Knowledge and Power.

Waikato Times, Volume 107, Issue 17973, 19 March 1930, Page 15

Knowledge and Power.

There is a rarer tiling than truth, namely, power, or deep sympathy with truth. What, is the effect, for instance, upon soicoty, of children ? Bv the pity, by the tenderness, and by the peculiai modes of admiration which connect themselves with the helplessness, with the innocence and with the simplicity of children, not only are the primal affections strengthened and continually renewed, but the qualities which are dearest, in the sight of heaven—tho frailty, for instance, which appeals to forbearance; the innocence which symbolises tho heavenly, and the simplicity which is most alien from the worldly, are kept up in perpetual remembrance and their ideals are continually refreshed. A purpose of the same naturo is answered by the higher literature, namely, the literature of power. What do you learn from a cookery-book ? Something new —something that you did not know before, in every paragraph. But would you therefore put the wretched cookery-book on a higher level of estimation than tho divine poem? What you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly level; what you owe is powcr—that is’ exercise and expansion to your latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, where ev«ry pulse and each separate influx is a step upwards—a step ascending as upon' a Jacob's ladder from earth to mysterous altitudes above tho earth.—Thomas do Quiiuey (“Alexander Pope”!*