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Love truth and its fruits of life, for yourself and for others; devote to study and to the profitable use of study the best part of your time and your heart.
To get something without paying for it is the universal desire; but it is the desire of cowardly hearts and weak brains. The universe does not respond to the first murmured request, and the light of God does not shine under your study lamp unless your soul asks for it with persistent effort.
“Genius is long patience,” but it must be organized and intelligent patience. One does not need extraordinary gifts to carry some work through; average superiority suffices; the rest depends on energy and wise application of energy. It is as with a conscientious workman, careful and steady at his task: he gets somewhere, while an inventive genius is often merely an embittered failure.
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Moral good is nothing else than desirable good measured by reason and set before the will as an end. Ends are related. They all depend on one ultimate end. It is this ultimate end which links up with the true and is one with it. Connect these propositions, and you will find that moral good, if not identical in every way with the true, still depends on it through the ends aimed at by the will. There is, therefore, between the two, a bond more or less loose or close, but unbreakable.
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study must first of all leave room for worship, prayer, direct meditation on the things of God. Study is itself a divine office, an indirect divine office; it seeks out and honors the traces of the Creator, or His images, according as it investigates nature or humanity; but it must make way at the right moment for direct intercourse with Him. If we forget to do this, not only do we neglect a great duty, but the image of God in creation comes between us and Him, and His traces only serve to lead us far from Him to whom they bear witness.
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Study carried to such a point that we give up prayer and recollection, that we cease to read Holy Scripture, and the words of the saints and of great souls — study carried to the point of forgetting ourselves entirely, and of concentrating on the objects of study so that we neglect the Divine Dweller within us, is an abuse and a fool's game. To suppose that it will further our progress and enrich our production is to say that the stream will flow better if its spring is dried up.
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An intellectual must be an intellectual all the time.
