HARLES;
ill! nil II I m
BOOKS BY PRESIDENT THWING ON COLLEGE SUBJECTS
American Colleges : Their Students and Work
Within College Walls
The College Woman
The American College in American Life
College Administration
The Choice of a College
If I Were a College Student
A Libera! Education and a Liberal Faith
College Training and the Business Man
Higher Education in America: a History
Education in the Far East
History of Education in the United States since the Civil War
Universities of the World
Letters from a Father to His Son Entering College Letters from a Father to His Daughter Entering College
The Co-ordinate System of the Higher Education The American College : What it is and what it may become.
Education According to Some Modern Masters. The Ministry: An Appeal to College Men The Training of Men for the World's Future
THE COLLEGE GATEWAY
BY
CHARLES FRANKLYN THWING
D.D., LL.D., LITT. D.
President of Western Reserve University
Second Series of Baccalaureate Discourses
THE PILGRIM PRESS
BOSTON CHICAGO
Copyright 1918 By CHARLES F. THWING
THE PILGRIM PRESS
BOSTON
PREFATORY NOTE
In the year 1903, I published " A Liberal Education and a Liberal Faith," a volume of Baccalaureate addresses given from 1891 to that time. The present volume includes the addresses given between 1903 and 1918.
To the students with whom I have lived and worked and played these many years, and who first heard these addresses at their Commencement, I dedicate this new volume. Without, as well as within, college walls, may they find that their highest aspirations are, through daily experience, becoming solid convictions.
C. F. T.
Western Reserve University, Cleveland
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CONTENTS
PAGE
Prefatory Note v
I Trustees for Humanity 3
II Entering into Life 25
III Sympathy the Solution of the Social
Problem 45
IV Some Rewards of a College Training 63 V The Needs of American Life which the
College and the College Graduate SHOULD Fill 81
VI Being Rich Without Riches 101
VII The American College Student and the
Universities of the World . . . .125 VIII The Four-Square Man 135
IX Public Disorder and the Higher Educa- tion 151
X The Interpretation of Life 171
XI College Life a Prophecy of Life Itself 187 XII The Greatness and Simplicity of Re- ligion 205
XIII The Looking Backward of Character
AND OF Achievement 221
XIV The Responsibility of the Individual
'^' |j -^;^ FOR THE COMMUNITY 239
^|XV Effects of the War on College Women 261
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TRUSTEES FOR HUMANITY
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THE COLLEGE GATEWAY
Chapter I
TRUSTEES FOR HUMANITY [1904]
" We were allowed of God to be put in trust with the gospel." — 1 Thessalonians ii : 4.
THE word gospel may be interpreted in a way either narrow or broad. It may be made to refer to the good news of a special and signal revelation; it may be ap- plied to the incarnation of Christ, to the words which Christ spoke, to the works which he did. The gospels represent the Gospel. This mean- ing is clear, definite, narrow. The word may also be used in a sense broad and no less clear. It may be made to refer to the whole cosmic process which moves from God manward, and from man Godward. It includes both the heart of the Eternal declaring itself in time, and the mind of Omniscience striving for hu- man betterment. It stands for the truth of the
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creation — that it is good, and also for the promise that there shall be no night and no more sea, neither sorrow nor crying. It repre- sents the fact of the lamb slain from the foun- dation of the world, and also embraces the manifestation of the lamb on Calvary. The Gospel as a force in this sense stands for love, for love as broad as man's need and as full as God's power. The Gospel is a realm as wide as humanity. The Gospel as grace is favor, forgiveness, help, limitless in time and space. The Gospel as doctrine is teaching to be inter- preted, known, accepted by all. The Gospel on the human side is the soul's re-birth, the soul's growth, the soul's re-making, the soul's righteousness, the soul's optimism. The Gos- pel on the divine side is God's passion, God's leading and lifting, God's furtherance of human well-being. The Gospel is truth to be known, justice to be declared, right to be done, duty to be accepted, love to be given and received. Of such a gospel prophets have prophesied, poets sung, apostles preached, and for such a gospel have the glorious army of the martyrs died.
These two interpretations, the one narrow, the one broad, are yet not antagonistic. They supplement each other. The lamb that was
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slain on Calvary was slain from the foundation of the world. The Gospel preached by Christ and his apostles is the gospel of the good news of righteousness, of truth and of duty, declared by every prophet from the beginning until now. The beatitudes of the Fifth of Matthew are the expression of eternal principles of righteousness, of pity, of love and of purity. The whole Sermon on the Mount is a declaration of love and of justice, as eternal as time and as wide in application as human need. The forces for human betterment, embodied in and de- clared by the Christ, preached by apostles, embodied in holy writings, are the very same forces which are regnant in history and dominant in human affairs.
Of such a gospel, broad, high, profound, man is put in trust. Of such a gospel, broad, high, profound, the college graduate is put in trust in a special significance.
For the Gospel is a body of truth and of truths. These truths are the most profound; they concern the divine plan, purpose and method. They are as eternal as eternity, as broad as space, as complex as nature's forces. They bear relations to each other. Some of these truths are primary, some subordinate; some causes, some results. Some find their
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chief support in the Bible, and their secondary in the human reason; some find their chief support in the human reason, and their secondary in the Holy Scriptures. Some are axiomatic, and others represent long processes of reasoning. Some are inductive, and some deductive. The Gospel, therefore, is a body of reason and truth. As such, it is specially committed to the reasoning mind. I am not saying that the Gospel is not a gift, a message that the wayfaring man may understand and accept. But I am saying that the Gospel is, in certain relations, a philosophy, and that the Gospel as a philosophy is specially committed to the college graduate. For he is the man of reason. His is the mind, if any mind may be said to be broad, which is comprehensive. It brings together the widely distributed parts of knowledge and unites them into a consistent principle. His is the mind, if any mind can at all appreciate, which is able to assess each fact at a proper value, to put the subordinate as subordinate and the primary as primary. His is the mind, if any mind be at all able, which is able to see clearly, to reason logically, to infer correctly. His is the mind, if any mind be at all qualified, which is to detect the sophistical, to unravel the complex, to recog-
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nize its own limitations, to distinguish the essential from the arbitrary, to point out the way of truth.
In this age there is special need of inter- preting the gospel as truth. In this age there is special need of receiving the gospel as a message addressed to the reason as well as to the heart, as a declaration made through the reason to the conscience and to the will. The gospel is, on one side, in peril of becoming what I may call a manual training. In this condition the impulse for service is in danger of becoming as irrational as it is enthusiastic and well-intentioned. The gospel of service is of course good, glorious. Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only. But if such a gospel of service have only heart, it is a gos- pel dissipating, disintegrating. It is like the steamer having boiler and engines, but rudder- less; it is destructive to itself and to others. On the other side the gospel is in peril of again becoming a form of mysticism. In mysticism the will loses itself in the contemplation of the eternal and the infinite. Modern mysticism takes on the name known as Christian Science. Mysticism has its place. Christian Science has its place. It is a half-truth, or a quarter- truth. But if mysticism be not founded on
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reason — and the peril is that mysticism will not be founded on reason — its place is small in the world of thought and reality. It be- comes a cloud, which, even if filled by the glories of unseen suns, is only an object of aesthetic and ascetic delight, coming no one knows whence, leading no one knows whither. The body of truth and of truths which are presented in the gospel are neither primarily a workshop nor a cloudy palace. But they do represent a temple of worship, of revelation, and of reason. In such a temple the college graduate is the most fitting dweller.
The gospel, too, represents a person, as well as a truth. As such, therefore, the college graduate becomes a special trustee of it. The first chapter of Genesis and the first chapter of John's gospel bear the same revelation — " In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. . . . And God said. Let there be light: and there was light." " In the be- ginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ... In him was life; and the life was the light of men." I care not what name is given to Him whom we call God. You may call him Jehovah, the Eternal, the First Cause, the Word, the Spirit. I am not preaching a sermon on the trinity,
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But by whatever name He is called, He is behind all, in all, through all, a person.
For the presentation and representation of such a person, unworthy as the presentation may be, the worthy person is essential and necessary. Personality alone represents per- sonality. What, therefore, let me ask, is the college for — but for the training of large personality? A personality in which are em- bodied at once the verities and the graces, the disciplines and the enrichments, the sanctities and the duties of life. Yet how de- fective is the result, how imperfect the realiza- tion of the ideal. At times, how low the ideal itself! But, above all other conditions, does not the college represent the most potent force and the richest condition for making character reasonable, moral, and strong? Does it not, above every other force, unite the contradic- tories, giving purity without Pharisaism, lofti- ness of aim without unreasoning ambition, compassion without softness, beauty free from self-consciousness, and the manhood which creates manliness and the womanhood which creates womanliness? Such a character, so disciplined and enriched, is the best qualified to interpret, to declare the Supreme Person of the universe to the world. Humanity, as it is seen
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and setjforth by the college, is best fitted to express divinity to men.
In the administration of this trusteeship of the gospel by college people, the gospel is to be applied to several great conditions of our life in America.
One of these conditions to which the trustee- ship of the gospel is to be applied is the subject known as labor and capital. This condition is most serious. Two elements necessary for the producing of results of primary value to the community are in constant or periodic antag- onism. If they are not warring foes they are, on their very best terms, armed neutrals. Capital is inclined to estimate labor as more important than the laborer. Methods are of slight worth provided results are satisfactory. Capital at times seems to give ground for the judgment that nothing is so cheap as human hands, and no supply so certain, or so large, as human life.
On the other hand the laborer is inclined to be jealous of the capitalist. He feels that labor is not getting its full increment of the increasing forces of civilization. He feels himself often opposed, cajoled, played with, fooled. He easily becomes an anarchist. He sees law-breaking at the top, and he at the
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bottom defies the law. Sullen, gloomy, re- vengeful, he often is. The Labor Union he uses as a mighty engine of democracy, both against the capitalist and his brother work- man. He often uses it as a means of serving one through all, and also of serving many through one. The Union is at once a democ- racy and a monarchy, — a monarchical de- mocracy and a democratic monarchy. It is the most important tool of modern industry and of modern life.
The first element in the adjustment of the rights and duties of capital and labor is the understanding of the rights and duties of both capital and labor. Each has rights, each has duties. Each is inclined to see and to insist upon its rights, and each is inclined to be blind to, or to shirk, its duties. Each side is, on the whole, narrow. Its narrowness arises from what it esteems its duty of self- preservation. A board of directors declares, " We must protect this property, we are the trustees of our stockholders; we must earn dividends; if we do not protect and earn, suffering results." The statement is true. A labor union or council declares, " This work is worth more than is paid for it; if we fail to get proper pay, we shall strike! " Each
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statement is true, the logic logical. The capitalist and laborer are both right, and both wrong, in many matters, in most strained conditions. But each is inclined to be per- sonal in his interpretations, partisan in his conception of duties, narrow in his ideas of rights.
In this condition the chief purpose, the only method to be pursued is the making of both the laborer and the capitalist larger men. The method to be pursued is the method of education; it is the method of altruism. It is the method of putting oneself in the other man's place. It is the method of altruism, the method of helping the other man to get into one's own place. We shall reach no per- manent method of settlement of the labor question until we have helped all men into a thinking broader, larger, into a feeling more vital, into a sympathy more tender and appreciative.
For securing such a result the college grad- uate stands as a most helpful force. What does education mean unless it means breadth? What does education mean unless it means a mighty sense of appreciation? For what are the favorite emblems on the shields of our colleges? Are they not a rising sun, a lighted
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lamp? What are the favorite words embossed on these shields? Are they not "Veritas," " Lux " ? Light for all, light for each; breadth for all, breadth for each! Prejudice, partiality, partisanship are not to be suffered.
It is not for me, now and here, to set forth the special methods by which you shall show your breadth. Of course you are not to stand before the world and say, " I am broad-minded; I am called to settle the disputes of labor and capital! " You are not to be a strike- breaker or a boycott-adjuster. You are to go about your business. But in going about your business you will have ample opportunity for using your largeness. The by-products of your breadth may be worth more than its direct results. You are, above all people of the community, to have that largeness of mind, that bigness of heart, which will do more than all else to settle immediate, present and local difficulties. You are to give to all men that same largeness and bigness which, when they have become a part of humanity, will render labor difficulties impossible.
To a second question in our American life are you college people to apply the trusteeship of the gospel. The labor question touches all parts of the land, all orders of society. The
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second question to which I refer is immediately a problem of the South. It is the question of the civil, social, industrial condition of the colored race. This government is a republic. It is a republic based upon equality of personal rights. I suppose that no one denies that in certain states laws are passed which do result in the denial of civil rights. I suppose also it is recognized that the industrial field for the colored man is, on the whole, becoming more confined. I suppose in many parts the feeling is in favor of a restriction of the social privileges of the colored race. The whole condition is unique in the history of the world. A race, as a race, inferior in power, of ten millions, domi- ciled in a republic of sixty other millions, — it is a problem of tremendous proportions, complex in historic relations and elements, fraught with endless, some would say frightful, responsibilities. But such a problem is a problem, first of all, for the reason. First of all it is a problem to be analyzed, each element drawn out fully, each element related to every other element. The problem is first to be stated in terms of the reason; it is to be dis- cussed in terms of the reason; it is to be solved in terms¥of^the^reason. One of the most forbiddingj[elements|inIthe whole problem is
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TRUSTEES FOR HUMANITY
that some people are found who are either unable or unwilling to state, or to discuss, or to treat, or to try to solve, the problem in terms of the reason. Therefore, because this ques- tion is a question for the reason, it is a question making a special appeal to college folk. Its historic relations, its racial condition, its civil and civic elements, its industrial and social affiliations, form a question which summons the largest knowledge, the profoundest re- flection, the keenest insight, and the most accurate discrimination.
Of course, in the solution of this problem the heart of love has its place, and the con- science of justice has also its place. If the heart of love or the conscience of justice fail to secure their rights in its solution, then the problem becomes yet more difficult, difficult as it is. But if this force cannot be relied upon for the solution, the greater is the duty placed upon the reason for the proper interpretation and declaration of the question. The proper interpretation and declaration of any great human problem is the best method for arous- ing the conscience to righteousness and the heart to its duty of love. In such a move- ment, therefore, primarily a movement of and through the reason for the betterment of a
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race, the college man and woman of the well- trained reason must have a great and significant part. You are put into a trusteeship of the gospel for the benefit of men and of any race of men.
A third problem of our time to which should be applied the trusteeship of the gospel by college folk, is the general problem of the giving to civilization increasing depth and larger relationships. For we sadly know that our horizons of vision are not broad, nor our wells of strength and of refreshment deep. Too keenly we know that the walls of the temple of our civilization are pretty thin. Every mob breaking down doors of jails, shooting, burn- ing wretches who still are human, proves how thin is the crust which divides subter- ranean fires from our homes and our lives. Soldiers of some civilized nations put into China become ravenous beasts. John Morley, writing of the social and personal evils attend- ing the discussion of the Irish Bill of 1868, says, " It was a painful demonstration how thin, after all, is our social veneer even when most highly polished." I sometimes fear that forces now active may fling themselves on the community and again overthrow civilization, as it was overthrown in southern Europe
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fifteen hundred years ago. Neither this nation, nor any other of the advancing peoples of the world, has any patent right to a constant progress or to a lasting exis- tence.
In the enriching and deepening of the forces of modern civilization, two questions arise for special notice. One question is the decline of the respect paid to the formal government and to the chosen members of it, and the corresponding increase to the informal associa- tions of society. The law-making body of the nation, of the state, of the town, stands for less than it did a generation ago. Congress, Legislature and City Council receive less respect today than they received in the days of Garfield, of Sherman, of Sumner and of Dawes. The laws and statutes are less ob- served, and are more thoroughly regarded as not worthy of observance. The respect paid to the executive and judicial part of the Commonwealth may not have suffered serious decrease, but the respect paid to the law- making body has vastly diminished. Man has become more, the state less; the people have waxed, the nation waned. But with this decline has occurred an increase in the force of the associations of men which are not politi-
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cal or governmental. The advancing forces are industrial, financial, commercial. The Stock Exchange is a more powerful force than the Senate Chamber. The Board of Directors of certain corporations have become more in- fluential than the President's Cabinet. The captains of industry are more commanding leaders than Governors of Commonwealths. Some would say that the captains of industry are the governors of Commonwealths, and some would say that at times those most in- terested in the Stock Exchange do sit in the seats of Congress. The influence of certain men over the destiny of this nation, who have no office and no desire for office, approaches in power, some might say exceeds in power, the influence of the President for the United States. I have sometimes thought that a great cor- poration is well named the UNITED STATES Steel Corporation. Such a figure is not to be interpreted too closely, but my simple conten- tion is that the respect paid to the formal government and governors has weakened, and the respect paid to the informal government and governors has strengthened.
A second change is passing over the com- munity. Human interest is passing from theology to sociology. Its center is no longer
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divinity, but humanity. The process is the reverse of the Ptolemaic and Copernican transfer. We find our center, not in an out- side world, but in man. We celebrate Christ- mas, God becoming man — the incarnation, rather than Easter, man becoming the divine. The incarnation of God in man is more im- portant than the spiritualizing of man in God. The great poems are no longer attempts to justify the ways of God to man, but they do attempt to justify the ways of man to man. We build few cathedrals for worship, we build auditoriums for instruction, social and college settlements. Young Men's and Young Wo- men's Christian Associations, Lend-a-Hand Clubs, Endeavor Societies, Leagues for Social Service, these and many other forms of al- truism embody the present tendency. The divine element in religion is minimized, the human magnified. I am neither opposing nor approving such a movement, I am only trying to interpret it. The change is one of the most significant and fundamental of all the changes of our generation.
These two movements, the movement away from the formal government to the informal, from the divine element in religion to the human, are illustrations of that great move-
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ment of human society which one of the greatest of social philosophers has described as a movement from status to contract. The formal government and religion represent the status into which one is born, a condition ap- proaching in permanence the forces of nature. We are passing over into the life in which forces are to be arranged and covenants to be made. Life in government and in religion has becopie mobile. Every day alters con- ditions, every day offers new duties, every hour reveals new truth and new work. Each new condition leads to new arrangements of the social order and organism, and all new arrangements lead to new conditions.
In such changing circumstances and forms the college graduate has laid upon himself peculiar duties. For the graduate has an intellectual sense of relationships, he sees and he foresees. He is to be at once just and generous, large-minded and large-hearted, con- siderate and enthusiastic. He is to adjust and to readjust, in the changing conditions of his universe, the stabilities and the standards of the formal government, and to represent the vital and energetic forces of life. He is to seek to show that law lies at the base of every state, political, civil, social and industrial.
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He is not to forget that all social movements relate themselves to Him in whom we live and move and have our being. He is to have cognizance of the great tides of human affairs, and also to take note of the individual waves which rise, break, fall. He is to seek to make social progress religious, religious interpreta- tions human, humane, humanistic. He is, by his greatness and fineness, to make civiliza- tion great and fine.
To the Members of the Classes about to Graduate:
Into your hands I put great commissions. I summon you to serious duties. You are to live in the most critical of centuries, among the most formative of peoples. In great move- ments you are to share, in great undertakings you are to have a part. The conditions are to demand your strongest might, your largest endeavor, your keenest wisdom, your most persistent patience, your finest enthusiasms. But my confidence in you is also large. Obli- gations never exceed abilities. If you do all that you are able to do, the result is well. That you will do all that you are able to do, I believe. Go forth, then, to
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transmute learning into wisdom, strength into efficiency, power into service. Go forth, then,
" To be forever an influence, A memory, a goal, a high example, A thought of honor in some noble heart, Part of thy country's treasure and renown, — And oft give courage unto souls that strive."
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II
ENTERING INTO LIFE
Chapter II
ENTERING INTO LIFE [1905]
"If thou wilt enter into life, keep the command- ments."— Matthew xix : 17.
THESE words form one of the most comprehensive of Christ's remarks. The sentence represents the constitu- tion of man. If you would live, observe the Commandments. The ten? Yes, the ten. What are the Commandments of which the keeping will give life? What is the compre- hensive interpretation of the Ten Command- ments ?
The first commandment refers to what I may call idealism. Idealism is a god-likeness which is supreme, of which no image can be graven. Idealism is conscientiousness touched by imagination. I refer to those intellectual ideas and to those ethical principles which are supreme and fundamental. I mean the belief in, and the living for, what the outer eye sees not, what the outer ear hears not, but the belief in, and the living for, what the inner eye,
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the inner ear, do perceive and appreciate. I have in mind the intimations of the eternal, of the immortal, which Wordsworth sets forth in the great Ode. Conscientiousness may be slow, painful, plodding. Imaginativeness may- be airy, visionary, unattainable. But idealism as a working commandment unites slow, pain- ful, plodding conscientiousness with airy, visionary, and unattainable imaginativeness. It lifts conscientiousness into a moral force, — swift, noble, and inspiring. Conscience re- strains, regulates, articulates the imagination. The imagination gives to the conscience wings, and conscience gives to the imagination feet. The man of idealism is a man of ideals, but he is more. He lives in a certain atmosphere; he holds a certain attitude; he occupies a cer- tain angle of vision; he is moved by certain higher purposes. But he has a range of pur- poses which are joined together by great table- lands of common sense. He has a reverence for tradition, for tradition represents idealism seen from the side of achievement. The idealism of tomorrow becomes the history of yesterday. Sincerity clothes this man of idealism as with a garment, for he cannot live a lie in himself. Simple is he, for he sees great things and sees them in great relations. In noble self-control
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he lives, for he is a part of the universe which is subject to law. Resignation and aggressive- ness are in him united. He is a patriot, for his country is dear, but he is also human. He loves men more than he loves man. He is an opti- mist; he knows he is in God's world and that all must be well. He is not a man of ambition, for ambition is self-centered. He is a man of aspiration, for aspiration points toward the goal. He is a man free, for he believes in him- self. He is a man tolerant, for he believes in other men. Justice, love for the beautiful, temperance, loyalty, are in him, for he believes in God and in all that God has made. In him are united not a few contradictories, — initia- tive and self-restraint, laboriousness and rest- fulness, concentration and versatility, co- operation and individualism, considerateness and self-respect, liberty and law, gravity and gayety, intensity and breadth, grasp on essen- tials and faithfulness to details, the cardinal virtues and the cardinal graces. All these are in him joined.
You are going forth into a world vastly material and materialistic. The lights of the street will be nearer to you than the stars. To make a living will at times seem to you more important than to make a life. Career may
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be a goal more attractive than character. The present may seem longer than the ever coming and never coming future. The market may tend to transmute you into merchandise. Gross and sordid purposes will flaunt them- selves before you. Trivial and perilous schemes will attract. Queen Victoria said to an arch- bishop: "As I get older I cannot understand the world; I cannot comprehend its little- nesses." But these littlenesses will at times seem to you not little. You are, however, to see them in the light of great principles. In the comparison of eternal and infinite truths, you are to be what John Morley says Gladstone was: " Immersed in active responsibiHty for momentous secular things, he never lost the breath of what was to him a diviner aether. Habitually he strove for the lofty uplands where political and moral ideas meet. He struck all who came into contact with him by a goodness and elevation that matched the activity and power of his mind. His political career might seem doubtful, but there was no doubt about the man."
Emerson asks, in the essay on The Trans- cendentalist, "Where are the old Idealists?" Where are they who represented genius, virtue, the invisible and heavenly world? Some have
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gone, but others are here. They have not been taken in early ripeness to the gods. High purposes are still held. The unseen is still seen. The temporal still has relations with the eternal. Our frivolity and base examples shall not dim the lustre of the shining of the stars. Vulgarity shall be ashamed in the presence of dignity, and low aims shall bury themselves beneath the sod of forgetful- ness.
Such idealism is essential Christianity. No small share of the power of Christianity is drawn from its idealism. Christianity gives a God. Idealism in its very being demands a God. Christianity presents the highest stand- ard of duty and of grace. Idealism seeks and accepts the noblest aims. Christianity offers the mightiest force in doing duty, — love. Idealism is quickened by the finest affections. Christianity gives a sense of proportion of values. Idealism sees things in relations. Christianity interprets life as more than living, the body as more than raiment, the soul as more than the body, eternity as more than time, the laws of being as more than the methods of exchange: all this is idealistic. Christianity is idealism. The most perfect working type of idealism is found in Chris-
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tianity. The record of Christianity is a record of the triumphs of idealism.
A second commandment leading to life is the commandment to work. " Six days shalt thou labor." The parenthesis of the fourth commandment is important, as well as the main text. The first commandment of Eden is reinforced at Sinai, and it becomes the message of the teacher of Nazareth and of the Apostle of Tarsus. The command to do is a command addressed, of course, to the will. But to the college people it is a command having special relation to the brain. The work which you are to do is to be a work in which you can use your intellect. Into every work, of course, some mental force enters. But the greater the opportunity for the use of intellect in every service, — other elements being the same, — the more worthy of you is that service.
