But when we turn from ships and airplanes to the provisions for training young persons we are in a different world. The element of chance now bulks very large. We let the youth have pretty free opportunity to begin his malformation before we begin seriously to construct him on right lines. We fail to note what an enormous fact “disposition” is, and we take little pains to form it early and to form it in the best way. We are far too apt to assume that all the fundamentals come by the road of heredity. We overwork this theory as much as earlier theologians overworked their dogma of original sin from poor old Adam.
The fact is that temperament and disposition and the traits of character which most definitely settle destiny are at least as much formed in those early critical years of infancy as they are acquired by the strains of heredity. Education, which is more essential to the greatness of any country than even its manufactures, is one of the most neglected branches of life. We take it as we find it—and lay its failures to Providence as we do deaths from typhoid. It must not always be so. We must be as greatly concerned to form virile character in our boys and girls and to develop in them the capacity for moral and spiritual leadership in this crisis as we are concerned over our coal supply or our industries. There are ways of assisting the higher self to control and dominate the life, ways by which the ideal person can become the real person. Why not consider seriously how to do that?
He that overcomes, the prophet of Patmos says, receives a white stone with a new name written on it, which no man knoweth save he that hath it. It is a symbolism which may mean many things. It seems at least to mean that he who subdues his lower self, holds out in the strain of life, and lives by the highest that he knows, will as a consequence receive a distinct individuality, a clearly defined self, instead of being blurred in with the great level mass—a self with a name of its own. And that self will not be the old familiar self that everybody knows by traits of past achievement and by the old tendencies of habit. It will be the self which only God and the person himself in his deepest and most intimate moments knew was possible—and here at last it is found to be the real self. The man can say, “I am.” He has come to himself.