570                 A. M. E. REVIEW.

stroy everything old and the stupid conservatism that will re-
ceive nothing new.
  These two forces have been at work in the educational field.
The one has been urging the training of the mind to the neg-
lect of the body, the other advocating the training of the body
while disregarding the mind.  Manual training is now being
advocated as the panacea for all our educational ills.  Organ-
ization is another reactionary slogan recommended to rectify
all social ailments--a sure cure for labor troubles.  We look at
a mule fastened to a plough by a chain and declare in unity
there is strength, forgetting that the individual links make
the chain.  "The wide pasture is but separate spears of grass;
the sheeted bloom of the prairies but isolated flowers."
  It is my opinion that we are expecting too much from these
two factors, manual training and organization. We are get-
ting the idea that by making a boy plough we will make him a
good farmer, and that by making a girl wash dishes a good
housekeeper will be evolved. This is a mistake. The Bible says,
"As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." The thinking
makes the doing, the doing does not control the thinking but
is controlled by it. Ideas precede action. Sensation precedes
motion.  What is the universe but a thought of God? "Every-
thing," says a writer, "resolves itself back into an idea. The
solid framework of the world, with all its objects of beauty and
use, is but the crystallization of God's thoughts. Fulton's
idea became solidified into a steamboat, Stephenson's into a
railroad, and Morse's into a telegraph."
  The brain is the master and the hand is the servant--useful,
nay indispensable, yet a servant.  The hand must be educated
through the brain, not the brain through the hand. Who ever
heard of a great musician who didn't have an ear for music?
If the music is not in the brain it will never come out of the
fingers.  The picture of the artist is in his brain before he puts
it on the canvas. The thought is always prior to the fact.
The world has to obey him who thinks and sees in the world.
All the facts of history pre-exist in the mind as laws.  "Thought,
says Carlyle, "is the parent of the deed."  The persistent




			

OHS/National Afro-American Museum & Cultural Center Serial Collection

African Methodist Episcopal Church Review, Vol. 28, Num. 2

Volume:  28
Issue Number:  02
Date:  10/1911