It is significant that of the first five hundred and thirty-one graduates of our oldest college in its first sixty-five years, about one-half became clergymen. It is also significant that for many years in the last century, more graduates of certain colleges entered the law than entered any other calling. It has now become most significant that a larger number
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of graduates are entering business. The pro- fessions are usually called learned. Business is not usually called learned. But those who are to enter business are to make business a learned calling. Small is the outlook for you in any work unless you can make that work intellectual. The increase in the horse-power of the world in the last fifty, twenty, and ten years has been tremendous. The increase in the brain power has not been so tremendous. Any place in which you can use your brain, your whole brain, your brain at its highest co- efficient of power, you should feel free to accept. The perception of a fact, the co- ordination of facts, the conclusion of facts, the weighing of evidence, judgment, these represent forces which every worthy calling should accept from you. If, for the use of such forces, a calling has no primary need, it is no calling for you to accept. If, for the use of such forces, a calling does have primary need, it may worthily represent the field of your choice. I recall that Henry Adams says that Clarence King had a poor opinion of intellect. He found it a defective instrument, but he admitted it was all that man had to live upon, although he confessed that women had other power also.
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In the last fifty years, the earning of each inhabitant of this country has almost doubled. In the year 1850, each person earned, on the average, each day, thirty cents; in 1880, 44 5/10 cents; in 1890, 51 44/100 cents; in 1900,58 12/100 cents. This increase is due both to the enlarged efficiency of material forces and to the enlarged efficiency of the human brain. The enlarged efficiency of material forces is, of course, the resultant of the action of the brain and the human will. This increase is the application of the com- mandment of Eden and of Sinai, — " Six days shalt thou labor."
Of such work, demanding intellect, you are to be the master. Work is in peril of making the worker like the well-digger, the further he digs the lower he falls and the narrower be- comes his outlook or uplook. Work should make the worker like the wall-builder, — the further he builds, the broader his vision, the larger his relations. You are to be the master. Work enslaves some men. No slave-driver's whip was ever more imperative than is the compulsion of the duties of some men's work. You are to be the master intellectually. You are to see, understand, appreciate. You are to know your work; you are to know your-
[32]
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self; you are to know your work in relation to yourself and yourself in relation to your work. You are to be the master morally. The temptations of your work you are to understand in their nature and constitution, to feel in their attractivenesses and repulsion. You are to be master of your work in your will. You are to be able to lay it down as well as to take it up. The mastery required for laying down a work is sometimes more magnifi- cent than mastery required for taking up and carrying forward a great work.
The greatness of the President of the Uni- versity of Chicago has been seen for more than a decade in wisdom of planning and energy of doing. So great an educational result of a decade the world has never known. The conditions were, and are, unique. The material forces have also been unique. The re- sult has, furthermore, been unique. But, the greatness of the man himself, the President, William Rainey Harper, has been proved quite as much by the calmness, fearlessness, and willingness to close the door of this greatest opportunity. If God calls you to lay down a work of riches and the highest promise, you will show yourself a masterful hero quite as much in letting fall the task as in being willing
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THE COLLEGE GATEWAY
to carry it forward to glorious completion and consummation.
For those who are masters of great work, for those who have brains to put into great work, the calling is loud and insistent. The demand for common folk must be great, because there are so many of us. But the demand for un- common folk is as much more insistent as it is narrower. Men of force and of vision, men of faithfulness and of courtesy, men of bold- ness and of self-restraint, men who are teachers and doers, men of guidance and of inspiration, men of such character and power as you college folk represent, for such the world calls mightily.
I would not say to you what Pasteur said to the students of Edinburgh on the occasion of its three hundredth anniversary: " Work perseveringly; work can be made into a pleasure, and alone is profitable to man, to his city, to his country." But I would say to you, choose a work demanding your highest and best intellect, and of such a work make yourself a great master.
tin aiding graduates to become masters of work, the colleges are setting, with each passing year, a worthier example and a stronger in- spiration. Those who are founding and en- dowing colleges are inclined to apply the
[34]
ENTERING INTO LIFE
standard of efficiency with increasing thorough- ness. The three men who are doing the most to equip colleges are applying the test of effi- ciency. Dr. Pearsons, Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Rockefeller are constantly examining colleges for the purpose of learning the relationship between their product and their expenditure. Of course a share of the academic product it is impossible to test by ordinary standards. The product has a value in quality as well as in quantity. But the test of amount of product has value. One of the gentlemen said to me recently, speaking of a college which he had been asked to aid, " That college has property amounting to one and a quarter millions of dollars and one hundred and eighty students." It was a college historic, numbering among its graduates the greatest names. " But," he declared, by inference, " the result is not commensurate with the expenditure." This College of which you are becoming graduates, and every college, should impress each student through the economic efficiency and the efficient economy of the use of equipment and of endowment.
A third commandment written upon the posts of the doorway of life may be called the commandment of love. The last six of the
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THE COLLEGE GATEWAY
commandments of the twentieth of Exodus are easily interpreted as commandments of love. For what is " Honor father and mother " but an expression of love? What is the pro- hibition against committing adultery but respect for love, love high and pure? What is the prohibition against stealing, false wit- nessing, and coveting, but respect for prop- erty, for truth, for rights? What, in fact, is the twentieth of Exodus but an analysis of another command of the sixth of Deuter- onomy? ^'And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might."
The command to love, as a means of entering into life, has special application in every age. In this age, it has, I think, three or four applica- tions of peculiar significance.
One application of love in our time is to be made to that industrial and commercial method known as competition. Competition is called the life of trade. It often proves to be the death of trade. For competition may result in monopoly. Monopoly is monarchy writ large. Monarchy may crush. The central question is, — How far forth should competition be guided by the principle of love? The central answer to be made at once is, competition is
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to be guided absolutely by the principle of love. For the principle of love is higher than the method of competition. The principle of love in trade is to be applied at once to one's neighbor and to oneself. The command that you are to love your neighbor as yourself implies that you are to love yourself as you love your neighbor. Your love for yourself is to be adjusted to your love for your neighbor, and your love for your neighbor is to be ad- justed to your love for yourself. These two principles are to be fitted to each other under the purpose of the betterment of the com- munity. Competition may survive or compe- tition may fall, but it is either to survive or to fall under the law of the fitting relation of egoistic and altruistic love.
This principle of love is also to be applied to a second part of the human field. It be- longs rightfully to the domain of capital and labor. One of the saddest impressions of our time relates to the indifference of some men who are employers concerning those whom they employ. Its sadness is exceeded only by the sadness arising out of the jealousy and hatred of some employees against some employers. The strike, the lock-out, is an industrial aifair, it is said, but each easily
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THE COLLEGE GATEWAY
becomes a personal affair. When either be- comes a personal affair, it easily becomes also essential murder.
The community may assent to the belief that there should be absolute liberty in all industrial affairs in respect to making contracts. The community may recognize that both labor and capital have the right to organize, each for its own good, provided the public good be not thereby impaired. The community may be apprehensive that the closed shop represents a certain fixedness of principle and of industrial condition which is distasteful to the American mind. The community may fear that the closed shop may take away certain motives and incentives to industrial and personal benefit. But, above all else, the community recognizes that man is man before he is a laborer, and that, in the treatment given to him as a laborer, the element of the man is superior and supreme. The community recog- nized that in this human part, sympathy, respect, fellowship, love, are first, fundamental, ultimate, supreme.
A third application of the commandment of love is to be made to the common relationship of nations. Love has touched the individual and humanized him. Can love touch the
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nation and civilize it? Love has abolished in America the duel. Seventy years ago, students fought duels and killed each other. Can love disarm nations.^ Respect for person and for property has created and established courts of law in a single state. Can a similar respect maintain, as it has established, permanent courts of arbitration? Although England is always fighting somewhere, yet with a civilized power, with the single exception of the Crimean, England has not had a war for almost one hundred years. In the century preceding her sword was seldom in its sheath. But love is not only to abolish war; it is also to disarm the nations. To disarm the nations is to trans- mute poverty into competency, and com- petency into wealth. It is to transform con- sumers into producers, destroyers into creators. The army and the navy threaten to make every great power of the old world bankrupt. Love would give wealth, as well as peace. Love also lessens a certain touchiness found among the nations. States are like capital, — sensitive. They are easily provoked. To jealousy they seem naturally subject. Each eyes the other with suspicion. Each fears that others are plotting against its welfare. Ig- norance begets fear; fear, anger; anger, self-
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THE COLLEGE GATEWAY
defence; self-defence, conflict. But love en- genders confidence; confidence, frankness; frankness, sympathy; sympathy, co-operation; and co-operation, union and unity. Love would oblige nations to heed the command- ment, " Thou shalt not kill," and would prevent nations from coveting provinces on the Rhine and territory in Manchuria. Love is the con- stitution of every peace society.
Love is also to be applied to, and in, the personal relation. John Hay, writing of a friend, said: " I once introduced him to an eminent writer, who remarked, * I understand now the secret of his charm. It is his kind- ness. ' " Jealousies, envies, bickerings, are to be made to cease. Men are to care for and bless each other. Let no one ever come to you without finding a friend. Let no one ever depart from you without leaving a helper. Happiness is born in love. Forbearance, in- spiration, guidance, are its results. College folk, above all others, are to be great lovers of their kind.
Idealism, work, love! These three words sum up the ten commandments of Exodus. These three words represent the command- ments, of which living means life. In whom are these great commandments united and
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incarnated? In whom, other than in him who spoke them? Did ever idealism have a higher aspiration? Was conscientiousness ever more noble or more deeply touched by lofty imagi- nation? Are not his beatitudes the creed of the ideahst? Are not the Kingdom of Heaven, the vision of God, and the childhood in God, the life richest and finest? Was he not poor in spirit, pure in heart, and did he not come as the Prince of Peace? Was not the Christ the great worker? Did he not say, " My Father worketh hitherto, and I work " ? Were there not joined in him the three most laborious callings of the carpenter, the teacher, and the physician? Was not his last command, " Go, and do " ? Moreover, was not he the great lover of all history ? Were not his first recorded acts, acts of obedience? And among his last, were there not found the prayer of forgiveness? Are not the arms of his cross raised in bene- diction and beneficence, and were not his last words, words of benediction and peace? The Christ was the idealist, the worker, the lover.
To the Members of the Graduating Classes:
If thou wouldst enter into life, keep the Commandments. To the one to whom these words were spoken, life meant the richest
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THE COLLEGE GATEWAY
character. If he were to become the best man, he was to keep the Commandments of God. These words are still as true as on that day in which they were first spoken. If you are to become the best that lieth in you, you are to keep the Commandments. You are to keep them, not because they are command- ments, but you are to keep them because the Commandments represent truth, law, principle. But the words may be interpreted in a sense narrow and special. You are entering into what is' called life. This week for you ends pupilage, dependence, learning, training, educa- tion. For pupilage, self-direction; for learning, activity; for training, service; for education, achievement is to be substituted. The prepa- ration is made, the ship is built, the day of launching has dawned. In this life, you are yet to be under the Commandments. Ideal- ism; it is to be to you at once an atmosphere and a mountain peak. In it you are to breathe; for it, you are to aspire. Work; it is to be your happy habit, — unceasing, progressive, remunerative, inspiring, recreative. Love; it is to be your life. Thus shall character grow from more to more.
[42]
Ill
SYMPATHY THE SOLUTION OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM
Chapter III
SYMPATHY THE SOLUTION OF THE
SOCIAL PROBLEM
[1906]
" And it came to pass, that, as Jesus sat at meat in his house, many publicans and sinners sat also together with Jesus and his disciples: for there were many, and they followed him." — Mark ii : IS.
THE text is a picture of democracy. The democracy of Christ springs from the sympathy of Christ. The association of Christ with men has its origin in his innate respect for men. Sympathy is primary. Sym- pathy represents thinking with, feeling with, choosing with, suffering with, rejoicing with, others. Sympathy is appreciation. It is the adoption of the other's point of view. It is the putting oneself in the other's place. Sympathy is an incarnation of the other per- son in oneself. It is the transfer of interest. It is vicariousness. Sympathy is your life lived in, and for, me; it is my life lived in, and for, you. It is the appeal of the race to the individual to surrender his individual
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interests for the sake of the race. It is the appeal of the individual for deliverance from the small and the trivial, and for deliverance into the great movements and achievements of the race.
An illustration of the broad relation of sym- pathy lies in the field which is itself made up of large human concerns, — namely, literature. Literature is more or less great as it appeals to the greater or smaller interests of men. Great literatuij'e is great because it appeals to great interests. Pick out the poems or the essays which are held to be the dearest and the noblest, and it will be found that they make the strongest appeal to the largest numbers. Mr. Lowell's greatest ode commemorates the college men who died on the field of honor at their country's call. Wordsworth's greatest ode sings the intimations of the life immortal. Tennyson's greatest poem is a chant of life and of death, and of life becoming the final conqueror. The greatest works of the greatest novelist of our country are concerned with the central theme of the dominance of conscience. The sin, the sorrow, the atonement, of Arthur Dimmesdale are only single notes in the greatest human Miserere. The novel attains its unique place in human life by reason of the
[46]
THE SOCIAL PROBLEM
Vesponsiveness which its note of love quick- ens in every soul. Literature touches things fundamental, elemental, universal, eternal. It therefore is literature. Human sympathy is likewise to embrace the things that are deepest, highest, most lasting, in human character.
The principle, then, which I wish to explain is the principle of sympathy. This principle I do not wish so much to explain as I wish to apply it. I wish to apply it in the solving of the social problem.
For, what is the social problem.^ It is the problem of society. It is the problem " How can human beings live together in peace and efficiency? " It is the problem of humanizing life. Society was of the farm; the farm stood for isolation. Society is of the factory; the factory stands for consolidation. Agriculture is separation; industrialism, combination. The problems of the farm-time were political. The present problems are social. Reflecting in the late evening of his long day of life, Glad- stone, speaking of his work as a law-maker, and referring only to achieved results, noted these achievements: " (First) The Tariffs, 1842- 1860; (Second) Oxford University Act; (Third) Post Office Savings Banks; (Fourth) Irish Church Disestablishment; (Fifth) Irish Land
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Acts; (Sixth) Franchise Act." What are these results? Are they not largely social? They have to do with men living together in happi- ness and service.
The social question is tremendously im- portant. In it lie the germs of revolutions. A man living in one of the most beautiful of all homes said to me, " The social revolution is sure to come. It was near coming in 1896." A young merchant just out of college said to me, " The revolution is sure to come. Current discussions and movements make plain it will be here within a decade." Writing in the year 1835, Tocqueville said: "The good things and the evils of life are more equally distributed in the world: great wealth tends to disappear, the number of small fortunes to increase; desires and gratifications are multi- plied, but extraordinary prosperity and irre- mediable penury are alike unknown. The sentiment of ambition is universal, but the scope of ambition is seldom vast. Each individual stands apart in solitary weakness; but society at large is active, provident, and powerful: the performances of private persons are insignificant, those of the state immense."
Three score of years and ten have wrought great changes. Have the good things and the
[48]
THE SOCIAL PROBLEM
evils of life become more equally distributed? Has great wealth disappeared? Is ex- traordinary prosperity or irremediable pen- ury still unknown? Is the scope of ambition still seldom vast? Does the individual stand forth and apart in solitary weakness? Is it not true, rather, as Canon Barnett has said: " On one side are the classes in possession, who rejoice in their refinements and restraints, in the cleanliness of their persons and the order of their meals, in their knowledge and culture. On the other side are the working classes, who rejoice in their strength, make merry over the mincing ways of their neigh- bors, and grow angry over what seems to be their hypocrisy and selfishness."
The problem is, therefore, the social problem to aid men to live together in happiness and in efficiency, in peace and in service. What will aid men unto such humanizing living?
Be it said negatively, the problem is not to be solved by any attempt at equality in work, — material, intellectual, ethical. Inequalities do exist, and apparently must exist. Men are born equal, not in ability or environment, but they are born equal simply in having cer- tain legal rights. The second term of the French Triad is false, as the other two are true.
[49]
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Liberty is the best condition; fraternity is a very precious result; equality, in any other sense than a legal sense, is impossible.
Nor can the problem be solved by largesses or by relief funds. The history of poor relief for two thousand years proves that the ordinary methods of municipal and personal help, of dealing with poverty, create or make more difficult the problem which they are designed to solve.
Nor can a solution be found in what is known as the Closed Shop, or the Closed Association of Employers. These propositions are more or less true: 1st, that there is a presumption in favor of absolute liberty of contract and of personal conduct; 2d, the community recog- nizes the rights of both labor and capital to organize each for its own good provided the public good be not thereby impaired; 3d, the community acknowledges that hygienic and other important conditions may often be best obtained for the whole body of workmen by the whole body rather than by the individual; 4th, the community is apprehensive that the Closed Shop represents a certain fixedness of principle and industrial condition which is distasteful to the American mind; Sth, the community holds that each man should be
[50]
THE SOCIAL PROBLEM
treated in his relationship of employment primarily as an individual; 6th, the community has a distinct fear that the Closed Shop may result in taking away certain motives and incentives to industrial and personal benefit; 7th, the people firmly believe that a change so fundamental in the industrial and personal order as is embodied in the Closed Shop should be made, not by one party nor arbitrarily, but should be made after thoughtful debate and by the whole body concerned. These propo- sitions may be more or less true, but they do not represent the force or the wisdom necessary for solving the problem.
The method which seems to me of the high- est worth in the solution of the social problem is sympathy.
For, first, sympathy represents respect for men as men. It pictures men as having God for their common Father, and the human brotherhood as their common environment. Sympathy has a keen sense of values. It treats the accidental and the incidental as the ac- cidental and the incidental. It finds the image of God in every child. It regards the individual as an individual, but also regards the individual as existing in, and for, the race. It respects the race as the race, but also
[51]
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knows that the race exists for the individual. It declares that the differences which divide men are slight in comparison with the like- nesses which unite them. The lowest man and the highest are much more alike than are the highest brute and the lowest man. Men are divided largely by exterior goods or evils. Men are united by the great principles of justice, of temperance, of tolerance, of in- tegrity and sincerity, of self-cpntrol and self- reverence, of imagination and industry, of liberty and humanity, of life and of death, of sorrow and of peace. These are the great things. Every home has its cradle; every house, its casket. The mystery of life and the mystery of death alike brood over all. Sorrow and joy knock at every door. Sym- pathy commands respect for men as men. Sympathy commanding respect for men as men does not so much solve the social problem as it dissolves it. Its hard and rugged lines are melted by the warm smiles or the hot tears of tender sympathy.
In the respect of man for man is included what may be called the element of neighbor- liness. One regrets that the neighborhood is passing away. People are seldom neighbors now. People living near each other do not
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unite because they live near each other. It would help this common respect of man for man if the neighborhood could be restored. Peter Harvey tells a story of Daniel Webster that, in the year 1817, Mr. Webster was called to defend two men who were accused of highway robbery. The appeal came to him at a time when he was tired out by service in Congress and in the courts. He had arranged to go away from his home. He felt no fee could tempt him to do further work. Three men from New Hampshire were announced. They asked him to defend the accused. The evidence for guilt was strong, but the feeling was that the men were innocent, being the subjects of a conspiracy. One of the three delegates said: " Here are two New Hampshire men who are believed in Exeter and Newbury, and Newburyport and Salem, to be rascals; but we in Newmarket believe, in spite of all evidence against them, that they are the vic- tims of some conspiracy. We think you are the man to unravel it, though it seems a good deal tangled even to us. Still we suppose that men whom we know to have been honest all their lives can't have become such desperate rogues all of a sudden." " But I cannot take the case," persisted Mr. Webster; " I am
[S3]
THE COLLEGE GATEWAY
worn to death with over-work; I have not had any real sleep for forty-eight hours. Be- sides, I know nothing of the case." " It's hard, I can see," continued the leader of the delegation; " but you're a New Hampshire man, and the neighbors thought that you would not allow two innocent New Hampshire men, however humble they may be in their circumstances, to suffer for lack of your skill in exposing the wiles of this scoundrel Goodridge. The neighbors all desire you to take the case."
That phrase " neighbors " caused Mr. Web- ster to take the case. The " neighbors " wanted it; the "neighbors" thought he would do it; the "neighbors"! It brought back to the mind and heart of Daniel Webster the community of association, of poverty, of sick- ness, of small economies, of distresses of many sorts, of boyhood and of manhood, of birth and of death. " Oh," said Mr. Webster, " if the neighbors think I can be of service, of course I must go." If to the American city there could be restored the neighbor and the neighborhood, respect for man as man would be heightened and a common sympathy vastly increased.
Second: Sympathy leads not only to a re-
[54]
THE SOCIAL PROBLEM
gard for men as men and to emphasis on fundamental human conditions; sympathy also leads to love. There is intellectual sympa- thy,— appreciation. There is emotional sym- pathy, — fellow feeling. There is also voli- tional sympathy, which I call love. To love men is the only panacea. Jeremy Bentham said: " If you would gain mankind, the best way is to appear to love them, and the best way of appearing to love them is to love them in reality." " Life in its largeness," says Woodberry in his great Essay on Swinburne, " is the power to love." The value of love for men is today beset by two perils. One peril is the love of things. People love material goods; they love wealth; they love money. The love of lucre represents, concentrates, the love for things. How silly is this love! The pathos of Mr. Dombey's interpretation of money to his poor little Paul makes the silli- ness of this love deeply pathetic. The love for men as men is also hurt by the passion for processes, by the ambition for progress, by the desire to get on. The current American " will and way " of making one's own way results in the overthrow of the person who stands in the way. But these two loves, — for things and for processes, — are yet set
[55]
THE COLLEGE GATEWAY
aside by a mightier love for men as men. To know men, to be with men, to serve men, means that one will and shall love men. Of the great historian, Green, Leslie Stephen says: " His sympathies with human beings were strengthened; and the history might have been written in a very different tone had the writer passed his days in academical seclusion. His interest in the welfare of the masses, and his conviction that due importance should be given to their social condition, determined a very important peculiarity of the work." Thus, being with men, understanding men's conditions, knowing their environments, one shall love men.
It you thus love men, the social problem is solved, or, when the love has become dominant the social problem has largely vanished.
Third: Sympathy is the method of the solving of the social problem. For sympathy leads one to the Christ as teacher and inspirer. One who is taught and moved by the Christ will possess great sympathy. For, the Christ represents the largest interpretation of human life. The industrial classes have largely fallen away from the Protestant churches, but they have not fallen away from the Christ. The son of the carpenter, and himself a carpenter, [56]
THE SOCIAL PROBLEM
is their idol and their ideal. " Down with the churches," they may cry, but before the manger and the cross they stand in mute worship.
Pilate's " Behold the man " is still inter- pretative. He is the consummate, compre- hensive character. He comes bearing the two widest and most important functions of teach- ing and of healing. He unites the contra- dictories of human experiences. He is holy, but he wishes to be baptized by his kinsmen. He is wise and strong, but he selects men to learn and to serve. He is transfigured on the mountain peak, but he descends to the valley to heal the poor sick boy. He is capable of mighty moral indignations, but he forgives the penitent and encourages the imperfect. He proclaims the gospel of the Kingdom, but he blesses the individual. He invites the weary to come to him for rest, and the heavy-laden for strength, and the ignorant for wisdom. He accepts the invitation of the rich, but he fails not to recognize the temptations of the rich. He declares the sorrowing are to be com- forted, the meek to have the earth, the poor in spirit Heaven's Kingdom, and the pure in heart the vision of God. His parables set forth great human lessons of growth, of effi-
[57]
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ciency, of fellowship, of oneness of service. They ever intimate that " the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind." To Him truth is at once a force and an aim; a duty, a condition and an ideal. His miracles are works of healing. Wonders are they to be- holders, but to him they are services. To heal, to soothe, to inspire, to help, is his purpose. He is righteous without self-conscious holiness, faithful to duty without pride, compassionate without ^softness or weakness, patient without slowness, earnest without haste, resisting temptation, — yet tender toward those who are tempted. He was so human, yet he gave intimations of the special divine callings and relations. He declared he had powers on whom he might call for aid in crises, yet he died crucified. He raised the dead, yet he allowed himself to die.
I speak not as a theologian: I speak as your friend, your fellow-worker. The Christ stands forth as the inspirer, the helper, the King of men. The man who lives as the Christ lived, who thinks as the Christ thought, who does as the Christ did, who is as the Christ was, — has, and must have, sympathy, which helps men to live together as brothers. I care not whether he be the Oriental Christ or the Christ
[58]
THE SOCIAL PROBLEM
of the Occident, whether he be the Christ of the Calvinist or of the Arminian, whether he be the Christ of the Middle Age or of the Twen- tieth Century, the spirit, the truth, the power of the Christ would, and does, solve the social problem.
Therefore, sympathy moving out on the great pathways of regard for men as men, — sympathy going forth on the great wings of love, — and sympathy, incarnate in the man inspired and moved by Christ, — sympathy would answer the questionings which spring out of the great social conditions of our time. If you care for and love men, and if you care for and love men as the Christ cared for and loved them, there would be no social problem.
