Christianity and Problems of To-day: Lectured Deliverd Before lake Forest

3 There are many Hebrew legends which have gathered about that early figure on the dim edge of history, Enoch, the son of Jared,—not the Enoch, son of Cain (after whom the latter named the city that he builded in the land of Nod), but the Enoch of whom the Biblical record is simply that he lived so many years, “walked with God and was not, for God took him.” According to one of these legends he was the first great teacher, inventor, and scientist of the race and the first to attempt to pass on, in a systematic way, from generation to generation, the wisdoms of human experience and divine revelation. For, having been forewarned that the earth would be destroyed once by fire and once by water, he erected two pillars (that came to be known as “Enoch’s Pillars”) on which he caused to be inscribed “all such learning as had been delivered unto or invented by mankind.” “Thus,” the legend adds, “it was that all knowledge and learning were not lost, for one of these pillars remained after the flood.”
Here have we the primordial illustration of that subjective mystery of the mind’s desire which is ever pushing out beyond the verge of the known, and which is not content until it has tried to tell the next generation what it has learned, and has found expression 4 objectively in such institutions as this and in such systems of education as to-day cover great portions of the earth.