Excerpt from The University of North Carolina Record, Vol. 38: May 1905 And what shall we say of the science which not only does not see any trace of the divine presence nor hear the still small voice anywhere, but actually leads the mind of a student through all the splendid avenues of the material universe and up the great highway of man's history, Whose mile-stones are the mighty tragedies of the human conscience, and at the end chills the glowing soul Of the youth with the declaration: There is no Listen to the sad exclamation of Professor Clifford, made in the midnight of his atheism: We have seen the spring sun shine out of an empty heaven to light up a soulless earth; we have felt with utter loneli ness that the Great Companion is dead. Truly our life is crippled, yea, mutilated by mal-adjustment to nature itself, if the sciences do not become the altar stairs that slope through darkness up to God. Science is untrue to its mission and cannot minister to the larger life, unless its last word proves. To be the first word of revelation In the beginning was God. This is the true conception-of education. It is a spiritual process, or it is a perversion and mutilation of life; and life is the supreme good. With all thoughtful men, we ought to rejoice at the practical tendencies everywhere manifest in educational work. By all means let it be practical. But what do we mean by practical education? Do we mean simply that it is fitting a man to be a better wealth producer? It is well to make money. It is a perverted view of life which affects to despise it. It is a part of our task in this world to utilize the products of nature and to stimulate the earth to yield yet more to supply the material needs of man; to make our fields green with corn or white with cotton, to increase the roar our machinery and multiply our smoke stacks. But if that is chiefly what we mean by practical education, we are in imminent danger of making education the handmaid Of materialism; of making our schools the moulds in which a small and hard materialistic life shall be formed. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.