To the Members of the Graduating Classes:
You have come to the week of your gradua- tion. You are going forth; going forth from the College, going forth into the world. The world into which you go is a bundle of complex forces and of perplexing problems. The forces were never so forceful, never so complex; the problems never so perplexing. The problems concern society. They concern the relation of men to men. These problems you are to
[59]
i
THE COLLEGE GATEWAY
) understand. Your studies have fitted you to understand. These problems you are to ap- preciate; they are significant of humanity's well-being. Your studies have fitted you to see things as they are. These problems you are to aid in solving. Where should humanity look for aid in answer to its great questions if not to the schools which write " Light " and "Truth" upon their shields? You are to go forth as human beings, — great, strong, high in purpose, having passion yet free from rash- ness, of tireless patience, of undying determi- nation, to do your part toward making over the kingdoms of this earth into the Republic of God, which is the kingdom of perfected man. May the Christ of God, and the Jesus of man, help, bless, and keep you, every one.
[60]
IV
SOME REWARDS OF A COLLEGE TRAINING
Chapter IV
SOME REWARDS OF A COLLEGE TRAINING
[1907]
" Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding,
" For the merchandise of it is better than the mer- chandise of silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold." — Proverbs iii: 13-14.
YOUR college course is ended, its work is done, its result for better or for worse, assured. As you thus stand with the academic gate closing upon you, I want to point out some of the results which belong to \ you at the close of these four college years. |
Our text indicates that these results are of the utmost preciousness. The whole chapter whence are taken the verses of our text is a song of praise of the rewards of wisdom. To the significance of some of these rewards I wish to call your thought.
The college y^ars are the years of the form- ing of friendships. The conditions promote personal intimacies and relations. Hundreds
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fere living in the same atmosphere, doing the same work, moved by the same general aims. Likeness promotes likingness. College life, too, is very real. It is free from deceits and deceptions. It abominates sham, it puts down arrogance; it abhors undue self-consciousness, it promotes the element of reality, the base on which friendship can rest. The college age, too, is the age of friendship. It is the age when the emotionalism of youth is passing over into intellectual maturity. The youth has lost the softness of character in which friendship does not last. He has not come into the hard- ness and unresponsiveness of character in which friendship does not begin. In such a soil, in which character is receptive without callowness and strong without indifference, friendships blossom and blossom to fruitage. Absence from home, moreover, promotes the forming of friendships. The student is flung into new relations. He lives alone: he must relate himself to new friends, — a new social alignment is made. The result is that next to the loves of the home, are the affections of the ) academic altar.
The greatest poem of the century is not only a poem great in its consolation, but also in its type of college friendship. Yet Tennyson had
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REWARDS OF COLLEGE TRAINING
other friends than Hallam. He lived with Spedding, who wrote the best life of Bacon, with Milnes, who afterwards was Lord Hough- ton, with Trench, who became the Archbishop of Dublin, with Dean Alford, with Merivale, the historian, and with other men of the same great wealth of promise. To every Greek boy, Liddell and Scott's " Lexicon " is a Web- ster's Dictionary. The friendship of Liddell and Scott began while they were still under- graduates, and lasted for fifty years. One of the greatest editions of the New Testament ever issued is that of Westcott and Hort. The friendship of these two scholars began in their early life at Cambridge, and lasted as long as life lasted. And associated with West- cott, also, were Lightfoot, the great scholar, who became bishop, and Benson, who became archbishop. The biography of every college man contains records of college friendships. Such friendships you are carrying out into your lives. You have made friends more intimate and more lasting in these four years | than you will ever make in all the rest of | your life. These are the friends who call you | by your first name, to whom you can pour out your soul without reserve, who, whether you succeed or fail, will always be true and with
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|vhom you will always remember yourself in Ihe freedom and joyfulness of youth.
There is also another result you are bearing
I forth from the college and which might be called a friendship. I shall call it the friend- ship of books. Books have been your tools, your equipment. The book is the symbol of the college. I fear that many of the books which you have read have not seemed to you to be friends. But there are books, you should rememberv, which are or which may become friends. A book, like a friend, speaks to you, argues with you, inspires your thinking, quickens your heart, confirms or annuls your choice, enriches your soul. A book bears to you messages, tells you a story, sings you a song, breathes consolation, giving a garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness. The book is the best method for you to enter into friend- ships with the great souls of the race, and also with the great soul of the race itself. The book reveals the lasting inspirations. \ Americans are the newspaper-reading people \ of the world. The newspaper habit is at \ once good and bad. Good, for it represents I a knowledge of the immediate, the present 1 world. It is the world of today. It is well to know the world of today. Today and to-
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REWARDS OF COLLEGE TRAINING
day's world is a part of the everlasting tim and a part of the universe. But the new- paper habit is bad in that it does not promote a larger knowledge of today. It fails to recog- nize that today came out of yesterday and is going to pass into tomorrow. The newspaper, is not comparative; it is descriptive. It is\ not interpretative. It becomes more of the reporter and less of the editor. It is not re- flective. The newspaper should become more and more a judgment day and less of a spec- tacle.
Therefore, I commend to you the friendship of books. Three types of books do I wish in particular to commend. One type is the es^ay. The essay stands for the most artistic result of prose composition. The essay represents in the writer what the diamond represents among precious stones. It is a regular and permanent form of treasure. The prose masters are essayists. Macaulay, Carlyle, De Quincey, Emerson, Lowell — make these your friends. They are great companions. You can thus walk with the philosopher along the Concord streets, with the historian along the banks of the Thames, or with the interpreter, in quiet happiness, beneath the trees of Elmwood.
Yet more friendly than the essay is the [67]
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biograph}^^ for the biography is the man him- sdJl Ah, these precious stories of a life; precious because the life is precious. Thus one comes into conference and communion with the masters. These last years, too, have given these great interpreters: Bismarck and Glad- stone, Huxley and Herbert Spencer, Tennyson, Browning, Longfellow and the other Cambridge poets. These are great friendships, which are offered to you for your knowing, for your consolation and for your inspiration.
But also in this form of friendship exists still another, the friendship of great poetry The friendship of great poetry is dearest be- cause poetry is the best soul, giving its best, its clearest, highest and profoundest vision, its noblest, happiest art. It may be Words- worth whispering hopes of the deathless life; it may be Shelley or Keats, rare souls dwelling apart like the star; or it may be Browning, virile, humble, triumphant; or it may be Whittier, singing of the dear, simple New Eng- land life, or chanting some chant for a noble soul, as he did sing of the first President of this College. Whoever the poet may be, his poem offers to you a friendship, dearest, closest, best.
So long as you have the friendships of great [68]
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books, you cannot be alone. So long as you have your library you cannot be homeless, so long as you drink the life-blood of master spirits, so long you will live and be strong. Your soul may be dull to music, your eyes may never see the soaring towers of Cologne, you may never be one of the little company that sits in silence in the Dresden Gallery before the Sistine Madonna: such friendships may be denied to you, but richer friendships, holier, more constant, the friendship of the great books are yours. They are the friend- ships of the college.
There is also a third result which you shoulcy bear away from these college halls with youl I shall call it a sense of proportion. It is tha appreciation of what is worth while. It stands for the significance of the significant. It represents interpreting great things as great and small things as small. It is a sense of | judgment which has become a part of your character. You have a desire to succeed. The desire is right. Success, you may say, lies in your being beloved, in your becoming rich, in your winning distinction in the field of public service. Success may lie in forms of results more or less material. I want you to know that for success you may pay a price too
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high. What you give for success may be worth more than success itself. In this great struggle for what we call success, the struggle never more intense than today, a struggle no- where more intense than in America, there are some conditions to which this sense of proportion should be especially applied. One of them is work and leisure. I might preach to you the gospel of work as does Carlyle and as the niodern man preaches. It is a good gospel. It belongs to the first Chapter of Genesis; I might also preach to you the gospel of leisure, of a leisure that is appreciative by reason of work, and that aids one to appreciate work itself.
Leisure without labor is idleness, work without leisure is drudgery. Either is bad. Work with leisure is contentment, self-ap- probation, usefulness; leisure with work is recreation, happiness, restfulness. Keep the proportion.
The same sense of appreciation is also to be applied to wealth and competency. The struggle for wealth is not so much of a struggle for money as a struggle for power. Some one says of Disraeli that he did not care for wealth and for fame, but for power. The mere desire for accumulation has lessened. The miser
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seems to have passed out of life both in fact and in fiction. But the community is becom- ing keenly alive to the monarchy of money. The community is blindly feeling its way to the deposing of this monarch, as it has debased the political and civil monarch. The struggle for wealth is a very costly struggle. It costs most men too much. It costs most men health, it costs most men friendships, it costs most men large appreciations, noble relation- ships and breadth of living. It costs most men home. I am not here to preach the gospel of poverty. Neither poverty nor wealth is desirable for most. The temptations of each condition are hard; which are the harder I know not. But I do preach the gospel of proportion. A competency which shall indeed be competent, enough that shall be enough, not too much, not too small, that represents the golden mean of Aristotle. The temperate zone, one half way between the arctic of limitation and the tropical of undue luxuriance, represents the proper sphere.
Moreover, in a still broader relation, is the sense of proportion to be applied to what may be called the sphere of self-interest and of public occupation. You are yourself. To yourself you owe duties. These two sets of
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duties are to be thoroughly and fairly ad- justed. If you live for yourself, you live for an object very unworthy! If you live for a community, neglecting yourself, the life thus lived is not a life which the community wants. You are to live for yourself, to make that self rich, strong, vigorous, great, and this self you are to give to the great common life of the people. Ah, for a life that is great in itself, and just as great out of itself; so great' out of itself because it is so great in itself.
This sense of proportion, of adjustment, of appreciation, of the worth while, is a most precious heritage given by the college to its sons and daughters.
The fourth result, and the last that I shall name which the college should give, is the sense of the presence of God as a part of your life. I am not speaking as a theologian, I am speaking as an interpreter. It is impossible for a man not to be always praying, says Emerson. I assume that you believe in a God. I must infer that God is a different being for different men* The subjective power of knowing, of understanding God, differs. Each man, therefore, may be said to have his own God. You may call God by diverse names,
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REWARDS OF COLLEGE TRAINING
you may worship him in diverse ways, you may interpret him in diverse forms. To one he may be an Over-Soul, the great spirit above all and around all, as the firmament is above and around the earth. To one he may be the Unknown and Unknowable, but the one, also, whom we are ever seeking to know. To one he may be the infinite force, which enters into finite relations, but whose essence is still hidden from the eye and the heart of man. To one he may be absolute truth, whom man is to seek to know; to one the absolute person; to one, as to Leslie Stephen, the Divine Good- ness; to one the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost whom one is to worship; one eternal life, moving in time and in the presence of men. But by whatever name he is called, under whatever form he is worshipped, that being is to be recognized as having relations to your being. His presence is to be interpreted as present to you.
I seldom rise and conduct the service of prayers of the morning of a college day, in each of these four years, without reflecting on the diversity of beliefs and the variety of experiences to which I know I am to minister. Some before me are born in the historic faith known as the Roman Catholic, some are
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adherents of the faith of the Old Testament; some are members of Protestant churches of various names; some are without ecclesiastical affiliations. I feel that as I thus conduct a service for all, my words should express or intimate beliefs in which all can unite. I, for one, believe more than I say, and believe, of course, all I say. I wish for each to assent to all that is said, knowing, of course, that each believes more or other than is said, and also knowing that this overplus of belief is not a common belief. The belief common to all is the belief in a God, in a God who is personal, — in a God who loves men, — in a God who has made a revelation of himself, — in a God in whom we live, — who is our origin, — in a God in whom we move, - — who is our strength, — in a God in whom we have our being, — who is our present and eternal destiny. The thought of such a God saves life from material- ism, the worship of such a God saves life from sordidness, the love of such a God saves life from selfishness, and the service of such a God saves life from its own annihilation.
There died, in the first calendar month of this year, one who had for a generation been a teacher in this historic college. How dear Professor Potwin unites and illustrates what
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REWARDS OF COLLEGE TRAINING
I have been trying to say. He was a college man. College friendships formed more than fifty years ago he bore through his life. Within these last days, I have read a letter from one of his students, himself bearing a distinguished name, of respect and of affection for this dear teacher. He knew the friendship of great books. You, his students, remember how inti- mate he seemed with the masters. His sense of proportion was keen. His leisure and his work were joined together in fitting harmony. The forces of his life were both static and dynamic. His communion with his God was as constant as it was deep. Like Enoch, he walked with God and he was not, for God took him.
May we not also find in that life, which has given name to the Christian faith, intimations of the presence of these greatest rewards? Christ's disciples became friends. The teacher and the master was, toward the close of his service, pleased to call all these pupils his friends and to regard himself as their great lover. The Christ also knew that book, the Old Testament, which unites the history, biography and poem as no other book does unite. The Christ also possessed the sense of appreciation. Life was to him more than
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living, the body than raiment, the soul than the body. Above all, the Christ dwelt in the presence of his God, " I and my father are one." The Christ bore forth from boyhood into manhood and bore through life the great ele- ment of friendship, of truth, of appreciation and of the divine presence.
To the Members of the Graduating Classes:
Endowed you are by nature, let me say, above mbst. Endowed you are by the college. Richer tonight must seem this endowment than ever before. These friendships, as you stand side by side, make an appeal more tender, more loving, than they ever have made. The wealth of truth, the power of inspiration of the noblest books; — material gold is as iron as compared to this wealth. The appre- ciation of values, the sense of proportion; what guardianship therein lies against the cheap, the mean, the unworthy! What an inspiration therein is found to buy that which is indeed the bread of life! The sense of God, the constant presence of the divine, the dwelling in the eternal now, how full of rapture the privilege! Great, great, my sons and my daughters, is your inheritance; rich is your endowment, noble is your circumstance and
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condition. Bow your heads, humble your hearts in gratitude; sing your hallelujah of thanksgiving, for the Lord has been good to you.
[77]
V
THE NEEDS OF AMERICAN LIFE
WHICH THE COLLEGE AND THE
COLLEGE GRADUATE
SHOULD FILL
Chapter V
THE NEEDS OF AMERICAN LIFE WHICH THE COLLEGE AND THE COL- LEGE GRADUATE SHOULD FILL
[1908]
*' I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." — John x : 10.
LIFE is life's supreme interest. With- out it nothing is possible; with it, all. American life is the supreme interest of America. That life is full, progressive, intense, ambitious, imperfect. One of its glories may- be called its imperfections. For there is a " glory of the imperfect."
What, therefore, are some of the needs of American society.^ What are some of thescB needs which the college and its graduates may" fill.?
(1) The first need to which I wish to call your attention is the need of intellectual! accuracy, moral honesty, and ethical sincerity. | These words may be comprehended in one word, — truthfulness. Truthfulness is a spirit, ^ mood, an atmosphere, of the whole man.
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Truth becomes truthfulness when it has passed through the laboratory of the heart and the will, and passed into the whole constitution. The intellect is in peril of not seeing. The intellect does not see because it does not look. It does not see because it is near-sighted and astigmatic. The intellect is in part blind, — an internal state. The intellect is in part blinded, — an outward condition. The out- side world gives it more light than it can absorb, 6r it fails to give it sufficient light. Even if the facts be seen accurately and re- ported as they are, the reasoning upon these facts may be illogical and the inferences un- sound. The word " about " as an adverb is significant. A thing is about true, about right. The need is of absolute truth — of absolute right.
To the filling of this need the college graduate should make a special ofi'ering. The graduate is set to see things as they are; to see things
Iin relation; to see things in proportion. The college graduate is trained to reason; to find sound premises; to rise through logical proc- esses from these premises to correct conclu- sions. He is trained to detect and to discard fallacies. He knows that the terms of rea- soning should be exact; that the middle term
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should be always distributed, and the con- clusion should contain no more and no less than the premises. His study of formal logic has helped him to rational processes. His study of the ancient classics has given him discrimination, judiciousness, judicialness. His study of mathematics has trained in him a sense of the certainty of absolute truth, as the study of all human sciences has given him a sense of the uncertainty of all truth which is not absolute. Economics has taught him the complexity of human phenomena, his- tory the vastness and variety of human expe- rience, and philosophy the mysteriousness of his own existence. Literature of every order and age has trained him into appreciations intellectual, aesthetic and ethical.
The graduate who is thus trained, disciplined, instructed, enriched, should help to fill this need in American life of truthfulness. In himself he is an example of one who can see straight and think clear. His speech should be truthful because of straight seeing and clear thinking. His temper and temperament should be truthful because he has learned that all deception is outlawed, and inartistic. His moral nature as well as his intellectual declares that exaggeration breaks the law of proportion
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and harmony, that all dissimulation is unjust and ungentlemanly, that all minimizing of the truth is a minimizing of himself both in cause and result. He has learned not only, as Emerson says, that the superlative weakens, but also that the superlative deceives. He has learned, too, that the positive is not only the strongest in will, but also the clearest in and to the intellect. Therefore, the American college graduate — the man of truth, and of truthfulness — helps to fill this need of the American community. I (2) American life also stands in need of I poise, of steadiness. It is easily moved. Its 'interests are quickly stirred. There is in it a good deal of solid and substantial EngUsh immobility. One sees such immobility in those parts where the English tradition most obtains. But also, American life is imbued with a keen sense of French mobility and excitement. I apprehend that this element of mobiUty and excitement has been derived in a large degree from our climate. Our climate has done more for us of evil and of good than we usually believe. It has given us energy, push, aggressiveness. But it has also given us restlessness, undue eagerness, vaulting am- bitiousness. It has transformed the old Eng-
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THE NEEDS OF AMERICAN LIFE
land muscle into New England nerve, nerve has become nerves, and nerves nervousness.
I do not believe that the college can change the American climate; but the college can enhance the good effects of this climate, and help to remedy the bad. The college graduate should give steadiness and poise, because of the* steadiness and poise of his own character./ For the graduate has been trained unto discrimination. He has been led to see what is important and what unimportant, what significant and what insignificant. He has learned to try to appreciate the great as great, the small as small, the abiding as abiding, and the transient as passing. When he sees the clouds moving he does not fear the heavens will vanish. Discrimination leads to an appre- ciation of relations. Discrimination and a sense of relations lead to confidence in the truth and in the eternal forces of being. The understanding of the laws of existence leads to a trust in these laws. Catastrophes and cataclysms do occur, but the sun rises at its appointed time and place each day, and the stars keep their tryst with the astronomer. Every summer brings growth and blossom, every autumn fruitage and harvest. The discriminations of the intellect give calmness
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to the heart, and a sense of large relations strength to the will. Discrimination leads to appreciation, and appreciation seems to be an act or a mood in which every part of one's being has a share. This appreciation repre- sents a certain judicial quaHty in intellect which leads to a certain judicious element in character and conduct.
^ The college graduate has also been trained fin a sense of self-restraint. Self-restraint is a function of the will. It represents calmness when one is tempted to be impetuous; humility when one is tempted to be arrogant; reti- cence when the provocation is to speak. But self-restraint is more than a function of the will. It stands for the simplicity, quietness and soberness of the gentleman. It is remote from bumptiousness, extravagance, and what in both metaphor and fact is called loudness. Such a quality the college trains. Every study enhances its value. The study of lan- guages trains it through the discrimination which they represent. Mathematics trains the quality by its lessons of absolute truth and man's consequent humility. The sciences also train it by their teachings of the breadth and diversity of natural phenomena and by the apparent limitations of man's knowledge.
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THE NEEDS OF AMERICAN LIFE
History trains this element by its examples of nations and of men, who have perished through the foolish expenditure of human forces. Liter- ature and economics also train it through the gentle humanizing influence of the one, and through the profound moral reflections upon the phenomena of the race of the other, subject. Philosophy, also, cannot fail to develop self- restraint through the search for truth of man. Self-restraint, however, is never to become atrophy, or self-negation. It represents re- pression at one point, in order to gain force in another. It is the dam built to give greater power to the pent-up stream. It is the jumper going back in order to leap a longer length. This man of self-restraint is the man of poise and of steadiness.
The college, therefore, training men of dis-i^ crimination and of self-restraint, helps to fill i a great need of this exciting and excitable life of ours.
(3) American life is also in need of the inde- \ pendence of the individual. There should be \ a new declaration of independence, — it is the independence of the single man. This need of independence is largely industrial and com- mercial. The peril is that the independence of the individual will become lost. This in-
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dependence is the result of a long and hard struggle. In it is heard the conflict of Greece against the East, in which Greece won, and which struggle helped in its triumph to create modern civilization. In it are felt the throbbing passions of the first Christian centuries, in which new and unknown forces of the North met and mingled with the old and new forces of the Empire in the valleys of Italy, on the plains of Spain, and on the banks of the Danube and the Rhine. In it is still recognized the ver- dict of the Protestant Reformation of the responsibilities and rights of the individual, before his God and before his brethren. Into it, too, and more closely, are wrought the con- clusions of the Puritan movement of three hundred years ago. I cannot believe that this doctrine of the independence of the individual the American world is easily to surrender. But the peril is on. It is the peril industrial, commercial. On the one side the labor union, on the other the so-called trust: the labor union demanding, I shall not sell my labor at less than a certain price; the trust requiring, I shall not sell my products below a certain value; the labor union demand- ing of me not to labor on penalty of forfeiture of my social freedom; the trust ordering me to
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THE NEEDS OF AMERICAN LIFE
sell my property or making it impossible for me to buy my materials or to transport my products; the labor union in some cases apparently putting a price upon my head ; the trust apparently in some cases killing my business. Such is the difference between the upper millstone of the combination of capital, and the lower millstone of the combination of labor. The ordinary man, non-union, who wishes to work, or the merchant who wishes to use his money if he have any, or to get some if he have none, is in peril of being ground to pieces.
Let us not deny the value of industrial and social groups. Let us acknowledge that one has the right to give up his rights. Let us confess that it may be a duty to surrender rights. Let us affirm that individuals are more important than the individual. Let us allow that the world's work can no longer be done by single individuals. That work has be- come so tremendous, so long continued in plan and performance, so widespread, so complex, so costly. But though acknowledging all this, let it also be declared that the industrial freedom of the individual should be preserved, his rights granted, his duties respected. Let us demand that the single man shall, in the
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game of industrial competition, have the cards dealt out in fairness, that his playing shall not be interfered with, and that the rules of the game shall be obeyed.
To such a complex and perplexing condition the college graduate may worthily give him- self. He^h^s been trained as an individual. The most individual intellectual training given the world is given in the American college. The graduate has lived in a college, in a col- lection of men, in a community. But he has also lived as an individual. He has been respected as an individual. He comes forth from the college gates upon his own feet as an individual. The better the training he has received the more individual he is. Therefore, he is fitted to represent the independence of the individual, and to conserve those forces in American life which make for independence.
But while one thus declares for the inde- pendence of the individual, there is also a need of American life which appeals to the graduate,
t— it IS the need of great human feelings and elationships. As civilization becomes older it becomes more complex. As it becomes more complex it becomes more diversified, more stratified, more classified. American civiliza- tion gaining in age, gaining in complexity, is
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THE NEEDS OF AMERICAN LIFE
also increasing in its spirit of caste. Against any spirit of caste the college graduate should be set as solidly as a Chinese wall, and as firm as Gibraltar's rock. In both his humor and his wit he must see the silliness of the petty divisions which separate. He can at once laugh over them, and also swear at them. History has taught him that our little societies have their day, — have their day and cease to be. But also, his theology and his philoso- phy have taught him that these societies are but broken lights of God, and that God is more than they. His study of the social sciences has made plain that society is one, and that each part depends upon every other. He may, or he may not, be humanistic, but let him be at least humane. Even he may not be humane — though I cannot think he should not be, — but at least he should be human. The humanistic studies and the humane strivings and conduct have served to broaden, deepen, and lift humanity.
The college man is trained unto humanness by reason of comprehensive intellectual vision and understanding. The educated man knows that truth is not a straight line of two sides; it is a polygon, — it is a circle, — it has an infinite number of sides. College trains a
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I man to the largest vision and understanding 'of which he is capable. The association of fellows with each other is one source of such training. Men of diverse origin, — geographic, domestic, pecuniary and social, — mingle. The angle of the vision of truth and of duty varies. What to one is true seems to another false; to one expedient, to another necessary; to one morally wrong, to another morally right. Associations, intimate and prolonged, with men of diverse origin, give to the student a comprehensiveness of intellectual understand- ing and outlook. Largeness of view is not to be bought by hazy indefiniteness of interpre- tation. If comprehensiveness be large in out- look, it is still to be clear in articulation. Certain studies specially promote such in- tellectual comprehensiveness. This is one of the superb results of the study of history. If history be interpreted as a record of events, the bare record disciplines intellectual breadth. If history be interpreted as a record of certain relations, causes, results, it trains the highest forces of mind. The man of comprehensive mind is the man who declines to accept his own judgment as the only judgment, or his own interpretation as the only interpretation. He knows there are other judgments and other
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interpretations. These his moral impulse prompts him to learn. Such learning rep- resents intellectual comprehensiveness and breadth of understanding which do lead to the largest humanness.
A friend tells me that in the year 1874 Jowett, Master of Balliol, said to him that he had made a point of introducing all new men of Balliol to the older. Such introduction aided the older in helping the younger. And he regarded this custom as one of the causes of the great success of the men of Balliol. A Western Reserve man, in traveling, said to me that wherever he met a Reserve man he made a friend. Good, very good. But also, grad- uates, wherever you meet a human being, know that he belongs to you, that you belong to him; that you are of his set, and he of yours, because you both are human. Great men are great humans. Be great in your simple hu- manity! Help to keep American life human.
