Thirdly, we are learning from you the necessity of re-modeling much of our education in the light of modern needs and of the demands of applied science. We shall learn from you to do more in the way of leaving out the non-essentials. You are stirring us up. It is one of our characteristics (good or bad, according to circumstances) to "stay put."

It is no accident that we have thus learnt from you. In the deeper matters of life, kinship means a great deal. We seem to be drawing closer together. We differ in the form of our institutions, tho we both of us have a balance of freedom and authority in our national life. We differ in the nature of our political tasks, tho we are both coming to bear a part in the white man's burden. But we share three thingslanguage, practical idealism, and the belief that the ideal of national life is to be reached, not in mechanical uniformity of state regulation, but in unity thru diversity.

These are things which it lies very near the central task of the schools to transmit from one generation to another. Is it too much to hope that, in years to come, not the United States and Great Britain alone, but all the great nations of the world will find themselves drawn more and more, thru union in common tasks and thru the wise influence of just teachers, into the spirit of truth, unity, and concord? That is our prayer; that is our brightest hope.

DEVOTION TO TRUTH: THE CHIEF VIRTUE OF THE

TEACHER.

MOST REV. JOHN IRELAND, ARCHBISHOP OF ST. PAUL, ST. PAUL, MINN.

Were I to choose a device to adorn the class-room and inspire teacher and pupil, whether in lowliest rural school house or in stateliest university pile, it should be this: "Devotion to Truth, for Truth's own sake.”

Devotion to truth is the prime condition of intellectual life and progress; it must be the dominating virtue in the work of the pupil whose mind is bidden to unfold beneath the sweet and penetrating light from Heaven's own skies, and yet more so in the work of the teacher whose task it is to turn this light in its full power and radiance toward the mind of a willing, but inexperienced, dependent.

I should say, too, devotion to truth for truth's own sake, with heart undivided, with intellect unbiased. Truth is a jealous and imperious queen; it has the right to be such, so rapturous its beauty, so sublime its majesty. Truth scorns the wooer whose proffer of homage is not plenary, and hides itself indignantly from his gaze.

What is truth? The brief, calm definition, given at first questioning. by philosophy, is: Truth is that which is; truth is reality-reality in actual existence, reality in causes, reality in effects the thing itself, whatever that thing be, completely and exactly as it is.

What is, is true; and what is, is good and beautiful. The three terms are substantially convertible: truth, goodness, and beauty.

The simplest definition given of truth secures to it our reverence and love, and tells the baseness, the sacrilege of that illusory phantasm which fain would put itself in the place of reality, which fain would distort or destroy reality, which has for name error or falsehood.

This is not all. Upon further questioning, philosophy soars into its highest altitudes, and there, speaking to us, it exclaims: Truth is divine; it is either God himself or the image and the work of God. Challenged we are to award to truth the devotion, I would say the worship, which is due to the eternal First Cause, the Infinite, the Omnipotent, the Omniscient; and rightfully are we so challenged.

Truth is that which is; truth is reality. But the plentitude of reality, and consequently of truth, is God's eternal, infinite essence. We recall the biblical words, God's own definition of Himself: "I am who am." What, then, is truth in its eminent entity but God, the Eternal, the Infinite?

God, being the First Cause, the Creator of all else that is, all else is the externalization of ideas eternally resplendent in his uncreated essence, and the effects, whether immediate or mediate of his omnipotence; and so, whatever else there is, it is and it is true so far, and so far only, as it mirrors the divine essence, and is that which God willed it to be. And thus truth is ever divine; in its eminent entity it is God himself; in tiniest form, it is, in the measure of its special entity, the image of God's eternal essence, and the fruit of his wisdom and power, being in itself truth only inasmuch as, when seen and judged by his supreme intellect, it is in conformity with its prototype within his essence and with the counsel of his will in its actualization.

