Practically every educator recognizes this fact and gives
expression to it in language similar to the following quotation from
Professor S.H. Clark:
"Never awaken an emotion unless, at the same time, you strive to open
a channel through which the emotion may pass into the realm of
elevated action. If we are studying the ideals of literature,
religion, etc., with our class, we have failed in the highest duty of
teaching if we have not given them the ideal, if we have not given
them, by means of some suggestion, the opportunity for realizing the
ideal. If there is an emotion excited in our pupils through a talk on
ethics or sociology, it matters not, we fail in our duty, if we do
not take an occasion at once to guide that emotion so that it may
express itself in elevated action."
And yet there is a question whether this insistence upon action may not
be exaggerated. Abraham Lincoln witnessed an auction sale of slaves in
his younger days. He did not go out immediately and issue an
emancipation proclamation, and yet there are few who can doubt that that
auction sale registered an application in an ideal that persisted in the
mind of Lincoln through all those years preceding our great civil war.
Many a man has been saved in the hour of temptation, in his later life,
by the vividness of the recollection of sacred truths taught at his
mother's knee.
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