(4) Furthermore, and in the fourth place, — our life in America is in need of a new baptism of idealism. This life of ours is a singular union of idealism and of materialism. What is materialism.^ What is idealism? Material- ism is the living in and for what the eye sees, the hands handle, the ear hears. It is the lust
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of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of physical being. It is living for the now, for the here. Materialism is living. What is idealism.^ Idealism is living in the unseen, for the unheard, for the unfelt. It is living for the eternal and the far-off. Idealism is life. Idealism is the idea made a goal of struggle and of perfection. There is much in American life which naturally promotes ma- terialism. America is a new land, and a new nation is the American. Things material make a forceful, and to many the most forceful, appeal in a new settlement. The soil must be planted, harvests reaped; the water must be harnessed, and mill wheels set. The trappers' trail must become a path, the path a road, the road an avenue. Houses must be built, homes, cities created; all the conditions for living provided. Picture this very spot a hundred years ago tonight. Forest and fields were spread out, where are now tens of thousands of homes. The pioneers' long, white-hooded, slow-moving wagon was winding its way along corduroy roads, where tonight speeds the electric car and carriage. Let us never de- preciate the absolute need of the construction of the materialities of any civilization.
But let us also know that in any civilization [94]
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are more than materialities. The Pilgrims came to the sandy, low-lying coast of Plym- outh to make a living; but they also came moved by great ideals. Among the ideals which moved them, says their historian Brad- ford, was the hope of extending the Kingdom of God. Such a hope needs to be taken by the American people as an ideal. We need to think less of getting on, and more of getting up. We need to think, if not less of doing something for America, at least more of doing something for the world as the field of the divine reign. We need to live less for what the outer eye may see, and more for the vision of things unseen. We need to live less for what shall delight the sense, and more for what shall satisfy the sensibilities; less for the fancy, and more for the imagination; less for admiration, and more for reverence; less for the picturesque, more for the beautiful; less for the pretty, more for the sublime; less for the present, more for the " eternal now."
In the promotion of such a life, in filling such a need in America, you graduates are to bear a large part. From both religion and science you have learned that the things seen are temporal, and the things unseen eternal. You have learned to find satisfaction in truth,
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and not in treasure; in duty, not in dollars. You have learned that life's richest content- ments lie in service — in helpfulness; in being pure, in speaking true, in righting wrong, in following visions. " Don't get rich," wrote a college boy from his camp forty years ago and more, to his friend, a Boston boy. You have learned already that riches cannot represent life's best results. You, having faith in God, faith in your eternal self, faith in noble hu- manity, faith in truth, and faith in service, shall lift our new material and materialistic life into a high and higher idealism than Greece ever knew, and of which Palestine was at once fulfillment, potency, and promise.
I am' come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." Like a piece of music returns our text upon it- self. These needs of American life of which I have spoken are the needs which Christ's life and Christ's character fill. Christ calls Him- self the Truth. " I am the Way, the Truth." Christ declares Himself the giver of peace. " My peace I give unto you." Christ stands for self. " I," " I," " I,"— is the emphatic word in His utterance. Christ represents humanity. " Behold the man." Christ repre- sents life in its fullest and most idealistic state,
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" I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw- all men unto me."
To the Members of the Graduating Classes:
Little more need I say to you, my dear friends and co-workers. By you, as well as for you, I wish the purposes of Christ's coming may be fully and finally fulfilled. May you have life, and may you have life more and most abundant. For such abundant life, America calls. America calls for your largest appre- ciation of truth. America calls for your calmness and poise. America calls for your noblest independence. America calls for a great human sense in you as well. America calls for a noble, vision of the ideal. May these calls be met in your character, and in your service. Give to our country your best — your all. Give your best, and give your all, in the name of God, for the sake of universal brotherhood.
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VI BEING RICH WITHOUT RICHES
Chapter VI
BEING RICH WITHOUT RICHES
[1909] " Poor, yet hath great riches." — Proverbs xiii : 7.
THE nation is becoming keenly aware of the duty of the preservation of its natural resources. The President of the United States and the governors of in- dividual states call conventions to increase knowledge and to quicken enthusiasm in the great undertaking. Commissions are ap- pointed to devise methods and to execute measures. Apparently some of nature's prod- ucts cannot be restored by the ordinary opera- tion of ordinary forces. Harvest fields devas- tated for a season may be replanted and forests once cut may be regrown ; but river-beds made low cannot usually be refilled, and mines of coal, of silver, or of gold once exhausted cannot be restocked. The loss is lasting. All these measures and methods for the preserva- tion of the forces of nature are good.
Individuals, too, are engaged, and indi- viduals for endless generations have been en-
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gaged, in laying up material goods. The purpose of the amassing has been and still is to secure power, to find happiness in the gaining and in the having. Small fortunes are amassed for the inevitable " rainy day," and great fortunes are piled up which would protect not only for one rainy day, but also against a deluge of forty days and nights. Such con- servatism and thrift are in many respects worthy. ^
I wish, at the beginning of the Commence- ment season, which crowns your college course, to intimate to you that you possess riches that are more comprehensive and more precious than those of forests and fields and mines, more common, more fundamental, and more worthy than wealth or wage. This wealth is a wealth made by all the forces which strengthen man's virtues, which give enlargement and enrichment to character, and which promote the incarnation of the graces into graciousness and which deepen men's satisfactions in the eternal principles of life and of being. The having of such wealth is one of the comprehen- sive results of a college education.
I would interpret your thought respecting the wealth which you have in the natural world.
Nature first awakens in the beholder wonder, [102]
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wonder which in turn becomes the material for and mother of poetry, and, secondly, she quickens curiosity, which in turn becomes the inspiring force of science. Nature makes her appeal to the will, too, as a source and emblem of power. She addresses herself, moreover, to the aesthetic sense as the image and in- spirer of the beautiful. Under each part of this quartet of relations nature offers friendship. In poetry nature is interpreted as suffused with a vital spirit to which man may hold relation. In science nature shows her worth as the beneficiary of man. In her power nature is manifest as the origin of the forces making for human welfare, comfort and up- building. In beauty and its appeal to the eye and the general heart of man, nature presents great consolations and inspirations. In each of these relations nature has become a resource to you whence you have acquired strength for doing, for bearing and for the enrichment of character.
Such an appreciation of nature is made evi- dent in the Hebrew Psalms, and also, to take a long leap, in the poetry of Wordsworth. But without the interpretation of poetry, man finds in nature herself, through a direct approach, holiest treasure. Nature belongs
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both to time and to space. In space it is vision appealing to the eye, in time it is a sym- phony appealing to the ear. But through both eye and ear nature appeals to the reason, and to the reason as a revelation of truth, of law, and of wisdom. Nature gives herself to us as the beautiful and the sublime. At her altar each may serve as either a priest or a saint. " Before all else," says Russell of Matthew Arnold, " he was a worshipper of nature, watching all her changing aspects with a loverlike assiduity, and never happy in a long-continued separation from her." Such worship arises from, and in turn deepens, the sympathies with the love for, and the knowl- edge of, nature. Man should become natural- ized, and nature humanized. One of the greatest literary men of the last generation has well expressed the humanizing of nature, when he says: "The mountains speak to me in tones at once more tender and more awe- inspiring than that of any mortal teacher. The loftiest and sweetest strains of Milton and Wordsworth may be more articulate, but they do not lay so forcible a grasp upon my imagination."
The second form of the riches which belong to you as a college graduate, is found in [104]
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literature. Literature has, in various lan- guages, formed a large share of your study. What wealth that word intimates! The biog- raphy, the novel, the poem, the history! What one man, what all men have been and have done, what the imagination creates of romance and of song! The book as a friend is a great resource. One might speak of a book as a source of knowledge. Let me interpret it as a source and resource of friend- ship. The friends of the novel, how many, how interesting, how intimate without famil- iarity they all are: Pickwick, the most popular man in all fiction, Arthur Pendennis, Henry Esmond, so human, and Jane Austen's quiet and simple men and women of the first decades of the last century. One who knows them all, with Scott's and George Eliot's and Hawthorne's creations, has come to possess much of affection's strength and a goodly fellowship of humanity.
" Darwin was extremely fond of novels," says his son, " and I remember well the way in which he would anticipate the pleasure of having a novel read to him, as he lay down, or lighted his cigarette. He took a vivid in- terest in both plot and characters, and would on no account know beforehand how a story [ 105 ]
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finished; he considered looking at the end of a novel as a feminine vice. He could not enjoy- any story with a tragical end; for this reason he did not keenly appreciate George Eliot's stories, though he often spoke warmly in praise of * Silas Marner.' Walter Scott, Miss Austen, and Mrs. Gaskell were read and re-read till they could be read no more. He had two or three books in hand at the same time — a novel apd perhaps a biography and a book of travels. He did not often read out-of-the-way or old standard books, but generally kept to the books of the day obtained from a circu- lating library."
Perhaps some one would say that a yet richer resource lies in the great poems. I have a friend who would prefer of a morning the Iliad to any other piece, and another whose solace is found in the ^Eneid. Many happy evenings have I spent with this friend as he has read out to me the great hexameters of the Mantuan bard. But if one prefer to keep to his English verse, as most do, what strength lies in the trinity of messages of Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold!
Browning seems uncouth, crabbed, un- known, unknowable; Tennyson seems cold, remote, at times apathetic, but each is a wise [ 106 ]
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interpreter of and a mighty minister to our age. Matthew Arnold may sing the song of cultured doubt but he also chants the great psalm of ultimate faith. Browning sings of supreme and all-conquering optimism, " God's in His heaven, all's well with the world." Tennyson sings of the great things in life, of character, of duty, of God. Leonard Huxley says of his father, " Shelley was too diffuse to be among his first favorites; but for his simple beauty, Keats; for that, and for the comprehension of the meaning of modern science, Tennyson; for strength and feeling, Browning as represented by his earlier poems. These were the favorites among the moderns. He knew his eighteenth-century classics, and he knew better his Milton and his Shakespeare, to whom he turned with ever-increasing satis- faction, as men do who have lived a full life." The one man of modern time who found books the richest resource, was one who him- self was a maker of books. On his way out to India in 1832, Macaulay, as he wrote to a friend, read much. He says, " My power of finding amusement without companions was pretty well tried on my voyage." He pro- ceeds to name some hundreds of books. The last scene his nephew and biographer paints: [107]
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" We found him in the library, seated in his easy chair, and dressed as usual; with his book on the table beside him, still open at the same page."
This friendship of books is a rich mine to which the college gateway opens.
The third form of wealth which the college has given you is the friendship of friends. George Eliot says, that if a few weeks passed without^ receiving some message from a friend, she began to doubt that friend's love, so dependent was she upon her friendships. You first make friends, and then your friends make you. Friendships are based on personal likings and permanent principles. Friendships arise from and enter into the soul. Friendships are largely made when the heart is young, unfettered, responsive to give and to accept. Of noble friendships life is full. Carlyle gave to Tennyson his tobacco box as a pledge of eternal brotherhood, and in the bottom of the box was found a letter from Carlyle, intro- ducing Mrs. Oliphant. The friendship be- tween Tennyson and Browning is a noble example. Browning dedicated a selection of his poems to Alfred Tennyson:
*' In poetry Illustrious and consummate, In friendship noble and sincere."
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The son and biographer adds, " Browning frequently dined with us. The tete-d-tete conversations between him and my father on every imaginable topic, when no one but my- self was with them, were the best talks I have ever heard, so full of repartee, quip, epigram, anecdote, depth and wisdom; but it is quite impossible to reproduce them, owing to their very brilliancy. These brother-poets were two of the most widely-read men of the time, absolutely without a touch of jealousy, and revelling as it were in each other's power."
Perhaps the most impressive illustration of a large number of warm friends is found in the career of Charles Wordsworth, the Bishop of St. Andrews. He tells that during his day at Oxford he was intimate with Claughton, who afterwards became Bishop of Colombo, with Roundell Palmer, with Anthony Grant, Canon of Rochester, with Dean Liddell, with Canon Harrison, of Canterbury, with Scott, the master of Balliol, with Vaughan, who became Professor of Modern History, with James Bruce, known as Lord Elgin, who be- came Governor-General of India.
The dependence of friend on friend, the helpfulness of friend to friend, the formative power pf friend over friend represent the [109]
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active side of the resource of friendship. Thomas Jefferson said of one of his college teachers that he " probably fixed the outlines of my life." Mark Hopkins helped many a Williams man to find himself. Arthur Hallam, moving upon Tennyson, Sir William Hamilton upon Clark Maxwell, Hawkins and Whately on Newman, Arnold on Stanley, Henshaw on Darwin, and Darwin on Romanes, how the list lengthens of noble mind inspiring noble mind in the conditions of intimate friendship! Many a younger man may sing of his friends as Romanes sang of Darwin, in his " Charles Darwin ":
" My help, my guide, my stay of heart and mind. The friend whose life was dearer than my own."
To commend the worth of friendship is to commend what all recognize as of chief worth. In the centuries that divide the writing of Cicero's essay " De Amicitia," from the writing of Tennyson's " In Memoriam," friend- ships are the unfailing springs of refreshment along life's thirsty highways.
The college, furthermore, has opened to you a great resource in yourself. This resource is not the resource of pride, of arrogance, of self- satisfaction, of self-contentment. It is, first,
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the resource rather of great thoughts and great f thinking. " Give me a great thought that I * may lift myself with it," said Jean Paul. Yes, a great thought lifts. " If you have a mind, use it; it is a most interesting thing," said Walter Bagehot. Great thoughts are a great resource. Such a resource the ablest of American theologians found in his contem- plation of God. In somewhat of hyperbolic phrase, he says that he liked to think upon the wisdom, the purity, the love, the excellency of the Divine Being as manifest in the sun, sky, cloud, grass, flower, trees, and all nature. He heard the voice of God in the thunder; he saw the face of God in the cloud; he felt the presence of God in his sweet contemplations.
The resource of oneself is found not simply in the realm of thought. It abides also in the domain of feeling. Noble emotions constitute it and help to give it form as well as substance. " The heart has its reasons," says Pascal, " of which the reason knows not." These passions, either active or passive, represent conditions of sweet and noble contentment. Most people live more in their hearts than in their heads. Their feelings mean more to them than their thoughts. The optimist is quite as much the man who feels happy as the
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man who thinks straight; the pessimist is rather the man who " feels miserable " than the man who believes in evil. The heart, there- fore, the spring of holy and happy feelings, strong, pure, constant, is a noble element in the treasury of one's own selfhood.
Into the possession of such a resource the individual usually enters through some great experience or by means of prolonged and up- lifting ^ disciplines. In " Sartor Resartus " Carlyle paints this transformation as the passing from '^ the everlasting no'' through the center of indifference " into " the everlast- ing yea ";
" Divine moment, when over the tempest- tost Soul, as once over the wild-weltering Chaos, it is spoken: Let there be Light! Ever to the greatest that has felt such a moment, it is miraculous and God-Announcing; even as, under simpler features, to the simplest and least. The mad primeval discord is hushed; the rudely-jumbled silent rock-foun- dations are built beneath; and the skyey vault with its everlasting Luminaries above: instead of a dark wasteful Chaos, we have a blooming, fertile, heaven-encompassed world." This change, however, is not a change in the world. The primary change is in the man [112]
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himself, and the man himself clothes the world with the transformations which he himself experiences.
This awakened man has come to believe in himself. He is egoistic in the most worthy sense, and possibly at times in a sense not the worthiest. This self-confidence arises in the man discovering in himself powers of which he had no intimation as existing. He finds himself stronger, larger, richer than he thought. The man thinks himself able to know things which once seemed impossible. " Produce, produce " is again commanded, as it was commanded by " The Everlasting Yea." He will do things. " Impossible " is not the word writ in this new man's dictionary. Whatever field of investigation or endeavor he may honor by the dedication of his powers will thence- forth be wider in extent and richer in findings. The man of this self-confidence is not inclined to sympathize with the past. The former generations have not done what they ought. Their richest attainments and highest achieve- ments are not absolutely either high or rich. Even iconoclastic may become the prevailing mode and agent of this new-born, self-found man. He may remove the images which hu- manity has long worshipped. The super- [113]
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stitions which humanity has been long con- tent to adore he expels from the ancient shrines and sets up new gods for humanity's worship.
This self-confidence is usually very serious. It takes itself religiously. It has none of the gaiety and frivolity of the world. If a man has been devoting himself to keeping his purple very purple, his fine linen very fine, and has been wont to ^ fare sumptuously every day, he becomes willing to discard his old belongings. In long-meter, — and possibly in a minor key as v/ell, — he sings life's psalm, " Life is real, life is earnest." He becomes conscious of responsibilities and of his own responsibility. A change passes over him somewhat akin to that which comes to Donatello of Hawthorne's Transformation.
Ah, happy, thrice happy the man who in humility and strength of soul is able to find in himself such resources. The age is trusting in its " horses " and its " chariots." It is in- clined to believe that material forces can bear man into life's supreme contentments and satisfactions. It someway thinks that ex- terior wealth will by some process offer to man the best, or prepare man to grasp and to enjoy life's richest prizes. Over sea and over land [114]
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these " horses " and these " chariots " may bear one, and from the depths of the one and the gold-bearing rocks of the other it is be- lieved these carriers may bring treasures finest and most satisfying. But, ah! the bitter taste makes sweet cups bitter, blind eyes see no lustre, and palsied hands hold no treasure. It is the man himself who makes all well because he himself is good and able, rich in mind, and noble in heart.
The integrity and fullness of one's own nature, after the deposit which was originally made at birth, depend upon education. For, if education literally means a drawing out, it does, as a matter of fact, represent enrich- ment. Education aids one to think compre- hensively, accurately, truthfully. Education increases the number and the worth of one's relationships. It gives self-knowledge, self- reverence, self-development, self-control. It aids in making righteous and wise choices; it extends the boundaries of knowledge; it helps to create the citizen who is at home in all lands and under all conditions. It gives a standard and a testimony for judging of values. It aids co-operation, for it promotes an appre- ciation of men of other conditions. It repre- sents the largest and the richest endowment,
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It pushes out life's horizon and lifts life's sky; it gives graciousness without weakness, strength without severity, largeness without visionari- ness. Education is fullness.
One reason why men fall morally is that they find no permanent support in themselves. Lacking self-guidance they accept guidance of others and such guidance may be indeed by and unto forbidden paths. Lacking the means of enjoyment in themselves they turn to ob- jective enjoyments, and these means are liable to be objectionable. Finding themselves rather stupid company, not having the " interesting mind " of Walter Bagehot, they enter into companionships which are unworthy. Self- worth is a mighty bulwark against accepting unworthy environments and unworthy nourish- ment.
In a poem of unknown authorship it is logi- cally, as well as beautifully, said:
" My mind to me a kingdom is: Such perfect joy therein I find, As far exceeds all earthly bliss That world affords, or grows by kind : Though much I want what most men have, Yet doth my mind forbid me crave.
" Content I live — this is my stay; I seek no more than may suffice:
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I press to bear no haughty sway; Look — what I lack, my mind supplies! Lo! thus I triumph like a king, Content with that my mind doth bring."
I must refer to one other resource which the college, I believe, has opened to you. It is the resource found in moral good and in re- ligion. Moral good exists without religion, although religion cannot exist without moral good. In life's crises, which you are sure of meeting, the hope of clinging to moral goodness is supreme. You may find that the beliefs which you once held are faltering, that the creed that once you glibly repeated you can no longer say. You may, in some awful night of loneliness or dismay, come to doubt those things which have seemed most real and most personal. But if, in such crises, you can look to the simple landmarks of moral character, you are saved and safe. Out of such a night of struggle you shall come forth with a faith more firm and a certainty more glorious.
With these resources of moral goodness, I would associate the riches found in religion. By religion I mean the Christian religion. I mean that system of belief which is most fully, beautifully, effectively embodied in the teach- ings and person of Jesus Christ. I have re- [117]
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ferred to the glory of confidence in moral truth. A great scientist and theologian, cut down before his time, was George John Ro- manes. Romanes once said: "And foras- much as I am far from being able to agree with those who affirm that the twilight doctrine of the ' new faith ' is a desirable substitute for the waning splendor of ' the old,' I am not ashamed to confess that with this virtual negation of God the universe to me has lost its soul of loveliness; and although from hence- forth there is pressed upon me terribly intensi- fied the meaning of the old words * the night Cometh when no man can work,' yet when at times I think, as think at times I must, of the appalling contrast between the hallowed glory of the creed which once was mine, and the lonely mystery of existence as now I find it, at such times I shall ever feel it impossible to avoid the sharpest pang of which my nature is susceptible. For whether it be due to my intelligence not being sufficiently advanced to meet the requirements of the age, or whether it be due to the memory of those sacred associations which to me at least were the sweetest that life has given, I cannot but feel that for me, and for others that think as I do, there is a dreadful truth in those words of the [118]
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precept know thyself which has become trans- formed into the terrific oracle of CEdipus:
" May'st thou ne'er know the truth of what thou art."
But near the close of Romanes' brief, though eventful and mighty, life, other sentiments pos- sessed and ruled his soul. He found that God, whom in the earlier time he had not been able to find. In one of his little known but moving sonnets he well expresses the final conclusion.
" I ask not for Thy love, O Lord: the days Can never come when anguish shall atone. Enough for me were but thy pity shown To me as to the stricken sheep that strays, With ceaseless cry for unforgotten ways — Oh, lead me back to pastures I have known, Or find me in the wilderness alone, And slay me, as the hand of mercy slays.
" I ask not for thy love, nor e'en so much As for hope on thy dear breast to lie; But be thou still my Shepherd — still with such Compassion as may melt to such a cry; That so I hear Thy feet, and feel Thy touch, And dimly see Thy face ere yet I die."
Religion, interpreted thus broadly, pro- foundly, highly, should be to the individual, light in darkness, companionship in solitude, comfort in sorrow, fullness in need. [119]
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These resources, — nature, art, literature, friendships, oneself, moral government and religion, — are available in different degrees to different persons. To some they may be largely denied, to others given with almost too abounding fullness. Nature is offered to all, but the eye may be blind and the ear deaf. Did not Pater find Switzerland stupid? Un- appreciative, too, may one be of music, though very seldbm of noble painting. In some form literature is a support for all: for it is an ex- pression of the highest life and its forms of expression are manifold. Friendship, too, and moral justice and religious culture, also, make a universal appeal to the human im- pulses and to the aspiring spirit. Every man, too, true to himself must on himself rely. From this comprehensive treasure the soul of man intuitively and instinctively selects those resources which are of richest worth to itself. No one shall be famished for the bread, or thirsty for the water, of life!
To the Members of the Graduating Classes:
I began with the intimation that there are
resources of higher worth than those found in
mines of gold, in river courses or prairie loam.
Has it not become evident that my intimation
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needs no demonstration? Is not nature as interpreted by the poet, or as humanized in life; is not the art of music and of the picture; is not literature as embodied in manifold forms; is not friendship as seen in larger association or in the family circle; is not oneself as contemplating great thoughts and experiencing great feelings; is not moral good and religious truth; is not each a resource richer than wealth, and more satisfying than material treasure of any form?
To you, above most people, in fact above all people, except those who are your sisters and brothers of other colleges, these riches are given. The college is happy to have worked with you in their creation. The college rejoices in the assurance that you will conserve them for your mortal life, and also, that when the life mortal passes into the life immortal you will find treasure laid up for you in heaven akin to the treasure which you, as students, have laid up on earth.
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VII
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE STU- DENT AND THE UNIVERSITIES OF THE WORLD
Chapter VII
THE AMERICAN COLLEGE STUDENT
AND THE UNIVERSITIES OF
THE WORLD
[1910] " Put on the whole armor of God." — Ephesians vi : 11.
THE universities of the Far East give a training to their students for efficiency; the universities of Germany train scholars; the Scotch universities train men as thinkers; the English universities educate the gentleman; — the universities of America should unite these four elements, — an educa- tion for efficiency, for scholarship, for thinking, and as the gentleman, and also should educate unto a high and broad type of Christian character.
The American college graduate should repre- sent a high type of efficiency. He should be prepared to do, and to do something worth while. The college is not a professional school; it IS a preparation for the professional school. The type of efficiency which the college gradu- ate should stand for is of a general sort. But
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in it are included, first, principles. No mere arbitrary rule is worthy of the graduate's following. He recognizes, appreciates, and acts upon those fundamental elements of being out of which rules arise. A second element in the graduate's efficiency is earnestness. The college man is not to be a dawdler, a dilettante or a loafer. The charge is sometimes made tl^at the college man dwells in a past age, that he is not keenly alert to the problems of the present. Fifty years ago a graduate called up from the campus to a friend studying in his dormitory room, " Fort Sumter is fired upon! " " What do I care," was the answer, " I am working on my Greek Grammar." But that was fifty years ago. The man was not earnest; if he had been studying his Greek Grammar properly, he would have recognized the sig- nificance of the attack on Fort Sumter. In earnestness is a love for people and an allegiance to truth.
