In one of our chats the other day he was dilating upon Henry van
Dyke's four rules, and very soon had banished all my little clouds
and made my mental sky clear and bright. When I get around to
evolving a definition of education I think I shall say that it is the
process of furnishing people with resources for profitable and
pleasant conversation. Why, those four rules just oozed into the
talk, without any sort of flutter or formality, and made our chat
both agreeable and fruitful. Henry Ward Beecher said many good
things. Here is one that I caught in the school reader in my
boyhood: "The man who carries a lantern on a dark night can have
friends all about him, walking safely by the help of its rays and he
be not defrauded." Education is just such a lantern and this
schoolmaster, Will, knows how to carry it that it may afford light to
the friends about him.
Well, the first of van Dyke's rules is: "You shall learn to desire
nothing in the world so much but that you can be happy without it."
I do wonder if he had been reading in Proverbs: "Better is a dinner
of herbs where love is than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.
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