t is not humility, nor is largeness and
justness of view faith. Philosophy, however enlightened, however profound,
gives no command over the passions, no influential motives, no vivifying
principles. Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic,
but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentlemen, it is well to have a
cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate
mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life;--these are the
connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a
University; I am advocating, I shall illustrate and insist upon them; but
still, I repeat, they are no guarantee for sanctity or even for
conscientiousness, they may attach to the man of the world, to the
profligate, to the heartless,--pleasant, alas, and attractive as he shows
when decked out in them. Taken by themselves, they do but seem to be what
they are not; they look like virtue at a distance, but they are detected
by close observers, and on the long run; and hence it is that they are
popularly accused of pretence and hypocrisy, not, I repeat, from their own
fault, but because their professors and their admirers persist in taking
them for what they are not, and are officious in arrogating for them a
praise to which they have no claim. Quarry the granite rock with razors,
or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen
and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend
against those giants, the passion and the pride of man.

Surely we are not driven to theories of this kind, in order to vindicate
the value and dignity of Liberal Knowledge. Surely the real grounds on
which its pretensions rest are not so very subtle or abstruse, so very
strange or improbable. Surely it is very intelligible to say, and that is
what I say here, that Liberal Education, viewed in itself, is simply the
cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or
less than intellectual excellence. Every thing has its own perfection, be
it higher or lower in the scale of things; and the perfection of one is
not the perfection of another. Things animate, inanimate, visible,
invisible, all are good in their kind, and have a _best_ of themselves,
which is an object of pursuit. Why do you take such pains with your garden
or your park? You see to your walks and turf and shrubberies; to your
trees and drives; not as if you meant to make an orchard