If you ask why the moral inner sense is to be (under due limitations) obeyed; why the few who are steered by it move the mass in whom it is weak? I can only reply by putting another question--Why do the few in whom the sense of beauty is strong--Shakespeare, Raffaele, Beethoven, carry the less endowed multitude away? But they do, and always will. People who overlook that fact attend neither to history nor to what goes on about them.
Benjamin Franklin was a shrewd, excellent, kindly man. I have great respect for him. The force of genial common-sense respectability could no further go. George Fox was the very antipodes of all this, and yet one understands how he came to move the world of his day, and Franklin did not.
As to whether we can fulfil the moral law, I should say hardly any of us. Some of us are utterly incapable of fulfilling its plainest dictates. As there are men born physically cripples, and intellectually idiots, so there are some who are moral cripples and idiots, and can be kept straight not even by punishment. For these people there is nothing but shutting up, or extirpation.
The cardinal fact in the University questions appears to me to be this: that the student to whose wants the mediæval University was adjusted, looked to the past and sought book-learning, while the modern looks to the future and seeks the knowledge of things.
The mediæval view was that all knowledge worth having was explicitly or implicitly contained in various ancient writings; in the Scriptures, in the writings of the greater Greeks, and those of the Christian Fathers. Whatever apparent novelty they put forward, was professedly obtained by deduction from ancient data.
The modern knows that the only source of real knowledge lies in the application of scientific methods of enquiry to the ascertainment of the facts of existence; that the ascertainable is infinitely greater than the ascertained, and that the chief business of the teacher is not so much to make scholars as to train pioneers.
From this point of view, the University occupies a position altogether independent of that of the coping-stone of schools for general education, combined with technical schools of Theology, Law, and Medicine. It is not primarily an institution for testing the work of schoolmasters, or for ascertaining the fitness of young men to be curates, lawyers, or doctors.