My task is a humbler one. Let us see if I can help you comprehend
a little part of it. Take an illustration.
An immensely wealthy man suddenly dies, leaving his estates to a little
boy seven or eight years of age. He has wide stretches of land, hill
and valley, river, woods, all that is beautiful as making up a
landscape. The house represents the accumulated resources of the
experiences and the intelligence of a lifetime. There are not only
beautiful drawing-rooms, telling of taste, but there is a library in
which is all that the world has been able to accumulate of learning, of
literature in every department. Here is another room containing
instruments of music and the works of the great composers. There is an
art gallery, containing some of the finest masterpieces in the way of
painting and sculpture; and then there is a room devoted to scientific
experiments,-- chemistry, the microscope, the telescope. Here are means
and opportunity for finding out what the world has so far developed.
Now has this young boy come into possession of these things? He has
inherited them, he is his father's heir. We say they belong to him; but
do they belong to him? In what sense and to what extent do they belong
to him? They belong to him just in so far and just as fast as he
develops himself into capacity of comprehension and enjoyment, no
faster, no farther. As he enters upon his inheritance then he is put
under tutors. Some man comes to teach him the languages which he does
not comprehend; and by and by that part of the library which is
composed of books written in other speech than his own begins to belong
to him.
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