The college graduate is also to stand for the German university conception of scholarship. He need not himself be a scholar. Few men are scholars. The broad scholar has passed. The man of encyclopaedic learning is no more. Knowledge becomes so enormous that to possess more than the smallest bit of the vast [126]
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store is impossible. Had it not been for the index and the card catalogue the increasing wealth of knowledge would have submerged humanity. But the college graduate should have a sympathy with scholarship, an appre- ciation of the cost of scholarship, should under- stand the significance and should prize the usefulness of scholarship. He should feel keenest honor, too, for the scholar. There are two types of men which Americans are prone to honor; one is the very rich man and the other the man of high public office. These two types are sure of receiving quite as much honor as they deserve. But the scholar should be honored more. When Helmholtz, one of the greatest of modern scientists, was visiting this country seventeen years ago, Mr. Bell, of telephone fame, came a long dis- tance to New York to say to Helmholtz that the principles which the great German had discovered were the principles which led him to the invention of the telephone. In the Chinese social scale the scholar stands first. The American college graduate, scholar or no scholar, should have the keenest respect and the highest honor for the scholar.
The American college graduate should also embody the characteristic of the Scotch uni- [127]
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versity; he should be a thinker. He should discern and discriminate; he should be able to analyze complex phenomena; he should disentangle the snarl of conflicting argument, should distinguish the necessary from the incidental, the relevant from the irrelevant, the permanent from the transient. He should not fail to assess a fact at its just value, to understand the relation of facts, to know the difference between an argument and an illus- tration, between a premise and a conclusion. He should think in terms of language, and these terms are of aflfluence. He should think in terms of science, and these terms stand for exactness; he should think in terms of mathe- matics, and these terms are necessary and fundamental; he should think in terms of the social sciences, and these terms are touched by human emotions and sympathies. Think- ing is to be differentiated from both feeling and willing. Feeling is important, but feeling without thinking is ill regulated, ill propor- tioned and disastrous. Willing is important; a strong will makes a strong man, but willing without thinking foreordains defeat. Willing without thinking is a leap without looking, a leap into the dark indeed. The college graduate is to represent the Scotch ideal of the thinker. [128]
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The American college graduate is also to be the gentleman and the gentle-lady. Who is the gentleman ? You ask me, — I cannot tell you. You do not ask me, and I know. He is the one whose mind is trained to see the elements and forces of a social condition and who is able to adjust himself to them. He understands and appreciates. He represents the l.ne art of good manners. What is the purpose of the fine arts? It is to give pleasure. The gentleman seeks to give pleasure; he is at home in any society. He, being rich, can be with the poor and give no intimation of his wealth; he, being poor, can be with the rich, and be happy. He represents a moral element, as well as an intellectual He seeks to serve, and hurts no one unless obliged to hurt. He protects the weakest, he loves the un- lovely, he bears with and seeks to save the erring. He restores the lost, he helps the help- less.
The American college student represents a fifth element which comprehends all I have tried to say, — he should be a Christian. Who and what is the Christian.'^ The Chris- tian is the man who accepts Christ as his Master; he finds in Christ's discourse the high- est philosophy, — the philosophy concerning [129]
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God himself. He finds in Christ's teaching the noblest moral code, a code of love for men inspired by love for God. He finds in Christ's commands life's supreme duties, — duty of service. He finds in Christ's invitations life's most comfortable rewards. He finds in Christ's promises rallying cries for noblest endeavors, and in Christ's character he finds the incar- nation of divine and human ideals. The Christian is not a being apart; the Christian is the man efficient, plus the man scholarly, plus the man thinking, plus the man gentle- manly, and a personality inspired by the pas- sion for Christ as his Master. The Christian conception represents the highest conception of life reaching out towards infinity, the deepest conception of life going down to fundamental being, the broadest conception of life, teaching all men. It stands for all that is noblest, most lasting, most human, most divine; it goes out above and beyond and beneath the conception of the Roman Catholic, the Friend, the Hebrew, the Protestant; it belongs to life, temporal and eternal, to life of God and of man.
To such a life the college has sought to lead you. To such a life the college sends you forth.
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UNIVERSITIES OF THE WORLD
To the Members of the Graduating Classes:
I have spoken to you out of large interpre- tations, out of great histories, out of your experiences; I have spoken out of our common past. But while I have been speaking we have thought together of your future. Ah, that future! For it I have no analysis, no prophesy, no anxiety indeed. Rather for that future I have with you a prayer, a prayer for all that is best and noblest and richest for you. My prayer is that all the best of your past may be made yet better in the unending time that is yours.
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VIII THE FOUR-SQUARE MAN
Chapter VIII
THE FOUR-SQUARE MAN 11911]
" And the city lleth foursquare: on the east three gates; on the north three gates; on the south three gates; and on the west three gates." — Revelation xxi: 16 and 13.
THE splendid panorama of the chapter whence are taken these texts gains its splendor from values known to man. But these splendors are only an environment for the Divine One and for man made in the divine image. It is neither the new heaven nor the new earth nor the foundations of the city's walls, garnished with all manner of precious stones which form the splendor and the beauty, but it is the Lord God Almighty: for the Glory of God lightens it and the Lamb is the light thereof. The conqueror has also here his place. He that overcometh inherits all things. God is his Father and he God's son.
It is not therefore a far cry to the inter- pretation of the four-square city of God as a type of the man who is also four-square and [135]
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perfected. Like that city, man has also four sides, or parts, and also like the walls of the heavenly Jerusalem, man has a trinity of approaches to each of these sides of his four- square character.
The first side in man's four-square character which one meets is the regard which man has for himself. Man can think of himself as a second or a third person. He can altruize himself.' He puts himself beneath his own ear or eye of observation.
As man studies himself he finds three most important relations, or elements. He think^ he feels, he chooses. These elements, or forces, hold also an important relation to the college. The college uses the intellect most constantly and fruitfully. Its function is, not to cram intellect with knowledge, but so to use knowledge that the intellect shall become the forceful and delicate instrument of thought. Modern education is concerned altogether too much with the content of knowledge and not sufficiently with the mind of the man to be educated. Confusion has resulted in the educational process through the vast increase in the stores of knowledge.
The enlargement in every field, linguistic, historical, literary, social, economic, political,
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has been tremendous. In the old college, the student could learn all that the college offered. In the new college he has sometimes thought that he ought to try to learn all that the college offered. In consequence he has become con- fused, and sometimes confounded. He is to learn, and the college is to learn, that out of this vast variety he is to select those studies which minister to the enlargement, the growth, the strengthening of his whole mind. Different minds are enlarged, strengthened, fostered by different knowledges. The college should min- ister to each. Therefore the college should set forth a fitting variety commensurate with the whole scheme of things. But the student should select that which ministers most directly and powerfully to his individual thinking. Any other process is waste, — waste of mind, which represents the saddest of all wastes. But the content is not the only element. The teacher is more significant.
The college man studying himself knows that he has a heart, — he feels, he loves, he hates, he exults, he is depressed. The peril of the college man and woman is, that they forget the heart side of life. It is the doorway which opens to the great temple of humanity itself. No fullness of knowledge, no accuracy [1371
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or comprehensiveness of thought, should for a moment be suffered to dry up these central springs of feeling. We know men in whom education has seemed to produce ansemia. Blood has lost its redness; temperature runs low. Such a result is too high a price to pay for the discipline of the intellect.
Man also thinks of himself as a will. The peril of the earlier education was through intellectual remoteness to lessen the willing power of the student. The peril of modern education is possibly to exercise the will so constantly that not sufficient force is left to nourish the intellect. The will is through the avocations of the college to be strengthened; as the intellect, through the vocation of the college, is to be disciplined and to be made a proper guide for the choices of the will itself.
The intellect, the heart, the will, these are three gates which man finds in the thought which he has of himself.
A second side of the four-square college man is the thought he has of his work. Who is the Frenchman who said, " Life is given as a judgment, but work as a reward".'* Toward his work man holds at least three relations. He is first to respect it: it is to be a work wor- [ 138 ]
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thy of his respect. It is to be a work worthy of his respect because of the service which it renders to humanity. Some of you have chosen your life work. That choice will prove to be lasting. Some of you have chosen your life work, and that choice will, for reason good or bad, be changed. Some of you have not chosen your life work. But whether chosen or unchosen, that work does represent a funda- mental principle of your being. It represents a special force or method by which you will become a creator. You stand, as it were, before your life work, as the Almighty Creator stood before void and vacant space on the first morning of the creation. The hour represents the mightiest and most pregnant of all oppor- tunities, fraught with imperishable conse- quences. But below, and above and around all minor choices rest the opportunity and the duty of a choice eternal in time and universal in space. On the night in which Charles Kingsley became twenty-one years of age he wrote: " My birthnight. I have been for the last hour on the seashore, not dreaming, but thinking deeply and strongly, and forming determinations which are to affect my destiny through time and through eternity. Before the sleeping earth and the sleepless sea and [139]
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stars I have devoted myself to God: a vow never (if He gives me the faith I pray for) to be recalled."
Whatever the calling may be to which you devote yourself, know that you are called by and for and of God.
In your thought of your work you are yet not to forget the duty of aptness for it. You are to become an expert. You are to know your special work, said Emerson, if you do not you are undone. One great contribution of the last thirty years is the increasing respect for the expert. The opinion of the mind trained to judge evidence in each of the great fields of endeavor is held in increasingly higher regard. The world has come to be able to afford the expert. The division of labor permits his training. Therefore in your special work make yourself just as able as you can. Be willing to spend years of hardest toil in order to become a supreme master.
It is also not to be forgotten in thinking of your work, that your work, going out from you, will|return tofyou and will educate you, the worker. Your hand should not be formed into the tool which it handles, but the tool should form, enlarge, refine the hand. The faithful- ness with which you do your work should
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make you a man more faithful. The place where you work should not be a prison, much less a brazen one, as Matthew Arnold says, but it should be a palace, with skylights. Let your work be so noble, so fine that in its reaction on you, it will make you finer and nobler.
A third side of you, a four-square being, is your thought of man. On this side are three gateways of honor, love, and co-operation. The three gateways are closely joined together and form one great way of approach. Man is more than his work, and humanity is more than all its achievements. The word " means " always seems to me significant. We ask if A. B. is a man of large means, inquiring is he rich? The very question indicates the sub- ordination of wealth to manhood. Wealth is a means, a measure, a method to, and of, and by, man. Man is most worthy of honor. Made in God's image he is declared to be, which indicates that God honors humanity by existing in its image. The honor paid to man is in its essence an honor paid to divinity. Fallen, stained, wretched, bereft, every hu- man life has still in itself a bit of the divine. Honor it.
With honor is joined the gateway of love. [141]
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The command of Christ to love your neighbor as yourself is too narrow, too low. It ought to be as it is, supplanted by Christ's new com- mandment that ye love one another as I have loved you. You are to love your neighbor more than you love yourself. You would prefer to cheat yourself, or to do harm to yourself rather than to cheat or to do harm to your neighbor. How did Christ love? He loved unto death; thus you are to love the world.
The humanity which you honor and love you are to co-operate with. With men, as well as for them, are you to labor. We know great souls, strong personalities, who cannot work with other men. Their service, which ought to be great, becomes weakness. I knew two great men who once served as college presidents, whose administrations were stormy and largely fruitless because they could not work with their associates. If college men fail in their life's career, they fail for one of two reasons, either moral weakness or in- ability to get on with men. They are either weak In will or are cantankerous. Of these two causes of failure, cantankerousness is the more common. Work with men, like yourself, unlike yourself, weak men, wicked men, [142]
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strong men, good men: work with them in honor and love for all men.
The fourth side of the four-square man bears the name " The Thought of God." God, to know him is impossible. Your thought of him must be very inadequate. But your thought of him is of supreme consequence to yourself, as his being is of supreme consequence to your being. In your thought of him is set therefore the great gateway of mystery. Him you cannot know. The finite never compre- hends the infinite, time never overtakes eternity. Beyond the farthest reach of space is still endlessness. A God whom you can know is no God. Christ came as a revelation of God, but even knowing Christ, Son of Man, Son of God, you cannot know God because of the limitation of your powers of knowing. You could see the universe if you had the eye of the universe. You could know God if you were God. Only God knows God. Therefore you stand in mystery as you think of the infinite Being.
But by the side of the gateway of mystery stands the gateway marked " Obedience." Your sovereign you may not know, but his laws you may read and observe. The most important laws; pf God are most evident.
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They form the cardinal virtues, the great hinge principles of character; justice, tem- perance, bravery are among them. The laws of God are also the graces that are summed up in graciousness, favor to the ill-deserving. The ten commandments of the twentieth of Exodus are among his laws, good for the State and the individual today as they were good for the Jewish theocracy of four thousand years ago. The graces of the fifth of Matthew, the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, are as precious today for the common planes of our living as they were for the disciples on the mountainside two thousand years ago. Your thought of God includes obedience to those fundamental instincts and principles which help to constitute not only the great state but also the pure family and the noble individual person. To those instincts of sym- pathy, helpfulness, purity, love, you are to be joyfully obedient.
In your thought, also, of God, is set the gateway of worship. God dwells in mystery, but of him we do know sufficient to worship. The greatest of modern philosophers has said that the two most awful elements in life are the heavens at night and the moral law, " I Qught/' These two great §olemnitieSj and
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more, are embodied in our worship of the Eternal. To the conscience within, to the majesty of the nightly heaven, let there be added the grandeur of the fathomless ocean and the eternity of ever-ceasing and never- ceasing time. And the infinities of Personality, whose power is omnipotence, whose knowledge is omniscience, whose presence is omni- presence, let all these be united together and let the individual man seek to approach unto Him. This approach is worship, worship of God.
And the city lieth four-square. The city is man. On the one side of the square, man's thought of himself; on a second side, man's thought of his work; on the third side, man's thought of man; on the fourth side, man's thought of God.
On the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates and on the west three gates. In man's thought of himself are found the gateways of intellect, of heart and of will. On the side of man's thought of his work are found the gateways of respect of his work, of aptness for doing it, and of education through it. On the side of man's thought of man are found the triple gateways pf honor, of love, of co-operation. On the
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fourth side is found man's thought of God. In this infinite wall are set the gateways of mystery, of obedience to God, and of worship of Him. Such is my thought of the four- square man, which I would have you each be.
To the Members of the Graduating Classes:
You will recall that it is said one side of the four-square city lies toward the east, one side toward the north, one side toward the south and one side toward the west. Such are the relations of your life and of your character.
On the one side are found the origin and the source of your being. It stands for the sun- rising of the east. The north may represent the cold and the chill and the remoteness of your nature, but in it shall be found superb vigor and mighty strength. The south shall stand for the sunniness and warmth of your heart turned toward all men. The west shall point toward the close of your life's brief day, but it also shall, in the passing of the endless years, represent the transmitting of your west into some east, whose sun shall be forever rising, but never coming to its declining.
I wish for you each that as you are of God, you also may dwell in Him, and that as you are human, you may dwell with men, and that as [146]
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your sun, rising well in the eastern sky, passes on over its zenith into the evening hour, the promise of the morning shall be assured in the^beauty and the splendor which belongs to the eternal city of God.
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IX
PUBLIC DISORDER AND THE HIGHER EDUCATION
Chapter IX
PUBLIC DISORDER AND THE HIGHER EDUCATION
[1912]
" And ye shall hear of wars and of rumors of wars." — Matthew xxiv: 6.
IT is an insurglng world. Man is rebelling against his institutions. The longer exist- ing and more natural are these forces, agencies, and conditions, the more rebellious does he seem to be. After many years of armed civil peace our nearest foreign neighbor of the south is in sedition. Overseas, in the twelve months since we gathered in this place, England has passed through two crises which have demoralized industry, strained the Eng- lish Constitution, brought havoc to the regular and recognized methods of life, flung millions into anxiety, and brought death to hundreds of lives. In this time the ancient power of Persia has been in the travail of revolution, the Italian Government has sought with menace and bloodshed to regain a long-lost hold in North Africa, and certain parts and classes of the
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European and Asiatic Empire of the Czar have been saved from revolution by the crushing hand of military despotism. India, at peace for a time, knows that any day there may break forth the flames of unrest and of anarchy. Above all, China has within these last months expelled its rulers, and in the midst of provin- cial revolution estabHshed a republic for which every American has best wishes. Today, in our couhtry, the hate of partizan passion within party and the hate of partizan passion without and against party inflames the mind and heart of every citizen. More than one-half of the world is in rebellion. The world is an insurging world. The insurging is po- litical.
The insurging is also social. The Victorian age has, like a late staying guest, finally passed out. The era of good feeling has vanished. The social quietness, the mediocre respect- ability, the timid decorousness, the life which was comparative because it was not superlative, the era of ideals, but of ideals so low that they did not create despair in trying to attain unto them, nor so high that they quickened great enthusiasm in the probability of reaching them, have all gone, both in England and America. We have passed from an age of
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statics into the age of dynamics. We have come into the age of force, forces, and of forcefulness. We have entered from condi- tions into movements. The age of indi- vidualism becoming aggressiveness; of aggres- siveness becoming unrest; of unrest becoming social and industrial reformation; of reforma- tion becoming social and industrial revolution; of revolution tending toward anarchy, seems at last to have come upon us.
This state is industrial, moreover, as well as social and political.
The industrial unrest in the United States and in Western Europe is more than evident. Most great producers or distributors of goods, of steel, iron, coal, cotton, and woolen fabrics; most carrying systems, steam, electric and water, involving scores of trades and hundreds of thousands, even millions, of workmen, are in constant jeopardy of positive interruption, or of annihilation. A twenty-four hour notice given by the Directors of Trades Unions and Labor Federations may stop thousands of trades, interrupt the recognized channels of communication, throw society into chaos and may bring certain countries like England, with twelve days of rations ahead, to the actual borders of starvation. The industrial world [153]
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is so builded together and tied up, part by and to part, that disorder in any one part produces, or tends to produce, disorder in every part. This unity belongs not only to industrial processes but also to the industrial workmen. Workmen are banded together in ascending scales of comprehensiveness. The dock la- borers have their union. The railroad em- ployees have theirs. Both may be members of a Federation of Carriers, and the Federation of Carriers may be members of some higher unit. Not only are these unions national, but also they are international. They cover the world. This industrial unrest is indeed no new thing. But it is to be said that it tends to increase in intensity. Working men are be- coming conscious of their power when they are joined together. They have entered politics and the Labor Party is a recognized politi- cal and civil body. Both in the United States and in England, the Labor Party becomes a distinct force in the great parties. Without its help, the Liberal Party in England would be unable to maintain itself in power. In America the decision of the Labor Party to work with or against the Republican or the Democratic organization, would probably determine an election. But be it said, that not a few leaders [154]
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of the working men have come to the conclu- sion that they can more effectively, as well as more speedily, get what they want to get, by Revolution than by Legislation.
Industrial war is, therefore, the declared resulting process. War is war, whether the warfare be rifles, or a strike, and picketing is picketing, whether it be along the Rhine, or about the docks of the Hudson or of the Thames; and In neither case can such picketing be described as peaceful.
It must, I think, be usually granted that the history of arbitration methods, conciliation boards, and other agencies for avoiding or ad- justing strikes and lockouts, has for the past twenty-five years been rather a sorry record. Agreements, hard to arrive at, have been easily broken. Understandings become speedily mis- understandings. Misunderstandings produce suspicions, and suspicions eventuate readily in quarrels. The result is, that the employer of large numbers of workmen, and the great bodies of workmen themselves, are constantly, when not engaged in declared war. In a con- dition of armed neutrality. The white flag of truce flies no small share of the time, but it is easily and frequently displaced by the red flag. But be it said: the white flag stands for only [155]
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a truce, and the red does stand for active and alert campaigning.
The industrial unrest is both the cause and result of socialism. Gladstone said, near the close of his unique career, that socialism formed the next question for humanity to take up. Towards the close of his long life, John Stuart Mill made a similar intimation: ** Socialism has for better or for worse come to pervade society in both Europe and the United States more generally and more deeply than is commonly believed."
Go to Oxford, or to Cambridge, and one finds socialism moving in the atmosphere, filling the hearts of many disciples, and of as many apostles. In scores of American colleges, little bands of these socialist workers and speakers are found. In theological seminaries, both among students and teachers, are enrolled adherents and expounders. I am not now declaring against the thing itself, or against this propagandism. I am simply interpreting such a condition as existing among college men and intimating that it is profoundly significant. For the belief of the abler and more serious college men of one age will become the belief of the people of the next generation, and the practice of the generation still following. [ 156 ]
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As I have said, this unrest is industrial, social and political. But the movement has gone far beyond the legislative process in its radicalism. It seems to bear recollections of the Reign of Terror, and of the Commune. The French Revolution helped to give Europe (excepting England, which got its liberty in the peaceful Revolution of 1688) liberty and nationality. The present movement is not concerned with either liberty or nationality. Its cry is A Living Wage." Its demand is for " Meat." (It has bread.) Its will is for " Opportunity." It wants the " Open Door."
A comprehensive remark to be made about these movements more or less allied, and about the people who constitute these movements, themselves more or less diversified, is that these masses, on the one side, worlcmen, employees, and on the other side, the classes, capitalists, or employers, are exceedingly antagonistic to each other. They regard themselves, or at least are inclined to regard themselves, as enemies. The workmen often, too often, hate the employer, and the employer often, too often, is indifferent to the workmen. Ad- vantages gained by one are regarded as a loss to the other; disadvantages suffered by one are interpreted as advantages gained by the
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other. The workmen think of their em- ployers as tyrants, and believe that the em- ployers look on them as machines to be run at the highest efficiency, and, when worn out, to be flung on the human scrap-pile. The employers regard, or give some reason for be- lieving that they regard, the workmen as men who are chiefly interested in doing the least work for the most money, who are willing to break their promises, careless of their em- ployers' rights, regardless of their own duties, without conscientiousness or zeal. Such an- tagonisms are not universal, but such antago- nisms are altogether too general. This condi- tion, inexpressibly sad, has arisen in part at least from the remoteness of the employer and the employee. The growth of all industrial undertakings, to embrace thousands or tens of thousands of workmen, makes it impossible for the individual employer to know the indi- vidual workman. The workman comes to be known as a number, and ceases to be a per- sonality. Humanity is thus submerged on both sides and with this submersion spring up dislikes, recriminations, enmities of all sorts.
I suppose it must also be confessed that the leadership of these movements is inadequate. It is a leadership intense and narrow. It is
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inclined to see one side only. That justice lies with the workmen and injustice with the em- ployer and capitalist is too often the pre- sumption that lies behind all reflection, and that forms the basis of executive procedure. The duty owed the people, the general in- terests of the community, have a small part in deliberation or decision. That the employer IS completely free from guilt is never for one instant to be intimated. Many years ago the reported remark from the head of a great railway system that " Let the public be damned " became a noisome stench in the public nostrils.
It is true that there are exceptions to the narrowness of the leadership under which workmen move. John Mitchell is an excep- tion; but the dislike for one of his large type helps to prove the proposition as it refers to America. John Burns is also an exception, but the dislike of many workingmen for John Burns helps to prove the chief proposition.
Now, in this condition, sketched so imper- fectly in broad lines, " What can the college and the universities do to make things better? " The question is significant. For the higher educa- tion does not desire to nurse a fugitive and cloistered virtue. It desires to serve — as it [159]
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ought to serve — the highest, broadest, deepest, and most enduring interests of man.
The higher education can help its students to look at facts as they are, and to weigh the evidence which these facts present. Of course, the colleges have always been seeking to achieve this result. The colleges have always been trying to teach the significant fact that two and two make four. A significant fact, indeed, for always there are some in the community who are trying to squeeze two and two into three, and an equal number who are trying to enlarge them into five. In the training of this power of looking at facts as they are, and in weighing evidence, lies the worth of education. But the college has a special duty laid upon itself of transmuting this general obligation into a duty specific and particular. For to the great social and industrial facts one is specially liable to be blind. The facts are not like the reforms of the Gracchi — remote. They are immediate. So close are they that it is diflScult to see them as they are, to interpret their re- lations, to point out their significance, or to lay down a course of conduct based upon their meanings. But they are pregnant with new births for men. Their nearness generates passion. Truth's white light has a small [160]
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chance for shining. For better or worse, for destruction, or for construction in this difficult environment, they must be interpreted. Such interpretation, the college can inspire its men to seek to make. It should help men to see these phenomena sanely and steadily, and to see them whole.
The college, further, may give greater place to what I call the human sciences. These sciences include history, economics, govern- ment, and sociology. The increase in the em- phasis laid on these subjects has, in a score of years, been vast. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the increase. It is not for me to depreciate the worth of the natural sciences, either as intellectual disciplines or as revela- tions of the wonders of the creative process. Let the natural sciences have their full and adequate place. But I do believe the social and industrial conditions demand that college graduates shall go forth with some under- standing of the complexity and seriousness of these conditions. For under these conditions, the people are misled. Political and civil harm results. The disease spreads. The pa- tient grows worse. Where can help be found? I know too well the imperfections and weak- nesses of the colleges. But if help is coming, it [161]
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must come in accordance with the great human laws which are as real as, though harder to understand than, the great laws of nature. These laws, these principles, of social, political, civil, and industrial well-being are studied, considered, related to each other in the colleges and universities. The men who have been students of these laws and principles are above all others best qualified to apply these laws to the body politic and social. Humanity goes on repeating its experiments which have failed. Its memory is short. The colleges stand for accumulated thought. They represent and present the history of human experimentation. The colleges should save men, at least some- what, from repeating their great social errors and mistakes. The result of all the help the colleges can give will be poor enough, but these results are the most precious and effective which humanity in its present stage of culti- vation can attain unto.
