United States or Palau ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


I carry on the supposition that you have formed, or will form, all your views on religion and politics from your own judgment, assisted by the experience of those whose mind you know to be qualified by their many-sidedness to judge clearly and impartially upon universal, not partial data.

All that I can do is merely in the line of suggestion, trying to direct your attention to some of the general features, somewhat objective in character. The first suggestion I have to make is along this very line the greatness, the many-sidedness of the educational problem and the need of general community intelligence in regard to it.

But these, my dramatis persona, are, let me repeat it, abstractions: they exist only in my mind and in the minds of those who think like myself. Hence, like all abstractions, they represent the essence of a question, but not its completeness, its many-sidedness as we may see it in reality.

An interesting example of the illuminating effect of a sound maxim upon different phases of a man's life and actions, and one illustrative of the many-sidedness of this motto of Nelson's, occurs later in his career, and not long before his death.

The bishop Augustin, who carried his pastoral cross from one end to the other of this country, and was its acting and thinking soul, may perhaps have owed to it the contrasts and many-sidedness of his own rich nature. Of course, Thagaste did not pretend to be a capital. It was a free-town of the second or third order; but its distance from the great centres gave it a certain importance.

Giorgione, as we have seen, could not have been more than eighteen years in active practice, yet in that short time he gained successes in all these various fields. His many-sidedness shows him to have been a man of wide sympathies, whilst the astonishing rapidity of his development testifies to the precocity of his talent.

II. And now let me say a word, secondly, about the many-sidedness of this universal gift. One of the reasons why Christian people as a whole do not realise the universality as they ought is, as I have already suggested in a somewhat different connection, because they limit their notions far too much of what the gift of God's Spirit is to do to men.

At most, they would take him to the lunatic asylum as "the King of Spain" if he should go very mad. But it is only the thin, fair people who go out of their minds in Russia. Innumerable "romantics" attain later in life to considerable rank in the service. Their many-sidedness is remarkable! And what a faculty they have for the most contradictory sensations!

In Utopia, where the concentric rings of growth are formed by the gradual evolution of an inner life, whatever feeds that inner life is a contribution, however humble, to the growth of the whole tree; and many-sidedness, far from being a defect, is one of the first conditions of success in education.

The better a genus is fitted for variability in the conformation of its individuals, the higher is the rank it is entitled to hold in the graduated series of creatures capable of development; and it is precisely that wonderful many-sidedness of his inner life, and of its outward manifestation, which assigns to man his superiority over all other animated beings.