Every being, from the smallest grain of sand on the seashore to the mightiest sun in the firmament, from the most diminutive insect to sovereign man, from all that is created to the Creator, is truth; every act going out from infinite God or finite creature, every fact or incident marking the flight of time since time began, is truth; and wherever truth is, the divine is there; and it is very religion to approach it with respect, and, in opening to it our mind, to bid it enter thither, in its native perfection, unaltered and undimmed.

In God and in man there is mind, the ability to know truth.

God, infinite mind, knows all truth; man, finite mind, knows truth partially; so far as man knows truth, so far is he nigh unto the infinite, partaking of the life, the beauty, and the power of the infinite.

As the bodily eye is made to see bodily things, so the mind is made to see truth. The mind lives of truth; it is dead when no truth comes to it; it is dying when false appearances, instead of realities, are set before it. With the avoidance of error it is freed from disease; with the increase of truth it grows in vigor and in power.

Truth is light, and light is the adornment, the beauty, of the mind. Every being, every fact that is truth is a ray shed upon the mind; and, as ray follows ray, as the slender streak first cleaving the darkness widens into sun-kissed horizons, the mind glows and is afire; it mirrors more and more the intellect of the infinite; it is ravishing of comeliness and splendor.

Truth begets strength in the mind. Every reality, which is seen and laid hold of by the mind, transmits to the mind its own force; and as the mind travels from reality to reality, absorbing force after force, it ascends in stature and mightiness, dominating the universe around it, making its owner, man, what God intended man to be, the sovereign of creation. The strength of the mind is strength to the whole man. All, indeed, in man is dependent upon the mind. The several energies in him, thru which he may work and conquer, are set in motion by his will. But the will of itself is blind; it sees not whither it should tend; it needs the light which comes from mind; and the more brilliant this light, the more far-reaching its diffusion, the more capable is the will to discover the pathways over which man's other energies may travel, the more ambitious is the will to issue words of command, and the more ready are the other energies to obey it.

The knowledge of truth is power; it is the condition of all movement, of all progress in the individual and in society. And hence it is that all communities that live and seek to go forward clamor for greater truth, and labor that knowledge of truth be co-extensive with their membership, and, at least here and there, rise upward into towering peaks whose summits may bask in the luster of truth's highest and most radiant suns.

The noblest and most sublime thing in creation is the human mind. It is the image of the highest attribute in God, the divine intelligence. Thru mind man is conscious of himself; he knows himself; he knows things outside of himself: ranging far and wide thru the universe, he grasps and appropriates to himself the truths that are within it; he rises far beyond the universe into the regions of ideas and principles; rising still higher he reposes upon the very bosom of the Infinite--the First Cause and the Final term, the Alpha and the Omega, from which all truths come and to which all truths lead, and there he enriches himself with the life, the knowledge, the grace, the power, which are God's. "O Lord our Lord," exclaims the Psalmist, "how admirable is Thy name in the whole earth! . . . . What is inan that Thou art mindful of him. . . Thou hast crowned him with glory and honor: Thou hast set him over the work of thy hands. . . . O Lord, our Lord, how admirable is Thy name in the whole earth?" It was the mind which is in man that the Psalmist was contemplating while he uttered his hymn of praise.

Does not the human mind compel our respect? Does it not, by its capability of beauty, of grandeur, of power, demand from us the homage

that we open its portals to that, and to that only, which is for it beauty, grandeur, and power-to truth, and to truth only? To draw darkening clouds around it while it craves for purest light, to proffer to it vilest husks while it hungers for the food of God's skies, to put before it error and falsehood, instead of truth, truth whole and entire in its unpolluted virginal radiance, is treason and sacrilege.