But there is a further method which the colleges may use in overcoming the anarchistic tendencies of the social and industrial move- ment. This method consists in the establish- ment of departments of the human sciences, for the special advantage of men of mature years who are especially interested in these [ 162 ]
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subjects and who have not been able, by reason of their Hmitations, to give themselves a proper education. This suggestion is by no means new. It bears memories of move- ments which have a somewhat prolonged history. The workingmen's colleges of fifty years ago, in which the noble Maurice and the versatile Kingsley were founders and sponsors and supporters, embody the same great idea. Today no better exponent of the movement is found than is incarnated in Ruskin College at Oxford. The difficulties in laying such a foundation are neither few in number nor slight. The ordinary members of a college faculty are seldom able to undertake such a task. Their duties are altogether too heavy for any such permanent additional service. For a brief time they may take such work upon them- selves but not as a lasting service. A special staff, therefore, is to be organized; and such a staff, competent in mind and conscience, is hard to secure. Furthermore, many men de- siring to become students are found to lack a proper general education. They have not the intellectual qualifications to take up special social studies, than which no subjects are more complex. Their eagerness and enthusiasm go a certain way — with some men, a long way —
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in overcoming the lack of trained mental power; but enthusiasm cannot be accepted as a substitute for a trained intellect. Though, therefore, every college may well consider the question of offering such courses, especially if placed in the midst of an urban community, yet the outlook is not bright for results either comprehensive or lasting.
I am also inclined to believe that the regular college officers may make a most effective use of their own wisdom and counsels in securing the great end of social and industrial peace. It is a perilous thing for a professor or president to give specific advice to a new student re- garding the choice of a calling. Principles he may lay down. Their application should be committed to the man who must bear the responsibilities of the choice. But oflficers should feel free to intimate, and perhaps do more than intimate, the opportunities open in social service as a vocation, or open even as an avocation. I have known the head of an institution of five hundred students to make plain suggestions to hundreds in respect to a life's calling. Jowett, of Balliol, was a supreme master in such guidance. It is at this point that the college may render especially effective service. I have referred to the lack of wise [164]
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leadership in the great social movements. Cannot the colleges do more in securing such leadership? Cannot the college train men up into such intellectual power and with such human sympathies that its graduates shall feel the impulse to enter into such communities and be able to merit such leadership? Many men in college are, as I have said, more or less socialistic. If they, entering life and taking part either formally or informally in these tremendous affairs, can keep their judgment large and clear, they should in time be able to give great help in offering right direction to these movements unto the happiest results. In quite a different field, and one more or less non-academic, it is possible for the colleges to put forth efforts. I have referred, as a sad feature in the social and industrial condition, to the antagonism of the masses and the classes. Can the colleges do aught to mitigate such reciprocal enmities? Of course, college men, mingling and meeting together and going out into their diverse callings and relationships, are better prepared through common knowl- edge and acquaintance to promote comradery. But I also believe that a simple and genuine religious basis and atmosphere would aid in dispelling antagonisms. Is there any such
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basis on which more men, college and non- college, could succeed in standing? I know of one and of only one. That is Christ's Sermon on the Mount. In this Great Dis- course, that part which forms the most fitting basis is known as " The Beatitudes^ One need not be a Roman Catholic as such or a Protestant as such; one need not subscribe to the occidental interpretations of Christ's char- acter or words, interpretations which the orientals say are wrong or false. But if men would agree to accept of the words of the Sermon on the Mount in respect to the Supreme Being, in respect to altruistic and selfward duties, there would be formed a deep, as well as a broad, foundation for men helping each other. I wish to appeal for a place for the Ten Beatitudes. I would write them into a Creed: — " I believe in humility of spirit and humble- ness of life; in the comfort of those who mourn; in the blessedness of those hungering and thirst- ing after righteousness; in mercy; in the vision of God belonging to the pure in heart, and in the peacemakers as the children of God; and I also believe in the willingness of enduring persecution for righteousness' sake, and in the blessed assurance that those who endure shall have great reward."
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It may not be further out of place for one to say that there is a need today of a revival of the humanity of humanity. One can say this without running the risk of being judged as a follower of Comte. There has been a revival in the study of, and of love for, nature. From being an unknown enemy of the ancients, nature has become through the stages of poetic interpretation, of sesthetic appreciation, and of scientific research, a known and great friend. A similar transformation and elevation is surely taking place in the study of humanity. The movement for arbitration and for peace among nations is a token of what has been achieved and is a promise of what is to be secured. The present may be a neap tide in the process. The sense of the value of the individual human life seems to be just now suffering an eclipse, but it is a temporary one. The value of men as men, the worth of humanity as humanity, the significance of the human, is ever to be emphasized. Man is neither a thing nor a brute. He is a man and because he is a man he is like unto God.
To the Members of the Graduating Classes:
You, my friends, who are about to graduate, are to go forth from the college into what we [167]
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call the world. You are coming to your kingdom at a great time, a time great in its problems and forces. The problems are many, complex, urgent. The forces are also many and powerful. I congratulate you. You have no soft job to do, no easy life to live. Thank God that you are able to endure hardness without becoming hard. I do not warn you. I encourage you, and hope for you, and bless you, and pray for you. Those that be with you and for you are more than those that be against you. Go on, like Christian in Bun- yan's immortal allegory. Let not Vanity Fair weaken. Let not by-ways tempt. Let not Doubting Castle imprison, nor the Slough of Despond engulf, nor Giant Despair frighten. Go on and go upward, O Pilgrims! The land of Beulah beckons you and from this land, you shall enter through the gates into the City Celestial, where wars have ceased, and flags are furled, for all men love each other.
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X
THE INTERPRETATION OF LIFE
L
Chapter X
THE INTERPRETATION OF LIFE
[1913] " What is your life? " — James iv : 14.
IFE IS the source of life: from it life springs. Life is the condition of life: in it life moves and has its being. Life is the method of life: it is vital, not mechanical. Life is the force of life: it is impelled by itself, not by exterior powers. Life is the end of life: more life and fuller is the final cause. But when one has said this, one has still failed to answer the question of the text — "What is your life.^ "
To attempt to tell what life is, is not our problem. Rather it is the far simpler one with which we are content, the interpretation of life, hoping that through this interpretation one may secure some little light upon the question itself.
First. The interpretation is to be made in terms of truth. Truth is the knowledge of things as they are. It is the correspondence of understanding with reality. It is essentially
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the photograph of what is. It represents existence, forces, conditions. The man who knows these forces and conditions is the man who comes the most clearly to interpret life itself. In this process he is to apply the tests of truth. Those tests which Descartes used are still valid. First: To believe nothing except upon clear and certain evidence. Second: To analyze every question thor- oughly.' Third: To use logic. Fourth: To observe with care. In other words, the man who is truthful is to confirm, verify. Evidence he is to weigh; facts he is to value; processes to understand; complex conditions to separate; separated truths to put together. He is to know things broadly, for things are broad; to know things highly, for things are lofty; to know things deeply, for things are pro- found; to know things intimately, for things are of details; to know things comprehen- sively, for things are wide. Experience is to make truth more truthful. Observation is to extend knowledge. The perils of self-deception are to be recognized. The personal equation is to be adjusted in making up all verdicts. The white light without is to find an ally in the pure soul within. The heart is to inspire but never clog the intellect. The heat of feeling [ 172 ]
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IS not to be sufficient to melt the lines of mental observation.
For giving you the power to interpret life as truth, the college holds a special and peculiar method. This method belongs to the physical sciences. The essence of these sciences is accuracy; — to know things as they are and to express such knowledge. I always look upon certain balances in one of the laboratories with peculiar reverence. Our own Professor Morley once said to me, speaking of his balances, which have historic meaning, that their delicacy could be best expressed, in his thinking, by comparison with a load of hay upon the hay scales, in which the change of a single straw would indicate the difference in the tons' weight. Now, you have forgotten many facts of chemistry and physics; others you will proceed to forget. But the methods which you have employed, the emphasis which you have laid upon the worth of truth, will remain as lasting intellectual forces and permanent treasures. Herein, by the way, lies the essence of a college education as a training in the methods to be employed in after-life, though not a training in the content of knowl- edge or of affairs with which you will deal in after-life.
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When one seeks for examples of such inter- pretation of life as truth, one finds many names springing to the lips, but the name of Darwin comes first — Darwin laboring year after year in his laboratory and gardens at Down. In his altogether too brief autobiography, he says: "Therefore my success as a man of science, whatever this may have meant to the world, has been determined as far as I can judge by complex and diversified mental con- ditions. Of these the most important have been the love of science, unbounded patience in long reflecting over any subject, industry in observing and collecting facts, and a fair share of invention as well as of common sense."
May you, in your interpretation of life as truth, find yourself having the same noble elements and qualities! The sciences which you have studied in college represent one of the helps which the college has given or can give in making such an interpretation.
Second. The interpretation of life is also to be made through development and growth. Life is development, the outfolding of forces inherent in itself; and also it is growth, the addition of forces unto itself from without. I have known thousands of men and women in collegej and also I have followed them after [174]
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college. I think of one, whom I will call G, a noble boy, quiet in manner, keen in his young intellect, faithful to his work, who has now become one of the great legal counselors of this nation. I think of another, M, able, commanding, popular, permitting his lower appetites at times to rule the higher, who finally compelled the higher to rule the lower, who came to fill great political offices, for which men strive in a republic. I think of still another, who, when in college, was helpful to every other man and to every cause, and who came to be most beloved of all ministers known to me. I think of another who, in her undergraduate days, sang poems, gracious and happy and reverent, who has continued to sing for widest audiences, and whose life is, in itself, a poem. I think of another whom I will call A, who, in college, was devoted to every activity, who won high scholarship prizes, keen, alert, sympathetic, who is now recognized as one of the great writers of his type of literature. To scores of others I might refer. Life has, to each of them, meant development and growth. The life that was in them in the undergraduate days has passed on from strength unto strength: "They have added to their faith, virtue; and to their [175]
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virtue, knowledge; and to their knowledge, temperance; and to their temperance, patience; and to their patience, godliness; and to their godliness, brotherly kindness; and to their brotherly kindness, charity." Their life has been an addition and multiplication.
Every subject, fitted for a place in the college, provides such development. Language and literature represent such a growth. I chanced to know Hiram Bingham, the apostle to the Gilbert Islands, and the grammarian and lexicographer of their language. He has told me of the simplicity of their tongue, and of the poverty of their vocabulary, except, he said, in words for anger. Now contrast such a simple speech with a highly complex language like the Greek, or with an accurate and exact tongue like the French, or with the amplitude of words of the English. The development or growth represents a new world of speech. Liter- ature shows a similar enlargement. Think of the contrast between the mind of Chaucer, meeting the realities of life and of nature, and the mind of Tennyson and Browning and Matthew Arnold, seeking to interpret the outer or the inner vision of the last century. Lan- guage and literature are thus illustrations of the development and growth which charac- [176]
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terizes and interprets life. Your life is not indifference, stagnation, listlessness. It is vital, progressive, the sum of aggressive vitalities.
Matthew Arnold wrote to his mother at the age of forty-one, saying: " I have ripened and am ripening, so slowly that I shall be glad of as much time as possible. Yet I can feel, I rejoice to say, an inward spring which seems more and more to gain strength and to promise to resist outward shocks if they must come, however rough." Such ripening may there be in you, firm, rich, complete.
Third. The interpretation of life also means duty. Duty represents usually something to be done. It stands for action. It is service and service for others. It means the applica- tion of Christ's command, " Love your neigh- bor as yourself." For such an interpretation of life I know you are eager, almost restless, yet a little fearful, turning your eyes and heart back with longing to the last four years. You are inclined to contrast present college years with what you think life is to be. The future in the world you believe is the real thing, the past in the college you believe has not been the real thing. Yet more alike you will find the two to be than you now imagine. The [177]
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value of forces, the value of ideals and idealism, the value of camaraderie, the worth of clear and large and deep thinking, the motives, large or petty, the rivalries; the disappointments, the triumphs — all these that make up the college years, you will find to constitute the years following. The able men and women will continue to be able and to be gaining in strength. The same kings and queens and castles with which you have played upon the academic chessboard, you will use upon the public chessboard afterward. That board will be larger and perhaps the pieces a bit less white or a bit more crimson, but the laws of the playing are the same, and the results of a kind quite alike.
In interpreting life as duty, and duty as service to others, you are choosing a vocation, or better a vocation is choosing or calling you. Of this election I want to say two things :
First, your calling is to be one which will give highest benefit — benefit both in method and result. Any calling which you will con- sider is good. You have only to think what calling is the better or the best for you. In this weighing of evidence you are to think wherein lies the greatest need, and also to think what is your own power for filling the
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greatest need. Yet when these two points are weighed, not surprised shall I be that you are led into a calling unlike that which you had laid down for yourself. God has in mind some better thing for you, without which you would not have been made perfect. Yet, be it said, your preparation for your chosen calling may prove to be the very best preparation for the calling which God has in store for you. Each duty done knowingly becomes light and leading for other duties not known. Be true and be trusting!
This leads me to my second remark: with your vocation, useful as it is, unite an avoca- tion which also shall be useful. Along the main road of your life let there lie a side-path. The unofficial organization of the community is a mark of our time: the boards, the societies, the associations, of and for men and women, are numbered by the thousands. They go from Homes for Foundlings to Homes for Aged Couples, and from Unions for Railroad Firemen to Theosophical clubs. In such service have a share. Choose that form which makes the strongest appeal to you. Do not dissipate energy. Only when the northern lakes are compressed into the Niagara River do they get power.
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If the physical sciences help to interpret life as truth, and language and literature as development, so also do the sociological sciences help to interpret life as service. One among the mighty lessons of such teaching is that " No man liveth unto himself and no man dieth unto himself." A further lesson is that if a man attempt to live unto and by himself, he dies as surely as does the man who tries to support himself by his own blood. The popularity of such studies helps to prove, as it does illustrate, that man, in seeking to help himself today, is making life worth living.
Life is indeed duty. It is to seek to live as Mary Lyon lived. Upon her tombstone at Mount Holyoke are cut these words — a memorable sentence given in her last teaching to her school: "There is nothing in the uni- verse that I fear, but that I shall not know all my duty or shall fail to do it." Quite as noble and more modest it seems to me is the in- scription found upon the tombstone of Sir Henry Lawrence at Lucknow. Struck by a shell in that memorable siege, and knowing that he was soon to die. Sir Henry asked that this inscription might be placed above his grave: "Here lies Sir Henry Lawrence, the man who tried to do his duty."
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Fourth. In one's interpretation of life, life also means religion. And what is religion? I ask at once. Is religion the intellectual ac- ceptance of certain intellectual propositions about God? Is religion a participation in certain ecclesiastical rites of high historic au- thority? Is religion service for man — al- truism? In reference to this last question — is religion altruism — I wish to say promptly and clearly that, however valuable and precious service for man may be, it ought not to be called religion. Call it philanthropy, call it social service, call it the expression of religion, but it is not to be called religion. Religion rather represents the relation which man holds to the Highest Being. That Being bears different names and is thought of under differ- ent forms. But, at all events, religion is con- cerned with our origin, with our passing through time and space, and with our destiny. It is the deep tide of which single events and lives are the individual waves. It is the atmosphere of which individual events are the zephyrs and cyclones. It is the sky, the overarching firmament, of which we are as clouds which move to and fro, fast and slow, from horizon to zenith. Religion gives divine movement, divine influence. Religion is knowing, so far
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as may be, the infinite Force — Person. It is adjusting oneself to Him in peace and co- operation. Religion is trusting oneself to Him in glad hopefulness, to enable us to achieve results. This power, universal, eternal, make, so far as you can, a Person; clothe it with the attributes of the great Friend; think of it as the eternal, beneficent, living, gracious Father and Mother. Feel it not as a dying and a dead but as a living and a loving Lord. Look upon this world not as a charnel house of ashen faiths, but as a garden — a garden, not of Eden, with its serpent and its prohibitions, but as a garden of the New Jerusalem, watered by divine refreshings and bearing fruits for the healing of the nations. Give yourself unto it, in sentiment and mind, as a grateful worshiper at its altars. Of such a religion the philosophy taught in the college has sought to make you as disciples and apostles. For philosophy tries to see the heart of things and to inspire one to live according to the holiest and the highest. Therefore, interpret life as religion. What is your life? It is to be interpreted as truth, as growth, as service, as religion. Such an interpretation make an essential, necessary part of your character — not a superficial and remote part — an interpretation warm, earnest, [182]
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overflowing, vital. Add to that interpretation, imagination; add to that imagination, feeling, great, warm, lasting; add to the feeling the choice of your whole being.
Thus life was interpreted by the Christ. He came, declaring " I am Life," and affirming " I am come that you might have life and have it more abundantly." He also aflSrmed " I am the Truth." It is said, moreover, that he increased in stature and in favor with God and man. Life was to him development and growth. It was also to him duty, service, for the second of his three great command- ments was to love your neighbor as yourself. The third of the three was to love your friends as he has loved you, even unto death. He was also the Spirit of Religion. " He that hath seen Me, hath seen the Father also." Accept the Christ as your Master, and life will become unto you truth and growth and duty and religion.
To the Members of the Graduating Classes:
The long wished for days have come — the last week of your college course is here. You accept of it, now that it is here, with mingled sadness and gladness. As you look back upon these four years, you do find, I trust, that [183]
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they have been to you an enlarging of knowl- edge and truth, an increasing growth in your- self, a stronger loyalty to duty, and a deeper sense of religion. If, to this quartette of verities, the four years have brought you into loving allegiance, the college has no fear for your future. If it has so helped you that you enter into that future, bearing a holier appre- ciation of the truth, a stronger passion for a full life, a more eager sense for service, a deeper reverence for religion, then that indeed which is best in the college you have gained. That, in this spirit, you do leave the college, and that also you, in this spirit, do face the future, I do believe. Let the noblest being and the best doing of the future prove how well you have learned the college lessons of truth, growth, duty, and religion. May God bless you every one! Farewell!
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COLLEGE LIFE A PROPHECY OF LIFE ITSELF
Chapter XI
COLLEGE LIFE A PROPHECY OF LIFE ITSELF
[1914]
"Behold: a Sower went forth to sow." — Matt. xiii: 3,
THIS day looks at once backward and forward; it bears memory and hope. Like the treasure of the sower, it is both fruit and seed. Therefore it is for me to point out certain principles, or teachings, or methods, of the four years of the college, which are also a promise or intimation of the several times four years which lie before you.
One teaching of the college, which you will find true of the after years, is, that you are to live your life. The sower sows; sowing was his business. He succeeded, or he failed, ac- cording as that life of sowing he lived. Not in any professional or technical sense is the remark to be interpreted; but in the largest sense, you are to live your life. Broadly, deeply, highly, fully, you are to live the highest, deepest, broadest, fullest life. Today you are
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thinking of doing; what am I going to do next year? is the most common question. Beyond, above, below the doing, is the life that you are to live. You are painting your future; the pictures are glorious. The service you will render, the reform you will make, the result you will win, the force you will apply, the cause you will begin — how noble each aspiration! Continue to dip the brush of hope into the red colors of your powers, but, in preparation for giving your service, for creating your reforms, for applying your force, for winning your result, live your life, your life of each day, of each year, fully, faithfully, greatly.
" I would be true for there are those who trust me, I would be pure for there are those who care, I would be strong for there is much to suffer, I would be brave for there is much to dare, I would be friend to all the poor and friendless, I would be giver and forget the gift, I would be humble for I know my weakness, I would look up and love and laugh and lift."
Such a life is the vestibule of the temple of noblest achieving. The man who lives his life most effectively in his own age and place, is the one who is sure to make the richest offering to the life of all future time, and of all other places. It was John Milton, the poli-
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tician, the statesman, the pamphleteer, the hot-headed Puritan of the great rebellion, who became the poet, the poet of a Paradise Lost, and of a Paradise Regained.
John Hay was chosfen to his greatest office while serving as ambassador at the English Court. I ventured to write him, this man of Cleveland, and a Trustee and benefactor of this University, a letter of congratulation. He replied to me, saying in essence: " I am a soldier; I can only obey my superior; I am coming back under orders, and I shall stand in my place until I fall." A true prophet he was, as well as a brave soldier. He did stand truly and bravely in his place, till he did fall. It was the man doing his work in this office or that, in England or America, which fitted him for the unrivaled work which he was to do as the Secretary of State.
At each stage live your life just as great, just as complete as you can; at that stage be content thus to live, until the next stage of living is made known.
A second principle, which the college bears, and which life itself will offer, and illustrate, is that most fundamental principle of logic and of science, that each result represents and in- cludes a cause. Every harvest looks back to a
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sowing, every fruit to a seed. Each golden- wheated October pre-supposes a grain-sowing May: logic, commonplace and inevitable, in conditions material. But humanity is not so inclined to recognize the fact, or to appreciate the meaning of the fact in conditions intel- lectual, moral, human.
The American people are eager for education. The people are to be educated. The masses are to be taught. These are the chief articles of our public educational creed, a creed inspir- ing, as well as aspiring. Let us accept the creed and practise its duties.
But those who promulgate this creed, often do not understand it. They should learn, and believe, and they should express the belief, that education is not a sudden and unrelated result; it is not as was said of Schelling's philosophy, " a shot fired out of pure space." Education represents toil and labor, sacrifice of the lower to the higher, of the small to the great, of the transientfto the lasting. One of the leaders of£the^Chautauqua movement tells me that apparently the American people are eager for what is called " culture." They want to know the best about the best. They desire to possess the virtues and the verities of learning and of scholarship. But he also says they seem
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to be unwilling to pay the price. They want to be furnished with the ready-made articles of intellectual habits. They desire to become cultured while they wait, or even without waiting. They want to learn while they loaf. They desire education in tablets. They try to take education, and not to be taken by it. The fact is that we are a good deal like our landscapes — new. We try to do things in- tellectual as we do things executive, quickly, immediately. Now all this is in some respects good and worthy. Such a process stands for energy, force, power; but it does not stand for thoughtfulness, for enrichment, for discrimi- nation, for delicacy of character, or for fineness and beauty of service. It does not stand for an appreciation of the great facts of life, of growth, of seedtime and of harvest. Know you, that real life comes from life, not from processes; from riches of character, not from poverty of material. Know you that fruit comes from seed, and seed from fruit. They both represent life, and life stands for growth, development. Biology, as well as physics, illustrates the great law of cause and effect.
A further principle, both academic and human, is the principle of adjustment. The sower went forth as a sower. He scattered
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seeds, not iron filings. He went forth in the proper season. He fitted himself into his con- ditions. He adjusted means and methods and forces to ends. This lesson the college has tried to teach, and the same lesson life also will confirm. It is important for you to adjust yourself to circumstance. The organism is to adjust itself to environment. If it fail to adjust, it perishes. The most important part of all your circumstance is the human part. Humanity has entered into an age of asso- ciated action, of co-operative effort. The in- dividual withers. In this association, in this co-operation, you are to fit yourself into others. You are to recognize their point of view, to appreciate their narrowness, to feel their prej- udices, to interpret their selfishnesses. Al- truistic interpretation is to be your mood, an intellectual substitution your habit.
This condition is one great cause of the prog- ress of German manufacturing, as a world- wide force. The German manufacturer puts up his goods in the forms which the South Sea Islander wishes. The Britisher is inclined to put up his steel and cotton goods in such forms as please himself, such forms as he has used for fifty years. The ripeness of the opportunity into which you would enter is important. Your
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technical, professional equipment is impor- tant. The forces at your command are, also, most important, but more important than any, perhaps more important than all other factors put together, is your power to adjust yourself to the human condition, is your capacity to work with men. Of course one is not blind to the personal perils of such human adjusting. It is the peril of losing your full, complete, whole selfhood. It is the peril, that in seeking to be all things to all men, you will cease to be your firmest and finest self. It is the peril of disintegration and dissipation, intellectual at least, and possibly moral. But avoidance of this peril may be had by the might and confirming power of a noble purpose. The apostle who writes of being all things to all men, affirms that his purpose is to save some of them. If one adjusts himself to hu- man factors, to gain advantage for himself alone, he will dissipate his personality. If he, however, give himself to all human conditions in order to improve and to better them, he will discover that in losing his life he has gained it; in losing himself, he has found himself larger and richer than the self lost.
