ll always appeal to a
certain section whose minds are correspondingly unpleasant." We prefer
the "pure joy" gospel, as being nearer the truth: for spirit is ever
pointing the vision upward to what we may become, instead of allowing it
to grovel around in the very unpleasant circumstances in which some
people are liable to find themselves. The outward vision is transient,
the inner vision can build eternal realities. "Are we to beg and cringe
and hang on the outer edge of life,--we who should walk grandly? Is it
for man to tremble and quake--man who in his spiritual capacity becomes
the interpreter of God's message,--the focus of Divine Light?"[19]

[Note 19: Kirkham Davis, "Where dwells the Soul Serene."]

CHAPTER IX

MUSIC AND EDUCATION

"Music is not only a source of noble pleasure--everyone admits
that, at any rate in theory--it is a form of intellectual and
spiritual training with which we really cannot afford to dispense"

_Sir Henry Hadow_

We may agree that education consists in the bringing of the latent
possibilities of the individual into action, and one of the most
important parts in the process of education is played by memory. The
fact that memory places on record our first impression of a thing is the
reason why we are able to recognise it on the second occasion: otherwise
we should have to make its acquaintance afresh every time. It is memory
again which enables us to retain the mental pattern of an action we have
once performed, and so to do it the more easily a second time, and on
subsequent occasions. Thus we see that everything we express, whether in
word, thought, or deed, leaves its mark within us: this impress is, as
it were, a brick in our life's edifice, and it has added something to
that disposition of mind which constitutes our character.

Mental growth is thus profoundly influenced by the things we express,
for whatever we express forthwith becomes part of ourselves. Anything,
therefore, that teaches us to express the fine, the noble, or the
beautiful, leaves the self by the fact of that expression with the
impress of that fineness, nobility, or beauty henceforth in the
character. We do not mean that by the utterance of a praiseworthy
sentiment a man at once grows estimable, but we do mean that the
sentiment according to its intrinsic value and worth has become an
element in his make-up. We observe every day in the contrary direction
that giving vent to continual complaint soon