Life is full of contradictions and incongruities and disappointments. Over against these, the school, in its relation to the higher life, has a duty to perform. For the discontent which springs from life’s contradictions and incongruities a safety-valve has been given to man in his ability to laugh. The person who never laughs is as one-sided and abnormal as the person who never prays. The comic is now recognized as one form of the beautiful, and the beautiful is closely allied to the true and the good. Without going into the philosophy of this matter, attention may be drawn to the fact that beauty has a home in the domain of art, as well as of nature; that the queen of the fine arts is poetry; that the greatest poet of all the ages was Shakespeare; that Shakespeare’s literary genius reached its highest flights in tragedies and comedies; that whilst tragedy and comedy are two forms of the beautiful in art, comedy is the highest form of the comic, whilst tragedy is the highest form of the sublime. In teaching us to appreciate the plays of Shakespeare, the school not merely teaches us when to laugh and when to weep, thereby furnishing the safety-valve to let off our discontent and to reconcile us anew to our lot, but puts us in possession of that which money cannot buy,—namely, the ability to appreciate the beautiful in its subtlest and sublimest forms. Who owns the moonlit skies, the millionaire or the poet? Who owns the hills and the valleys, the streams and the mountains; he in whose name the deeds and mortgages are recorded, or he whose soul can appreciate beauty and sublimity? Beauty has a home in nature and in art. It is the province of the school to put us in possession of the beautiful, the sublime, and the comic, for these quite as much as the true and the good belong to the things of the higher life.
How about life’s disappointments? Higher than the life of thought is the life of faith and hope and love,—higher, because these are rooted and grounded in the life of thought, ripen above it as its highest fruitage and efflorescence. The nineteenth century has been an age of faith. Every scientific mind has profound faith in nature’s laws, in the universal efficacy of truth; and, like Agassiz and Gray and Drummond, multitudes of the best minds have made the step from faith in natural laws to faith in the laws which govern the spiritual world.