"When I consider what some books have done for the world, and what they are doing, how they keep up our hope, awaken new courage and faith, soothe pain, give an ideal life to those whose hours are cold and hard, bind together distant ages and foreign lands, create new worlds of beauty, bring down truth from heaven; I give eternal blessings for this gift, and thank God for books."
"Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections; unless we chew them over again they will not give us strength and nourishment."
"In the course of our reading we should lay up in our minds a store of goodly thoughts in well-wrought words, which should be a living treasure of knowledge always with us, and from which, at various times, and amidst all the shifting of circumstances, we might be sure of drawing some comfort, guidance, and sympathy."
"We shall be agreed, I assume, that the object of Education is to train for life, and not for a special occupation; to train the whole man for all life, for life seen and unseen, for the unseen through the seen and in the seen; to train _men_ in a word and not _craftsmen_, to train citizens for the Kingdom of God. As we believe in God and the world to come, these must be master thoughts.
"We shall be agreed further that with this object in view, education must be so ordered as to awaken, to call into play, to develop, to direct, to strengthen powers of sense and intellect and spirit, not of one but of all: to give alertness and accuracy to observation: to supply fulness and precision to language: to arouse intelligent sympathy with every form of study and occupation: to set the many parts and aspects of the world before the growing scholar in their unity: to open the eyes of the heart to the eternal of which the temporal is the transitory sign.
"We shall be agreed again that the elements of restraint alike and of personal development which enter into education will be used to harmonise the social and individual instincts, and to inspire the young, when impressions are most easy and most enduring, with the sense of fellowship and the passion for service.