experience, the return voluntarily made through clear recognition of
the soundness of the primitive relations, the beauty of the service of
the older and wiser to the younger and the more ignorant. We are born
into relations which we accept as normal and inevitable; we break away
from them in order that by detachment we may see them objectively and
from a distance, and that we may come to self-consciousness; we resume
these relations of deliberate purpose and with clear perception of
their moral significance. So the boy, grown to manhood, returns to his
home from the world in which he has tested himself and seen for the
first time, with clear eyes, the depth and beauty of its service in
the spiritual order; so the man who has revolted from the barren and
shallow dogmatic statement of a spiritual truth returns, in riper
years and with a deeper insight, to the truth which is no longer
matter of inherited belief but of vital need and perception.

The ripe, mature, full mind not only escapes the limitation of the
time in which it finds itself; it also escapes from the limitations of
the place in which it happens to be. A man of deep culture cannot be a
provincial; he must be a citizen of the world. The man of provincial
tastes and ideas owns the acres; the man of culture commands the
landscape. He knows the world beyond the hills; he sees the great
movement of life from which the village seems almost shut out; he
shares those inclusive experiences which come to each age and give
each age a character of its own. He is in fellowship and sympathy with
the smaller community at his doors, but he belongs also to that
greater community which is coterminous with humanity itself. He is not
disloyal to his immediate surroundings when he leaves them for
exploration, travel, and discovery; he is fulfilling that law of life
which conditions true valuation of that into which one is born upon
clear perception of that which one must acquire for himself.