Spiritual Principles can only be acquired after long discipline in the pursuit and practice of Virtue.
June Twenty-Second
THE schoolmaster never attempts to teach his pupils the abstract principles of mathematics at the commencement; he knows that by such a method teaching would be vain, and learning impossible. He first places before them a very simple sum, and, having explained it, leaves them to do it. When, after repeated failures and ever-renewed effort, they have succeeded in doing it correctly, a more difficult task is set them, and then another and another; and not until the pupils have, through many years of diligent application, mastered all the lessons in arithmetic does he attempt to unfold to them the underlying mathematical principles.
Thus practice ever precedes knowledge even in the ordinary things of the world, and in spiritual things, in the living of the higher life, this law is rigid in its exactions.