A fourth principle which the fact and the hour emphasize is the willingness to await
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results. You can grind your wheat into flour and bake your flour into bread in a few hours. To grow your wheat requires many weeks. You have waited years for this baccalaureate week. You are still to be willing to wait many a year more for the crowning of your whole life. The two supreme questions now before the world are, in my judgment, first, the question of the union of races. Humanity is now dividing itself, more or less arbitrarily, into several races. Formerly these races lived apart. The swift, cheap and frequent trans- portation is bringing them together. Com- mercial relations promote relations social and inter-racial. The exporting and the importing of goods mean the coming and the going, and the staying of men. Such conditions promote family unions. Is it best for the progress of the race, that the people of the East and the people of the West shall intermarry.^ Recent history shows two examples of apparently good results. In the Hawaiian Islands the union of the native Hawaiian women and of the Chinese, and on the east central coast of Africa, the union of certain women of native tribes and of certain Arabians, seem to give evidence of the righteous effects of such inter-racial marriage. But go to India — the Eurasian — the child of
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an English father and a Hindoo mother, is despised by both native and foreigner. One may say that many factors — sociological, moral, personal — enter into the condition.
But, be it said in most general terms, that before this tremendous problem of the separa- tion or the union of races, the wise man is willing to wait. Biology alone can give proper conclusions, and biology does not hasten, though neither does it rest.
A second great problem of the world, that likewise demands patience, is the problem of the best and ultimate organization of society. Is that organization to be individualistic, or socialistic? Certain present evidences seem to indicate that it is to be socialistic. Men have sought long and hard for civil liberty, and the advancing nations have found civil liberty. Men are now seeking for equality. Equality of opportunity, it is declared, is what they want. Let this seeking, which is becoming almost a battle, go on, and may the signs of victory abound. But it would seem that the battle is not simply for equal opportunity, but also for equal power; equal power of brain; equal power of purse; equal power of person. This battle, furthermore, often seems to consist in making equality by cutting off, by pulling
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down, by lessening, as well as by adding, by multiplying, by lifting up, by broadening. Now, of this form of social order, there can be only one judgment. It is the judgment of condemnation; rejection by the intellect, despising by the heart, discarding by will, reprobation by the conscience.
But a socialism which produces equality by enriching the poor, not by making the rich poor, which produces equality by broadening the narrow, not by narrowing the broad; which produces equality by deepening the thin, not by making thin the deep; which pro- duces equality by lifting up the low, not by lowering the high — that is a type of equality, of socialism, of social organization, of which all good men can now approve and for which all good men can quietly wait.
Can quietly wait for its adjustment to the individualistic bases of society? Quietly wait — no, by no means. I would have you seek to understand the elements of the condition and to promote the adjustment of these ele- ments unto most efficient and long-to-be- waited-for conclusions.
But, if, while you wait, you must work, I will have you willing to wait while you do work.
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A fifth principle is to be noted of which the college is prophetic of life. It is this: achieve- ment in the realm of character, and achieve- ment in the realm of service is to be yours. The parable whence is taken the text, con- cludes with saying: " Brought forth fruit some one hundred fold, some sixty fold, some thirty fold." How many fold of harvest your life will mean, no one, not even yourself, dares intimate. But I do venture to promise you that there shall be a harvest. You are elect men and women. For many a year it has been my joy to study students and to study the same men and women when they have ceased to be students. The qualities which made them worthy in the college years and within academic walls, have made them more worthy in the after college years and beyond academic walls. On this basis I assure you that the cardinal intellectual virtues of thoughtfulness, observation, analysis, comprehensiveness, and the cardinal moral virtues of love, justice, courage, self-restraint, and the cardinal graces of courtesy, generosity, graciousness, appre- ciation, shall bear to you results rich and far richer than your most daring day-dreams ever intimated. The world is yours, if you will be your best self. The sower sowed on poor soil;
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he seemed to be intent on just sowing. I would not have you careless of conditions, or thoughtless of result, but there is a sense in which you should be unthinking of conse- quences. Be most eager for duty; to under- stand it and to do it. The results God will take care of. Be most eager for truth, to know it. God will take care of where it leads you. Be simply your broadest, deepest, high- est self.
Since last we assembled in this Baccalaureate service, no less than six members of the Board of Trust of this University have died. Haydn, Pope, Severance, McBride, Holden, Watterson, names ever to be held in dear and beau- tiful remembrance in the annals of this Uni- versity. They each, in diverse ways, and under unlike conditions, illustrate what I have been trying to say. They each lived his life. They each recognized the truth of that old remark of Bishop Butler, that things will be as they will be. They each recognized the principle of adjustment of means and methods of forces to ultimate ends. They each were patient in waiting for results. They each felt assured that achievement and service belong to the good and the true. Rich contributions they and their children make in money to this
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University, offerings to be measured by the mil- lions, but richer and finer than all the material treasure, is their embodiment of the great principles of life and of being.
Of like character and service was one whose name is ever to be mentioned in this University with grateful devotion and tender, strong affection, Mrs. Flora Stone Mather. As you entered yonder tower gateway, you may have seen, veiled, what you inferred was a piece of marble. As you pass out you shall see, carved by an illustrious Italian sculptor, a memorial statue. The gift of many loving friends, it incarnates our thought of her as a messenger of love and learning, of wisdom and of charity. Fitting is this place for this beautiful memorial, a place to the making of which Mrs. Mather's last work was devoted and which, with her sister, Mrs. John Hay, also of the immortals, she erected to the memory of their great father. From memorial window of the chancel and from memorial mar- ble of the nave, the youth, for many genera- tions, who daily enter this temple, shall learn lessons of high ideals, of generous endeavor, of gracious service and of holy zeal.
Yet it is in Jesus Christ himself, that one finds the supreme illustration of what I have
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tried to say. He lived his life. He went about teaching, preaching, doing good. His pure boyhood prepared him for such a life. He recognized that in the realm intellectual end spiritual, no less than in the realm material, causes inevitably lead to inevitable results. He sought through life and through death to adjust himself in the richest eflFectiveness to the world in which he was put. He was willing to await results. He recognized that his life of sacrifice, the supreme achievement, was to be of the utmost worth. He knew that ulti- mately he would draw all men unto himself. He was and is the great sower who went forth to sow.
To the Members of the Graduating Classes:
The hour of my last word to you has come. We look backward together; forward also, let us look together. Live your life, your common life. It is worthy. That life shall prepare you for the uncommon life yet more worthy. Expect no result in character or achievement, without labor. Adjust yourself to your con- ditions. Yet in the adjustment, find a larger, not a lesser, self. Be willing to wait. Live for eternity. Demand the highest of yourself, and be assured that the highest shall follow the
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demand. Such, my friends, becoming our sons and our daughters, are the lessons of our great parable.
May the practice of these lessons be your daily joy and inspiration, and may the reward of this practice be rich to you, in all the un- known years. God be with you now and forever. Amen.
I
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XII
THE GREATNESS AND SIMPLICITY OF RELIGION
Chapter XII
THE GREATNESS AND SIMPLICITY OF RELIGION
[1915]
" What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? '* — Micah vi : 8.
WE are met in one of the college chap- els for the last of several hundred times in a service of religion. Many are the themes appropriate to the place and the hour; but out of them all I select one which in its comprehensiveness and definiteness seems not unfitting. It is drawn in particular from the last of the three parts of our text, and it is the nost important: " To walk humbly with thy God." For if one does walk humbly with his God, I am sure he will do justly, for God is just. And if he does walk humbly with his God, he will love mercy. For merci- fulness is a property of humility. The topic, therefore, drawn from the lesson of walking humbly with one's God is the supreme one:
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The Greatness and Simplicity of Religion in the Life of the Individual and of the Nation.
And what is religion? The question be- comes at bottom what and who is God? For religion is primarily a relation to God.
In the first verse of the massive first chapter of Genesis I like to stop before the first verb and read " In the beginning God." God a Person'; a Person, for He has reason, conscience, and will. If His reason be infinitely wise, and if His conscience be perfect, and if His will be omnipotent, such infinities do not forbid His personality. God, the atmosphere in which we live and move, and have our being. God, the energy of which all forces are only forms and adaptations and applications — an energy which had no beginning and apparently, like- wise, has no end. God, the knowledge which is omniscience, to whom the microscopic is not unworthy and whose vision the telescopic cannot transcend. God, who was in the beginning and whose ending is inconceivable — eternal. God, who fills infinite space, as He fills and transmutes all time into eternity with His presence. God, who, being before the beginning, did in the beginning create; who came into time and who, being in space, made space with His creation visible. God, who as
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a Creator made what seemed to Him good — a power working for righteousness. God, the beneficent, who was, and is, and shall be, love.
Yet any worthy definition is impossible, for a definition of God seeks to interpret the incom- prehensible and to make plain the infinite. Any God who could be defined by, or to, the human reason would not be God. Any human reason which could define God would cease to be a reason human.
As God is necessary to the world, so is man's relation to Him, — religion, — essential. That relation cannot be abdicated, though it may be abridged. From it is no escape, no more than from the law of gravitation. The only question is, what shall that relation be.'*
That relation may take one of three forms: It may be antagonism. The suffering, the inconsistencies, the sins of the world, may create this mood of antagonism in man. It may also be a relation of thoughtlessness, of indifference of heart, and of the will. One may be so absorbed in the seen, the heard, that one has no heed for the unseen and the eternal. It also may be one of trustfulness. Love, obedience, faith, are the keynotes of this song. The trust is a faith in the character of, and an obedience to the will of, God.
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In seeking to interpret the importance of religion one finds light in that richest field of human endeavor, literature. Literature as the noblest expression of humanity has closest kinship with religion, and literature we may- use to interpret the nature of religion. Litera- ture and religion spring from the same funda- mental sources. Religion may be defined as the relation which man bears to Ultimate Being. Religion is concerned with the sub- stance which lies behind phenomena and also with the duty of man to this Being, universal and eternal. It considers, too, what, whence, whether. Literature in its final analysis repre- sents the same fundamental relationship: it seeks to explain, to justify, to reconcile, to interpret, and even to comfort and to console. The Homeric poems are pervaded with the re- ligious atmosphere of wonder, of obedience to the eternal, and of the recognition of the interest of the gods in human affairs. A more significant place does religion hold in Greek tragedy. A divine providence, the eternity, universality and immutability of law, the inevitableness of penalty, and the assurahce of reward represent great forces in the three chief Greek tragedians. Less im- pressively, yet with significance, the poems of
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Virgil are bathed in the air of religious mystery and submission. The great work of Lucretius is, of course, an expression of the human mind in its attempt to penetrate the mysteries of being. The mythology, too, of the nations of the north, as well as the literature of the mediaeval peoples, are concerned with the existence and the work of the gods. In Scandinavian mythology, literature and re- ligion are in no small degree united.
Not only do religion and literature spring from the same fundamental sources; they also are formed by the same forces. They both make a constant appeal to life. They pre- sume the strength of the human emotions — fear, curiosity, reverence — and they both accept the categorical imperative of the conscience and of the will of man. Both gain in dominance, prestige, and usefulness as they are the more intimately related to life. The great themes of religion and literature are similar and are vital: sin, its origin, penalties and deliverance therefrom; love, the passion and the will, its place and its limitations; righteousness, and the relation of men to each other. In illustration of the likenesses of the themes of religion and literature, one may refer to Dante's Divine Comedy, which is con-
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cerned with the passing into and through Hell, where live those who knew not Christ in the earthly life or, if they knew Him, refused to obey; through Purgatory, where dwell those whose sins are not mortal, and to and into the Paradise where dwell the righteous in an eternity of light and of love. The great poem of the Middle Ages is at once great literature and a certain type of religion. The whole field of modern fiction abounds in examples of the connection between literature and religion; Hawthorne significantly represents the more modern American unity of the two forces, and among all his works the " Scarlet Letter " and the " Marble Faun " are most notable in this respect. In English fiction George Eliot ex- emplifies this unity, and of her works " Adam Bede " is the most significant illustration.
The teaching of the greatest poets of the last fifty years of any language gives forth lessons even more religious, and almost more impres- sively Christian. The poems of Browning embody a religion most vital and real. That God is a divine father, almighty and loving, and that Jesus Christ, his son, is our Lord, are doctrines which embody both statement and the atmosphere of Robert Browning. The Pontiff says in "The Pope" in an address made to God :
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"Our known unknown, our God revealed to man. Existent somewhere, somehow, as a whole; Here, as a whole proportioned to our sense, — There (which is nowhere, speech must babble thus!), In the absolute immensity, the whole Appreciable solely by Thyself, — Here, by the little mind of man, reduced To littleness that suits his faculty, In the degree appreciable too."
In Other passages Browning speaks of " a need, a trust, a yearning after God." The air is called the " clear, pure breath of God that loveth us." It is also said:
" What is it that I hunger for but God? My God, my God, let me for once look on Thee As though nought else existed, we alone! "
The highest voice of humanity, heard in its great literature, is testimony of the supreme importance of religion.
Is literature great? Does it represent the past worthily? Does it interpret man fully? Does it move man deeply? If it does, then I say religion is great. For religion represents the past worthily. It interprets man fully. It moves man deeply.
While I thus speak in general of religion, I refer almost unconsciously to the Christian faith, for it seems to gather up and to embody
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the worthiest in all other systems of belief. The Christian religion is a religion of self- sacrifice, but under its self-sacrifice it accepts the truth of renunciation, the chief article in the creed of millions of people, yet it supple- ments its renunciation by greater affirmations and the richest enjoyments and fulfilments of life. The Christian religion is a religion of communion, but under its doctrine of commun- ion it accepts that article of the great creed of absorption in the eternal, interpreting this teaching as a fellowship which, becoming personal, lifts, and enlarges, and enriches. The Christian religion is a religion of mutual helpfulness and reciprocity. It accepts the teaching of Confucianism, of reciprocity, and transmutes the doctrine into a love for one's neighbor greater than one's love for oneself. The Christian religion is a religion of obedience to law, but it accepts the teaching of Islamism of submission, purifying the doctrine into obedience to righteous commandments, which are summed up in the supreme commandment of loving God with all one's mind and one's heart and one's strength. The Christian faith gathers up out of all the past the worthiest of all creeds and through them offers to man the ultimate and supreme faith.
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The Christian religion gives to man a standard, the ultimate standard. It gives a standard for the intellect, to know, to understand, to think; a standard for the conscience, whose imperatives are right and whose judgments, though a great deep, are as good as they are categorical; a standard for the will, of the power of choice — choice of the true, the good, the beautiful; a standard for the heart, offering an object worthy of supreme and deathless love. Religion gives a standard for the race as well as for the in- dividual— a rule which the race, moving through infinite space and time, can readily obey, a height of attainment for which the race can worthily strive. The Christian faith gives not only a standard. It also fills up a lack and supplies the needs of humanity. In a world of movement, it gives something fixed. In a world of losses it offers that which cannot be lost. In a world of pain, it holds forth comfort. In a world finite, it holds out the infinite. In a world of sin it teaches repentance and pardon. In a world simply human, it gives the divine.
This appeal of the greatness of religion finds re-enforcement in the times in which we live. My appeal is for you to think the broadest,
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feel the deepest, choose the highest, — cubical relations all. Relations should represent re- ligion. But the appeal of the times is likewise for broadest thinking, deepest feeling, and highest choosing. War does contradict these intellectual conceptions: first, that God is the father of all men; second, that all men are brothers; third, that nature's forces are for beneficent uses. Yet in another sense, — an emotional one largely, — war does lift a nation. A world's civil war lifts the world above the mean, out of the frivolous, away from the petty, into the heroic, the human, the divine, the infinite. No one of you, though more than three thousand miles away from Belgium and Poland, can live these months and years and be the same men and women that you would have been in time of quiet peace. To be the same would be faithlessness to the future and treason to humanity. It was said of some of our college boys who fought in the civil war that enlistment seemed to have changed them — boys into men. So this world's civil strife, even if you bear no rifle and draw no sword, has in sympathy made you a world-citizen, in loyalty a disciple of the highest, in service an apostle of the God of all nations, and of all men.
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Religion is at first personal. But if it be only personal, it is only partial. Religion is to be organized. It is to become social. It is to cause men to unite. Organized religion is called by various names: the church, the meeting, the congregation, the parish, the society. To me at this moment the names have no value. My chief insistence is that in the religious society approaching most closely to your intellectual and moral and religious sympathies you should become a part and a partner. That society may be historic, built out of memories and teachings and traditions reaching back thousands of years. It may embody annals of prophets and martyrs, and tales of disciples and apostles may form its birthright. Or, that society may be new, novel, simple, plain, prosaic, without chants, or psalms, or song. Or that society may be hardly an association at all, but a process or form of activity to help those men up who are down, and to help men who are out in the darkness and dirt and squalor and sin into light and laughter, into cleanliness and righteousness. But whatever that society may be, or whatever name it may bear, to which you feel yourself in closest affihation — into that put yourself completely, thoroughly.
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Work in it, and with it and for it and through it. In such a co-partnership you will multiply your individuality and increase your power a thousand times. In your belief be an in- dividualist. In your service be a unionist, a commoner.
To the Members of the Graduating Classes:
Tonight at least two great and high ideals move your souls. You would be good and do the right — you would make your life, like the city of God, four-square. You would be builders, not destroyers. You would be the worthiest. Moreover, also, you would be kind, gentle, and courageous, possessing hearts that are warm as well as thoughts that are high, and a good will for all, as well as a con- science that is keen. Truth with righteous- ness and righteousness with beneficence you would make the atmosphere and ideals of your character and service. Above and be- neath all minor and lesser ideals these two, truth and love, prevail. To reach these ideals I offer to you the force, beauty and inspiration of the Christian faith. That faith is the tide which sweeps the ship of moral struggle out into the deep seas of vision and of service. It is the river which gives life and flower and fruitage
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unto all the plants of your moral seed-sowing. It is the love which bears good into your souls. The future years will silently go by. As they go by, many details of college life will become obscured. But as the college years recede, the outlines, like the slope of far-off mountains, will become more clear. Friendships, atmospheres, tendencies will emerge. One great result — may it become the greatest — which I would have you cherish is the idea and the feeling of the infinite importance of your relation to your God, the relation of obedience, of communion, of gratitude, of love, and of peace.
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XIII
THE LOOKING BACKWARD OF
CHARACTER AND OF
ACHIEVEMENT
Chapter XIII
THE LOOKING BACKWARD OF CHARACTER AND OF ACHIEVEMENT
[1916]
" That they, without us, should not be made perfect." — Hebrews xi : 40.
THESE words conclude a great passage of memorial literature. The passage eulo- gizes heroes : — heroes who have sub- dued kingdoms, who have fought with wild beasts, who have endured violence and flinched not, who have battled with men and won, who have suffered persecution of fire, of sword, of saw, and recanted not, who have wandered homeless or whose homes have been in dens and caves, who have hungered, thirsted, been destitute and afflicted, and have proved them- selves conquerors. The passage tells of the pioneer, Abraham, of the statesman, Joseph, of the legislator, Moses, of the king who was a poet and of the poet who was a king, David. Rich was their achievement, strong their character, patient their endurance, lofty their hope, mighty the results they won. Yet, de-
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clares the writer, however rich their achieve- ment, however strong their character, however patient their endurance, however lofty their hopes, however mighty the results they won, their character was not perfect, their labor and suffering not complete, without us, living thousands of years after they were dead and in conditions unlike their own.
Therefore the subject of the address is ^^The Looking Backward of Character and of Achievement,^^
In its influence character is commonly sup- posed to relate to the future only. Achieve- ment of its aims and results is assumed to be of the next year or decade. But this writer declares that character looks backward and that achievement concerns the past. Both are conservative, retroactive, supplementary. The ship which carries lights forward also carries lights at its stern and they shine out upon the course which has been run.
The truth of our principle receives special evidence in the development of modern civiliza- tion. Modern civilization is the resultant of at least four great forces, the force of religion, the force of beauty, the force of government, and the force of liberty. The force of religion is derived primarily from the Hebrew race.
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The force of beauty is derived from the Greek race. The force of government is de- rived from the Roman race, and the force of liberty is derived primarily from the Anglo- Saxon race. This quartette of forces has given us Western Europe and the American common- wealth, born of Western Europe. How slow has been the development, how hesitant the rise, how swift often the decline! What dis- integrating conditions overcome, what patience demanded, what inspirations needed, for trans- muting aspirations into achievements! What narrowness turned to breadth, what alternation of desolateness and happiness, what Magna Chartas, besides King John's, demanded and granted, what commonwealths, besides Crom- well's, social, ecclesiastic, scholastic, as well as political, established and superseded! What funeral pyres of the brave and the true, lighting the advancing path of man, what ashes of the same pyres, cast on the river of time, drifting out into the sea of forgetfulness, unmourned and unsung! But out of these progresses and regresses has come what we call civilization. Out of these progresses and regresses has come our America.
And what, be it asked, in another form, what has our America, our America of today, cost.^
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It has cost the learning and sacrifice, the vision and the faith, the patience and endeavor of ten generations. What has our church cost? It has cost tolerance in the midst of intolerance, faith in the midst of doubt and doubtfulness, trust in God in the midst of heresy, holding to truth in the teeth of scorn, loyalty in the face of shame and hatred. And what has our government cost? The answer is ready on your lips before I speak. It has cost wisdom and foresight, thought and will, patriotism and daring, life and all that life stands for, the fam- ily and all that the family means. In our liberty and union, what have they, parts of government, cost? Have they not cost a Washington, a Lincoln, a Hamilton, a Seward, a Hay, oceans of blood and mountains of treasure?
But these are things which cannot be calcu- lated, and do you know how easily these costs could be destroyed? Do you know that what America has cost in education could today be destroyed by making education material- istic and sordid? Do you know that what America has cost in religion could today be destroyed by making the institutions of religion superfluous and unhuman, artificial and formal? Do you know that what America has cost in
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government could today be destroyed by making government selfish and of the classes? Do you know that what America has cost in liberty and in union could today be destroyed by the domination of labor unions or the in- stallation of class leagues and societies? But, aflftrmatively, be it said, that the civilization which the Mayflower brought in government and in church — a church which the compact drawn up in the Mayflower cabin stands for — is saved only by the sons and daughters of the Pilgrims believing in the God whom their fore- fathers worshiped, believing in the democracy for which their forefathers risked their all, believing in the simple virtues, of justice, hardihood, bravery, which clothed them as a garment. American civilization, born of Eng- lish, of French, of German, of Dutch, and of other races, and existing and flourishing for three hundred years, is a flower faded, a sun burned out, an experiment failed, unless we, its present exponents, defenders, promoters, prop- erly incarnate its strength and express its graces. They, the Carvers, the Bradfords, the Standishes, the Washingtons and the Lincolns, are not perfect save as we are^ and as we do^ the best. That they, without us, should not be made perfect,
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Let me also ask, in a personal way, what has your life, up to its present hour, cost you? I might ask what has your life cost your home, or the community. But I do permit myself to ask a more searching question, what has your life cost yourself? It has cost you affec- tion in its first age, imagination in its second, and reason in its third age, an age which you are now^ beginning. By and by it will cost you the force and the store of memory. In affec- tion, your life has cost you the giving of love, the making of sacrifice, the daring of adventure. In imagination and in reason your life has cost you thought and anxiety, patience and waiting, the restlessness of ambition, the curbing of appetite, the suppression of temptation to meanness and to jealousy, the curbing of im- pulse and of waywardness, the loss of indul- gence and of pleasure. It has cost you the living up to high ideals and the holding of your mind and will to far-off things. Your life has cost you the new three R's of education, re- flection, reconsecration, reconstruction. The cost has been a piling up, an Ossa on Pelion, for a score of years. Every will you now will, or are to will, is to make every worthy will of your past more aspiring. Every affection you now feel, broad, and tender, is to render
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every affection of the past, year by year, broader, more tender and more controlling. Every ideal which you lift before yourself is to give a cap-stone more lofty to every past fundamental purpose. Every thought you entertain is to enlarge, to enrich, to heighten, every thought that has been yours in all the years you have lived. Every deed you do, every achievement you make, every victory you win is to give wings and power and glory to all the worthy thoughts and achievements and victories which have been yours. So also, with evident and painful truthfulness may it be added, all the unworthiness, the evils, the nar- rowness, the disobedience, the wrongs and the sins of the past take to themselves an un- worthiness more black, a narrowness more shriveling, a wrongfulness more wrong and a sinfulness more sinful, by your present un- worthiness, narrowness, wrong and sin. Like- wise, on the other side, the goodness of the past is made purer, the rightfulness of the past more right, the worthiness of the past more worthy, by your present goodness, rightfulness, worthiness.
But, more and more, in a way which is at once regressive and progressive, my thought goes out. I think of those who are to follow
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you. I think of those who are to come into places that you now fill. I have in mind those who will finally come to look upon you as you look back upon preceding generations. What are you doing, what are you to do, what are you being, what are you to be, or to become, to make it worth while for them, the followers, to labor and to strive to make your work and your character perfect? By you I do not mean only you who occupy these pews. I mean humanity. I mean our brothers and sisters of the race and of the races. What is man today doing or being to make his child and grandchild, in the sixth generation, feel that they are to complete his service and to enrich his achievement? We know too well what man is doing in some fields 1 But what can man do? What should he do and be?
There are two things which man can and should do today to make his character and his achievement worthy of the completing and perfecting by those who are to follow in the far-off future.
The first is that man should have and should be controlled by the desire and the instinct for leadership. The nations need leadership. Be- yond a few personalities, and they are very few, the world today has no figure of inter-
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national preeminence. The voices are many. The echoes are more. The commanding per- sonality, where and who is he? For what does constitute leadership? What are the qualities which make a great leader?
