[Donal Grant is just meeting his new pupil Davie.]
"... You are a book God has begun, and he has sent me to help him go on with it; so I must learn what he has written already before I try to do anything."
"But you already know what a boy is, sir! Why should you want to learn me?"
"You might as well say that, because I have read one or two books, I must know every book. To understand one boy helps to understand another, but every boy is a new boy, different from every other boy, and every one has to be understood.... There is one who who understands every boy as well as if there were no other boy in the whole world."
"Then why doesn't every boy go to him when he can't get fair play?"
"Ah, why? That is just what I want you to do. He can do better than give you fair play even: he can make you give other people fair play, and delight in it."
"Tell me where he is."
"That is what I have to teach you: mere telling is not much use. Telling is what makes people think they know when they do not, and makes them foolish."
"What is his name?"
"I will not tell you that just yet; for then you would think you knew him, when you knew next to nothing about him. Look here; look at this book," he went on, pulling a copy of Boethius from his pocket; "look at the name on the back of it: it is the name of the man that wrote the book."
Davie spelled it out.
"Now you know all about the book, don't you?"
"No, sir; I don't know anything about it."
"Well then, my father's name is Robert Grant: you know now what a good man he is!"
"No, I don't. I should like to see him though!"
"You would love him if you did. But you see now that knowing the name of a person does not make you know the person."
"But you said, sir, that if you told me the name of that person, I should fancy I knew all about him: I don't fancy I know all about your father now that you have told me his name!"
"You have me there!" answered Donal. "I did not say quite what I ought to have said. I should have said that when we know a little about a person, and are used to hearing his name, then we are ready to think we know all about him. I heard a man the other day--a man who had never spoken to your father--talk as if he knew all all about him."
"I think I understand," said Davie.
To confess ignorance is to lose respect with the ignorant who would appear to know. But there is a worse thing to lose the respect even of the wise--to deserve to lose it; and that he does who would gain a respect that does not belong to him.