Excerpt from The Young People and the Church

What do we wish that they should be? If forced to reason about it, we say they ought to be what we have found by experi ence it is prudent and wise to be; and they ought to be something more, - they ought to go one stage beyond the stage we have gone. But we cannot conduct them beyondthe stage we have reached. We can only point and say, Here are the boundaries which we have reached; beyond is an un discovered country; go out and discover it. We can furnish you with a few probabili ties; we can supply you with a few tenden cies; we can say to you that we think that wisdom points in this direction; but we cannot go with you; we cannot guide you; we must part with you at the opening of the door, and bid you Godspeed. But we want you to go on; we do not want you to stop where we stopped.

What capital, after all, is it that we sup ply them with? I take it that knowledge is a pretty poor commodity in itself and by itself. A ship does not sail because of her cargo. There is no propulsion in that. If the captain did not know his port, if he did not know his rules of navigation, if he did not know the management of his engines, or have somebody aboard who did, if he did not know all the powers that will carry the ship to the place where her cargo will have additional value, the cargo would be nothing to him. What is his purpose? His purpose is that the cargo should be used. Used for what? For the convenience or the enlight enment, whatever it may be, of the people to whom he is carrying it.

And so with knowledge. The knowledgeyou supply to the little fellow in the home is not merely conveyed to him in order that he may be full; the knowledge that is sup plied to him in school is not put in him as if he were merely a little vessel to be filled to the top. My father, who was a very plain spoken man, used to use a phrase which was rough, but it expressed the meaning exactly. He said, My son, the mind is not a prolix gut to be stuffed. That is not the object of it. It is not a vessel made to contain something; it is a vessel made to transmute something. The process of digestion is of the essence, and the only part of the food that is of any consequence is the part that is turned into blood and fructifies the whole frame. And so with knowledge. All the wise saws and prudent maxims and pieces of information that we supply to the genera tion coming on are of no consequence what ever in themselves unless they get into the blood and are transmuted.

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