Be it the device of the class-room: be it the religion of all sanctuaries of learning be it the inspiration of the teacher as he gives guidance to the pupil, and of the pupil as he questions the teacher: "Devotion to Truth for Truth's own sake. "

What in regard to truth is in every man a sacred duty appeals with singular emphasis to the conscience of the teacher. For the teacher is by profession the apostle of truth and the guardian of the human mind. The dignity of the teacher! I say it, when I recall that the subject-matter of his labors is truth, that the purpose of his labors is the introduction of truth into the human mind and, as a consequence, the exaltation of the soul of man into the regions of the divine. The dignity of the teacher! I say it, when I recall that the search of truth is the search of the divine, that the search of truth is an act of religion. The profession of teaching is the priesthood of truth; where the teacher speaks there is a sanctuary - the sanctuary of truth; and the sense of the Divine should perineate the atmosphere.

It was the great thinker of France, Joubert, who wrote: "Study the sciences in the light of truth, that is, as before God; for their business is to show the truth, that is to say, God everywhere. Write nothing, say nothing, think nothing that you cannot believe to be true before God." Words sweet and beautiful, those of Joubert! They explain and confirm the device: "Devotion to Truth, for Truth's own sake."

Is there need that I urge faithfulness to truth. times sought out and revered, as it deserves to be? charms suffice to open every pathway to its advance, to obstacles might retard its march?

Is not truth at all

Do not its native remove whatever

We have but to cast a quick glance over the world of letters and speech to be satisfied that to truth its rights are not seldom denied, that not seldom, where truth should be supreme, error and falsehood prevail.

Truth has enemies. At times it is the inertia of mind and will which recede before the effort that genuine devotion to truth makes necessary; at times it is prejudice; at times, again, it is passion - pride, anger, selfinterest.

Frequently truth retires to a distance; it delights, as it were, to hide from its suitor, and to surrender only to toil and patience. It is not truth; it is error calling itself truth that they lay hold of who would conquer at first sight, whom indolence impels to quick retreat.

It is proposed to study a foreign country. A few months, a few

weeks are made to suffice, the greater part of the time being spent in hotels, which in no manner are representative of local thought or custom, whose ciceroni are especially trained to say and show what inay flatter the national pride and prejudices of guests. Nevertheless, the volume is published, portraying the whole life of a nation, its moral and intellectual conditions, its religion and its politics, its commerce and its industry, concluding with most assured predictions of its approaching rise or fall, and with abstruse philosophical disquisitions on nations and races in general.

A book, bearing the name of a litterateur of fame, written to describe America and its people, is today widely read in Europe. The writer spent in America eight months - five of them in a charming winter resort in the heart of Georgia, and one amid the bustle and fashion of Newport: what could he know of America as it is and as we expect it to be? Many are the books read in America, written to describe countries foreign to us, whose authors spent far less time in those countries than Paul Bourget did in America, and without the cosmopolitan information and the keenness of intellectual insight which characterize Paul Bourget.

Monsieur Bourget's candor of spirit led him not long ago to entitle a book, which he had written as an account of a very rapid journey thru Italy, Sensations from Italy.

History, the material from which is woven so largely the texture of our thoughts and of our philosophy of life, is very often gathered from the mere surface of things. What was said by writers of yesterday is repeated by writers of today, as what had been said at an earlier date was repeated by writers of yesterday. And readers, unfortunately, are inclined to give their faith to the volume which first falls into their hands. Frequently the sources of our historical store are second-hand statements, and, in this manner, egregious historic falsehoods can be pointed out that pass down thru many generations, doing vast injustice, not only to individual names, but to whole nations and whole races. What should be done for history is to go deeply into first sources, study each question in the light of the epoch, more or less remote, to which it originally belongs, by impartial investigation of contemporary documents of whatever nature these be; or, if this is impossible for certain ones among us, to seek out, as far as we may, writers who have gone to first sources and who are noted for their fairmindedness; and, in controverted matters, to give an attentive hearing to witnesses on both sides in the dispute.

In late years there is visible a wondrous improvement in the study of history, for which the worshipers at the shrine of truth cannot but be most grateful. No one is today reputed a worthy historian who has not gone, in a most patient and laborious manner, to first sources. Luster of name, literary beauty of style win no confidence, if proofs are not given of sound erudition and absolute honesty of purpose. Facts are in demand,