ich is found in obeying the Divine Will;
for mental improvement is seldom urged as a religious duty, although it
is plain that to seek to know truth is to seek to know God, in whom and
through whom and by whom all things are, and whose infinite nature and
most awful power may best be seen by the largest and most enlightened
mind. Mind is Heaven's pioneer making way for faith, hope, and love, for
higher aims and nobler life; and to doubt its worth and excellence is to
deny the reasonableness of religion, since belief, if not wholly blind,
must rest on knowledge. The best culture serves spiritual and moral
ends. Its aim and purpose is to make reason prevail over sense and
appetite; to raise man not only to a perception of the harmonies of
truth, but also to the love of whatever is good and fair. Not in a
darkened mind does the white ray of heavenly light break into prismatic
glory; not through the mists of ignorance is the sweet countenance of
the divine Saviour best discerned. If some have pursued a sublime art
frivolously; have soiled a fair mind by ignoble life,--this leaves the
good of the intellect untouched. Some who have made strongest profession
of religion, who have held high and the highest places in the Church,
have been unworthy, but we do not thence infer that the tendency of
religion is to make men so. They who praise the bliss and worth of
ignorance are sophists. Stupidity is more to be dreaded than malignity;
for ignorance, and not malice, is the most fruitful cause of human
misery. Let knowledge grow, let truth prevail. Since God is God, the
universe is good, and the more we know of its laws, the plainer will the
right way become. The investigator and the thinker, the man of culture
and the man of genius, cannot free themselves from bias and limitation;
but the work they do will help me and all men.

Indifference or opposition to the intellectual life is but a survival of
the general anti-educational prejudices of former ages. It is also a
kind of envy, prompting us to find fault with whatever excellence is a
reproach to our unworthiness. The disinterested love of truth is a rare
virtue, most difficult to acquire and most difficult to preserve. If
knowledge bring power and wealth, if it give fame and pleasure, it is
dear to us; but how many are able to love it for its own sake? Do not
nearly all men strive to convince themselves of the truth of those
opinions which they are interested in holding? What is t