Learning and working Author:Frederick Denison Maurice Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III. LEARNING AND MONEY WORSHIP INCOMPATIBLE. In my last Lecture, I attempted to prove that Learning' and Work are not natural enemies, but natural... more » allies. The word work I used in the largest sense. From the instance of Dante I argued that the most intense interest in practical politics—even in what we should call factious politics—did not prevent a man in. the thirteenth century from being at once a profound schoolman and a divine poet. From the instance of Bacon I drew the inference that a laborious lawyer and statesman might be the reformer and methodiser of physical studies. Undoubtedly the occupations of the Florentine and of the Englishman were not manual; they were working with their brains as priors and as chancellors, not less than when they were composing poems or treatises on the Advancement of Learning. But their occupations were of a kind which are ordinarily supposed to interfere with the pursuit of science and literature. Leisure from these toils has been esteemed even more necessary to secure calmness and extent of knowledge for the student, than freedom from manual exercises, which it is admitted may, under cer- tain limitations, be a variety for his mind, and be healthful to his body. If, however, proofs were wanted that manual labour not taken up at hazard, or merely for change and recreation, but wrought into the tissue of the life, did not interfere with thought and with letters, there was the example of the Benedictine monks, with which I began,—there was the example of Robert Burns, with which I concluded. Labour was enjoined upon the one as the very condition of their social existence, as necessary to their devotion and their learning. The labour of the Scotch peasant was not only appointed for him from his birth; he owed to it his truest a...« less