For not alone they are useful to the State who defend the accused, bring forth candidates for office and cast their vote for peace or war, but they who encourage the youth [the teacher was ranked with the senator] who in so great a scarcity of good teachers instruct the minds of men in virtue [there was a great scarcity of good teachers then as now, but who knows what the eternal influence of some unknown teachers of to-day may be, for the greatest of world teachers was then going, as the record has it, "among the villages of Galilee, teaching"] and hold them back from running after wealth and luxury [for so it was in the first century, as in this] and teach what is meant by honesty, patience, bravery, justice, contempt of death and how much freely given good there is in a good conscience.
How difficult it is to prescribe the training for this high office of incarnation and instruction is best intimated in the answer which the president of a Missouri normal school gave when asked the question as to how teachers can be best taught: "This is a question which only angels can answer." But we do, indeed, need educational archangels (as the legend of Enoch intimated) as the teachers of our teachers. And there are many of us who have reason to thank the Lord that here, in this valley, even, in some of its little prairie colleges, there were and are such archangels who revealed things about heaven as well as earth, and angels as well as men. One of them, who was my teacher, is to be the next speaker.
But my thought is rather of the _transmission_ to the new generation, as a whole, of what--to paraphrase George Edward Woodberry--has been built out of the mystery of thought and passion of the past, as generation after generation has knelt, fought, faded, and given the best "that anywhere comes to be" to the souls of Enochian urge to carry on, "letting all else fall into oblivion."
As the most primitive and picturesque visualization of the curriculum of this bequest of the race mind of one generation to the next, the pillars of Enoch stood on the verge of history against the Eastern sky of our civilization's dawn. They have crumbled, or they lie buried in sands that have hidden their wisdoms. The excavator's spade could uncover no more interesting record than that which would tell us what this great teacher thought should be saved from flood and fire out of the experience of the race.