Chapter III - Out College
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2010
Summary
In my youth a man was taught in his own College. There were brilliant lecturers at Trinity, but one was not sent to them. No one ever suggested that such men as Jackson and Verrall, or among the professors Westcott and Seeley, might be worth hearing, at least once. This was a mistake; for with years I am more and more clear that the significant man does more for a pupil by his mere personality than a dozen lectures full of useful information dictated by an ordinary person, however correct; and most College lecturers are ordinary people. For instance, I constantly think of two lectures by Rendel Harris that I heard—I might say that I watched; for his Woodbrooke audience, gathered from Britain, the United States, Holland and Norway, with stray people of other origins and abodes, was part of it. He took two hours (on separate days) to give us what a commonplace person would have told us in ten minutes or less; only in that case it would probably all have been forgotten; as it was, it was an experience, and a landmark. The whole class was enlisted, and there and then worked the matter out. The question was the date of Christ's birth, and we all started calculating about Cyrenius and the year of the Greeks and so forth, the orthodox ones never guessing that they were engaged in Higher Criticism; it was all so natural, right and inevitable.
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- Information
- Cambridge Retrospect , pp. 63 - 80Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009First published in: 1943