full of such stupid people.
You will find as utter spiritual stupidity among the rich and the
lettered and the refined of this city as you will find among the ignorant
and the vicious and the criminal classes. Is stupidity a sin? asks
Thomas in his Forty-Sixth Question. And the great schoolman answers
himself, "Stupidity may come of natural incapacity, in which case it is
not a sin. But it may come, on the other hand, of a man immersing his
soul in the things of this world so as to shut out all the things of God
and of the world to come, in which case stupidity is a deadly sin." Now,
from all that, you must already see what you are to do in order to escape
from your inborn and superinduced stupidity. You are, like Old Honest,
to open your gross, cold, senseless heart to the Sun of Rig