First, an intellectual appreciation of the cause in which one is to lead. This apprecia- tion is a sense of proportion. It is discrimi- nation. It embodies an understanding of relationships. It detects where stress is to be laid heavily and where emphasis is to be made light. It means often the giving up of the outlying forts of an argument or of a move- ment in order to defend the central fortress. It stands for understanding a cause and esti- mating the forces supporting and opposing.
A second element is sympathy. Sympathy is the fellow-feeling with one's followers and a fellow-feeling of the followers with oneself, the leader. Such fellowship spells unity. Such was the leadership of Lincoln with the Illinois Whigs and Republicans in the decade before the Civil War. Lincoln thought their thoughts, felt their feelings, and they his. Although his power had gone far beyond the power of his old neighbors and friends, yet their sym- pathies for each other continued warm and deep. Sympathy means also remoteness, as
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well as community, of fellowship. For a leader is to lead. He is to be the head of the column. Yet he is not to be so far ahead that the hosts cannot see his form or hear his voice. Leadership means sympathy born at once of oneness and of elevation.
With the quality of sympathy is to be joined courage. Risks are found in every movement. These rjsks the leader accepts and glories over. Dangers abound, but these dangers the leader is to meet and to overcome. Courage is not foolhardiness. It does not mean blindness to peril. Neither is courage seeing the peril and standing dazed, without fear, before its threat. Courage is knowing, feeling, appreciating the danger, and setting one's face against it and making bare one's breast to its arrows. Any hour may give any man or woman the oppor- tunity for the use of courage which spells leadership.
Wit and humor, too, should not be omitted from the list. Wit sees, humor feels, the in- congruities of a condition. These incongruities the quick tongue makes clear. Mr. Lincoln had both of these qualities and the great Secretary Hay was not wanting in them. With the possession of such gifts the following is made easier and more effective, and the guid-
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ance more inspiring to the guide and to the obeying ranks.
A further quality is that of imaginative picturesqueness. The leader is if possible to be a picturesque figure. He is to make an appeal to the imagination. The merely logical seldom quickens the heart. The merely logical seldom moves the will. The song element is to be heard, the rhythmic element to be felt. Was it not the " rail-splitter " for whom many of the common people of the prairie voted in 1860? Was it not the "little giant" who was, two years before, the antagonist on the stump with the same man of the axe? Was it not the " plumed knight " for whom many voted as their president, thirty years ago?
But still one may have all these qualities and not be a great leader. The gift of leader- ship seems to be a gift. It can be analyzed but the thing itself may pass on beyond the quality of analysis. Arthur Balfour has in- tellectual discernment, sympathy, wit, imagi- nation, but he has lacked the real gift of the leadership of his party.
A second thing, which humanity needs today to make its character and service worthy of the completing and perfecting of the future, is found in human confidence, in the confidence
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which man has in man. It is the confidence of the individual in the individual. It is the confidence of the nation in the nations, the con- fidence of the race and of the other races in each other, the confidence of the rich in the poor, and of the poor in the rich, the confidence of the capitalist in the laborer and the laborer in the capitalist, the confidence of the noble and the great in the obscure, and of the obscure in the noble and the great. This confidence is the most precious thing. The lack of it is the great lack. The lack of it is the cause of humanity's downfall. It is to begin in the worthiness of confidence in the integrity of individual character, in the reality and in the incarnation of the verities and the virtues. It is to begin with the man, the single man, the one person. He is to be the best and the other man just as good. For such a consummation of confidence, no struggle is too hard, no labor too great, no agony too intense. It must be had, this confidence of man in man, if the world is to stand, if civilization is to go on. The present agony of the world is the result of the lack of confidence of man in man.
The centuries are bound together, bound not by hoops of steel, but bound together as every part of our body is bound to every other
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part, or as the waters of the Gulf Stream are united with great continental currents and movements, by vital or co-operative relation- ship. The humanity of the past is a part of the humanity of the present, — and the present is a part of that which has been and also of that which is to be. No humanity of the future can become perfect unless that of the present transmits to it something worthy of its adventure, " that they without us should not be made perfect,'*^
These remarks take to themselves special application and significance in the beginning of the last decade of the first century of our oldest college. What men those founders were! What men and women have they been in every age! What splendor of vision, what coolness of daring, what strength of hope, what valor in privation, what endurance in seeing the invisible, what a re-birth of the heroes of the eleventh of Hebrews ! They would be the last to describe themselves as I have interpreted them. But from the halls of the past, over which death has drawn a veil, I like to call out their names; of servants of the State, Hoadly and Woods and Taylor and Up- son and Williamson; of servants of the church, like Chamberlain, and the Scudders of India,
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Munger, and Joslah Strong; of scholars like Newberry and Seymour and Young and Loomis and Bartlett, and of scores of others who have subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, who, out of weakness, were made strong, who waxed valiant in fight. Time would fail me to tell of Allen, of Bushnell, of Mathews, of Emerson, of Hart, of Conger, of Bissell, of Burton, of Barrows, of Sanders, of Curtis, and of hundreds of others who have wrought righteousness in the struggle for humanity.
We are their children. Happier are our times, richer our circumstance, ampler our scholarship, finer our endowment. Is their work to fail? Are their bequests to be lost, their ideals to fall, their struggles to be van- quished, their past to die.'* Nay, is the answer. For our clear thinking shall confirm their thought; our right willing shall complete their holy desire; our precious aspirations and achievements shall transmute their endeavors into lasting values; our doings shall gather up the results of their sacrifice; and our love and our faithfulness, we swear it, shall take all they were and tried to be and all they did and tried to do and shall transmute their offering into our achievements, into our characters,
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which shall be as lasting as time, as rich as humanity, and as broad as life.
To the Members of the Graduating Classes:
Physicists write of the ultimate end toward which the universe is moving through un- measured space in limitless time. Where that goal, in the ways of space, may be, or in what period of time or through what processes that goal may be reached, they do not venture to prophesy. But, at some point in both space and time, that goal shall be reached, they do recognize. I think of humanity as moving always through unmeasured space in limitless time. I think of humanity at last coming to its goal, the goal of perfection. In what ways of space or what period of time that goal may lie or be reached, I know not. But, guided by education, inspired by religion, I think of humanity at last as coming to that goal. And what is that goal to be? What is to be the goal of religion? The knowledge of God's truth in this world and in the world to come, life everlasting. What is to be the goal of life? It is life most abundant. What is to be the goal of education? It is truth, the truth in terms of intellect, of heart, of will and of conscience. Is that goal not the goal of life
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itself, of life everlasting, eternal, not simply in duration, but in the depths and heights and breadths of being? Such is the goal toward which I think of humanity as going. It is the goal toward which I think of you, who are the crown of the past, who are the beginning of the future of humanity, as also moving. To- night, as you stand, I summon you each to pledge ^yourself that, so far as lieth in you, you will seek to advance humanity toward this goal through perfecting the work of those who have preceded, through making worthy the work of those who are to follow you, in the glorious achieving of your work and in the perfecting of your own character.
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XIV
THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE
INDIVIDUAL FOR THE
COMMUNITY
Chapter XIV
THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL FOR THE COMMUNITY
[1917]
" Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." — Matthew xix : 19.
THE New Testament has two chief words for love, agapao and phileo. The one used in my text is agapao. It repre- sents both the intellect and the heart, but the intellect more fully. Phileo represents both the intellect and the heart, but the heart primarily. In the intellectual act love inter- preted as agapao has an element of the will. " I will well to my neighbor " would not be a bad translation. This good will to my neigh- bor represents a certain appreciation of my neighbor. The emotional element is largely eliminated. The intellectual, the volitional relation of each man to his neighbor becomes chief and significant.
Therefore my theme is The Responsibility of the Individual for the Whole Community,
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What is a sense of responsibility for the community? What is a sense of responsi- bility of which we speak much and define little? Is it not akin to the sense of duty to others? Does not altruism embrace it, and more too? Does it not mean making the community's interests one's own affair, the community's sorrows one's own griefs, the com- munity's, failures one's own defeats, the community's needs one's own wants, the com- munity's burdens weights for oneself to bear, the community's losses one's own losses, the community's shame one's own degradation, the community's fears one's own dreads, the community's hopes one's own assurances, and the community's glories, one's own triumphs? Does the phrase not represent vicariousness? Does it not mean substitution? Does it not spell incorporation with another?
Such a sense for the community belongs to great souls. The community — what is the community? Is it your street? Yes, it is your street. Is it your city? Yes, it is your city. Is it your state? Yes, it is your state. Is it your nation? Yes, it is your nation. Is it your world? Yes, it is your world.
Why is the world your community? Because the community is that with which you have
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certain things in common. With the world of the opposite zone even you have many things in common. The world is tied up to- gether, many articles, in the same, and a small, parcel. The world is like a globe of water. Pressure at one point affects the whole. War's declaration in Europe means unrest in India, the amount of gold mined in this country, the doubling of the price of nitre in Chile, the tripling of the cost of potatoes in Northern Maine. The whole world seems like the human body. A pain in one part is felt in the whole. The world is organic. It is one, — one out of many, yet one, — one in many, one going out to many, yet one. The world seems almost like a person, so complete is it, so necessary part to part.
It is to train men and women to understand this sense of responsibility of the individual for all and to undertake the service which this sense embodies, that the college and university exist. Many elements can be named which represent the purpose of an academic founda- tion. You have often heard them from me. I shall not now repeat. But beyond and above the selfward purpose of culture, including the mission of the extension of the field of knowl- edge, including also the sharpening of the
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knife of the mind and increasing its cutting power, embracing the giving to character weight and dignity, beyond and above intel- lectual freedom and creative activity and capacity, is the higher, deeper, broader purpose of the development and the use of this sense of responsibility for all people.
There are several fields to which this con- structive sense of responsibility, which the college represents, may be applied. Of course one feels that one field is education itself. Education has come to be regarded as the most important of all agencies for the welfare of the nation. Every grade, and kind, and order, of education at times seems to me the most important. The lower grades are the most important, for most folks never get be- yond them. The common studies are the most important, for all persons use them. But really the most important order of education is the college. For from the college comes the teacher, and the teacher makes the class. From the college comes the leader, and the leader makes the school. Who are the men who have had the greatest influence over American education.^ What are the strongest forces, who the inspiring personalities of American education, of the last threescore
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years and ten? Are they not Horace Mann, William T. Harris and Charles W. Eliot? Horace Mann reformed the public school system of Massachusetts. William T. Harris inspired the teachers throughout this country unto the highest ideals. Eliot gave to educa- tion freedom in method, as well as fullness in content. It was Brown and Yale and Harvard that helped to give these leaders and teachers to American education and to American life. The vagaries found in education — and they are many — the short cuts proposed in educa- tion— and they are not a few — the reforms which are urged in education, patent educa- tional medicines, educational nostrums, have not come from the colleges. In these silly aifairs of the schools the higher education has had little or no place. The college feels the responsibility for raising men and women unto the nth power of their ability by those great processes of orderly disciplines, of truth- seeking endeavors, of personal influence, which do, and must, remain permanent and normal in the midst of the transient and abnormal changes of the day and of the hour. The college does feel its responsibility for the whole system of the education of the people. The college, further, recognizes its responsi-
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bility in the service which it gives in the crea- tion of the home. The maker of the home is a woman, and every woman makes a home. She may be a wife, or not, a mother, or not, a sister, or not. But she is a daughter, and probably other. At least in one relation she makes a home. The home is now beset by many foes, some open and some insidious. The dissipations of life, quite as much intel- lectual as moral, dry up its stream of affection. The absorptions of life consume its proper interests. Narrowness of vision and of work robs it of its treasures of imagination. Weari- ness of life's common tasks exhausts its springs of strength. The trivialities, which surround its daily progress, becloud the glories of its conquests of the lasting and the great. Now a college like ours is to educate women to be the heads and the hearts of homes. For the col- lege creates interests. It develops resources. It gives breadth without thinness, depth with- out narrowness, height without remoteness. It grows the wings of imagination. It trans- mutes the commonplace into dignities and grandeurs and glories. It helps to make every cradle a Bethlehem manger, and every humble path of duty a way to heaven and to God. The college aids in making such homes, and when
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such homes are made, the earth becomes a heaven.
The college also feels its responsibility for the proper conduct of business, industrial, mer- cantile. What is business? It is the making and interchange of commodities. What is the most important element in business.'* The human. Who is the best business man.f* The man of vision, foresight, prudence, of integrity, of soundness of judgment, of courage, of initiative, of outlook, of co-operation, of wide and definite knowledge, of inspiration, of patience, of good manners. What are these but the qualities which the college is training every day and every year.^ The college calls you to look ahead, to be sound in conscience, to * be exact in thinking and in statement. Student life develops energy, evokes initiative. It calls out co-operation. It requires patience in labor, respect for others, and the essence of good manners in all its doings. College does not train you to be merchants or manufac- turers. But it seeks to train you into character of a type out of which are made the ablest manufacturers and the best buyers and sellers of all commodities. The college feels and seeks to use its sense of responsibility for you.
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The college also tries to develop a sense of responsibility for the making of that great power called the newspaper. The newspaper is a picture of the world, an interpretation of humanity and of nature. In this world are numberless forces of action, constant or in- frequent, of power, strong or slight, of im- portance, great or small. The newspaper is to present the action, the interaction, the play and the inter-play and the by-play. It daily paints a picture and tells a story, prints a report or publishes an interview. As the pic- ture is painted truthfully, as the story is told with interest and fair proportion, as a report reflects what humanity should know, as the interpretation offers what humanity should understand, the journal is great or not great. Behind it all stands a man, or a body of men. If they are truthful, honest, just, lovers of their kind, leaders of great causes, the resulting journal will embody these same great elements. To make men truthful and honest and earnest, to inspire them to be lovers of their kind, to make men leaders in great causes, the college is founded. Select the most important, the most representative journals of the life in America today, and it will be found that the leaders and makers of them are graduates of the
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American college. When Mr. Godkin was retiring from the editorship of The Nation after a service of thirty-three years, James Bryce wrote to him, saying:
" Still do I regret it terribly, for there is no one in the U. S. A. that one has heard of who can do the tithe of what you have done for principles of good government and purity and for sound reason as against demagogism."
When Wendell Phillips Garrison was retiring after forty years of service on the same journal, Henry W. Longfellow, Lowell, Goldwin Smith, Professor Gilman, Phillips Brooks, and others, wrote to him, saying:
" To have directed for forty years, with such zeal and taste and lofty ideals, a journal re- flecting the finest scholarship and the soundest public morals of America, is an achievement without parallel in our literary annals."
Such leaders were trained in the college. The list of names of your own elder brothers who hold high places in journalism would be a noble one.
To one further field do I refer, which illus- trates the function of training men unto a sense of corporate responsibility. It is religion. Religion represents responsibility for most serious communal interests. Religion stands
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for the incarnation of the Divine Being. It represents God on the earth. It gives inti- mations of the infinite, the eternal, the univer- sal. It spells the over-soul. It stands for that spirit in man which difi"erentiates him both from things and from brutes. Religion takes on the divine forms of truth, of duty, of wid- est, highest relations. It calls to its service prophets who proclaim its truths, priests who minister at its altars, scholars who read and interpret its holy books. The progress of pure religion means the progress of the community. The regress of pure religion means the declining of the community. The college gives itself to the education of men who shall be prophets true, priests devout and devoted, scholars wise. It realizes that, if the oracles be dumb, if the priesthood be corrupt, if the altar-fires are impure, or the scripture false, the whole community suffers in the degradation of mind, of conscience, of conduct, and of life. It recognizes that if it can have a share in the education of the saints and prophets, it is giving a sky to the life of the community, a sense of infinity in the midst of its minute finites, and a God to a world living the lust of the flesh and of the eyes.
To these, and to all other forms of the com-
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munal life and interest, such as government, the professions, the fine arts of literature, of painting, of architecture, of music, the college gives itself as it feels its responsibility. It feels its responsibility in the training of men and of women.
In this training of individuals for every department and field the college offers certain uniting and integrating forces. The college seeks to give to men and women of all callings and forms of endeavor at least three condi- tions. First, it seeks to accumulate resources in each. Civilization is measured by its treasure of results achieved and saved. Sav- agery does not accumulate. It spends daily or yearly what it makes daily or yearly. The college tries to train students unto the force of accumulating the results of the past. It gathers up the former generations for the pres- ent and transmutes those results unto the future. It makes this collegian a citizen of all the past and of all nations, a resident of every zone, at home with all men of all time. It gives, in a word, resources.
To the college woman, in particular, the duty of the college in giving resources becomes in these times specially urgent. For it grows in- creasingly clear that the public service of wo-
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men is to be more and more needed in this old world of ours. The granting of suffrage represents a field of this service. But it is a token also of the opening of other fields. For entrance into such fields women know they are to be abundantly fitted. Failure cannot for an instant be thought of. Success in the en- deavor is to be won, and it is to be recognized that success can be won only through the pos- session of proper resources.
Second, the college seeks to create a sense of the unities of life and of all being. It endeavors to show the penetrations and the in- terpenetrations which belong to forces, states, conditions, causes, and results. It labors to make it plain that nothing is alone, that all is in all and that each is in each, that all is in each and each in all. It aboHshes the doc- trine of aloneness and aloofness. It stands for the social and the communal.
Third, the college also desires to show that life is a process — more a becoming than a become. The college tries to conjugate life rather in the imperfect than the perfect tense, rather in the future than in the past. It tries to prove that aspiration is more important than achievement, and that achievment which is not the parent of further achievement is failure.
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INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY
It tries to prove that any victory which does not lead to further advance of the forces of truth and of righteousness is really a defeat. Its heavens show the morning star, and its suns are ever rising toward a zenith which is never reached.
By what method does the college give to its students, who become its sons and daughters, this tremendous sense of co-operative respon- sibility?
In answer be it remembered that the college accepts these students as boys and girls, at a beautiful and critical time in their normal development. The age of memory is beginning to lose its keen avariciousness. The age of intellectual imagination dawns; it feels the growth of wings. The age of reasoning is taking its first and longer steps. It is an age of in-looking, of expressing, of out-looking, of observing. It is an age of interpretation. It is a time when, in the verse of Wordsworth, one is " moving about in worlds not realized." It is a creative age. The new worlds are being formed, and of each of them, both night and day, one can say, as in the first of Genesis, " It is good." It is of tremendous worth that the college receives the girl or boy as a youth. The college gateway is the gateway of youth.
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When the college has received this student there are at least three ways which the college may employ in developing this sense of com- munal responsibility. One way is the way of truth. The college seeks to aid this mind to know, to know things, processes, causes, re- sults in time and space. The college seeks to help one to interpret all phenomena and above all to see phenomena in their relations. Seeing things in their relations is truthful truth. See- ing things out of their relations is untruthful truth. Among such fundamental truths is the fact that all men and all movements are vitally associated. No man liveth to himself: no man dieth to himself. When the student comes to realize that his individual unity is simplest, and that the unity of the community is of unspeakably more importance, he has taken the first step in the understanding of his responsibility. Such realization does be- come his. The coming of the sense of such a responsibility is an intellectual new birth. It represents wisdom. The knowing the truth is knowledge. The knowing truth truthfully is wisdom. Knowledge is the steel and timber assembled for the building of the ship. Wis- dom is the putting of part to part and the mak- ing of this greyhound of the ocean. Knowledge
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INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY
is stone in the quarry. Wisdom is the laying of block upon block into the house of character, of beauty, of rest and service. Knowledge is the wheat in the granary, rich and golden. Wisdom is the grinding of the wheat into flour for the feeding of the multitude. Knowledge is the theory of civil and political service. Wisdom is taking that theory and using it for government, honest, helpful, democratic, and effective.
But seeing truth truthfully is only the first step. The student is to come to recognize the oughtness of this communal responsibility and relationship. He is to appreciate the duty which moves him in relation to his fellows. The work which the college may do in this condition is a difficult one. For it is said that the college is an intellectual agency. How can the college cause a student to translate a revelation into a dedication? The answer is still a difficult one and also direct. It is by thinking, thinking, thinking, on the needs of the world which surrounds him and of which he is an integral part. No one can reflect on the wants and the woes of today, soberly and continuously, without a tremendous will that he ought and that he will do all he can to fill those wants, to remove those woes, to ennoble
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all conditions. In a stone of one of the older buildings at the English Harrow are cut these words, ** Near this spot as a young boy stood Anthony Ashley Cooper, in the year 1814, and saw for the first time a pauper funeral." He was so moved thereby that he determined to give his life unto the helping of the suffering poor of England. In the year 1885, the same boy become a man, and known as the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, died at the age of eighty- four, died after a life spent in carrying out the boyhood pledge, and died saying, " Must I die and leave all this suffering in the world? " Every school and every college train unto this sense of responsibility by seeing and re- flecting.
This same condition of thinking also gives a further aid. It both quickens the feelings and moves the will. " While I was musing, the fire burned, then spake I." It is for such thinking and its influence on both the heart and the will that I plead. Get knowledge, get truth, get fact, get information, get all. But with all your getting, get understanding. With all your getting, get reflection, get meditation, get consideration, get interpre- tation, get understanding of the things great and greatest, of all things encyclopaedic, get
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INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY
it as a habit, get it as a mood. Good is it in itself and good also is it as means of moving the heart, of quickening the conscience, of in- fluencing the will, of forming the character, wholesome, holiest, best. Thus the college may be true to its intellectual mission and also be true to its duty, too, in educating men and women who are bound by a mighty sense of responsibility to and for the whole com- munity.
Such a life of responsibility is worth living, either as a memory, as a hope, or as a present duty. No other life is so well worth living. It is a life which the new master of Eton has put into verse as an elegy of one of the thou- sands of schoolmen who have fallen in the great war. This master writes of his boy in almost dialect lines:
"To have laughed and talked, — wise, witty, fantastic,
feckless, —
To have mocked at rules and rulers and learnt to obey,
To have led your men with a daring adored and reckless,
To have struck your blow for Freedom, the old straight
way:
"To have hated the world and lived among those who love it. To have thought great thoughts, and lived till you knew them true,
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To have loved men more than yourself and have died to prove it, — Yes, Charles, this is to have lived: was there more to do?"
To the Members of the Graduating Class:
You who here stand together realize this sense of responsibility of the individual for the community more keenly, more deeply, than have the members of any other class who have stood together, for many a Commencement. Memorial halls, memorial alcoves in librarieSj memorial volumes, are testimony of that sense felt in the Civil War. Women's colleges in Oxford and Cambridge converted into hos- pitals, with women students as nurses, the nurse's gown supplanting the academic robe, the lonely grounds of Magdalen and Oriel, and the lonely and lovely gardens of New College, the waters of the Cam unflecked by oar, are evidences of the sense of responsi- bility for a free world felt by the men and women students of the older England. A like, though not the same, condition is yours. You do know and you do feel the responsibility which falls on you. In what special field you may exercise this responsibility, neither you nor I at this moment know. Neither do we seri-
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INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY
ously care. But we do know and care that wherever you shall be, whatever path you may walk, under whatever sun you may daily labor, under whatever star you may pitch your nightly tent, you will recognize yourself as a trustee for the whole community. Trea- sure your powers as a resource for the race and the races, holding the cup of the water of your life as strength and refreshment for all. Your mind is a mind for all: your will is a good will for all, your heart is a heart for all. To such a quest I need not call you. To such a quest your whole life calls you and will ever call. Of your obedience to such summons I am con- fident. I pray, now and ever, for full strength for you each in your obedience.
[257
XV
EFFECTS OF THE WAR ON COLLEGE WOMEN
Chapter XV
EFFECTS OF THE WAR ON COLLEGE WOMEN
[1918]
" Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene." — John xix : 25.
" Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and that he had spoken these things unto her." — John xx : 18.
IN these days every soul is seeing visions. In these nights every soul is dreaming dreams. No soul is more keen in seeing visions or more alert in dreaming dreams than the soul of the college woman. Her spirit goes out into all this war-torn earth, and all the war-torn earth beats back upon, and into, her responsive spirit.
What, therefore, are the effects of this war upon her? That is the question which I shall try to answer.
First. One effect is the giving of an in- creased sense of the unity of all human life. Books are written and arguments are offered upon the differences that divide men. The
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THE COLLEGE GATEWAY
white race, the black, the yellow, the brown, are distinctions which are made emphatic. There is said to be a brain Caucasian, a brain Mon- golian, and a brain African. The civilization of the orient and the civilization of the Occident are interpreted as distinct and different con- ditions and forces. For
^ " East is east, and west is west, And ne'er the twain shall meet."
Yet in these years, we are learning that, if there are races, there is also, and more, one race, — the human, and that if there are several social classes, there is also, and more, one social class, — the human. We are discovering that, if "east is east, and west is west," if one go far enough east, he will find himself in the west, and also that the farther west one travels, the nearer he approaches the east. Men are, in fact, united — united by the pursuit of one ideal, the ideal of democracy. Men are united by one ideal — humanity itself as it struggles against the fell purposes of narrow autocracy. The horrors indeed have joined all peoples together, except those peoples who com- mit the horrors or who warm themselves by the fire of selfish ambition while the horrors are being committed. Dangers unite. Sinking
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THE WAR AND COLLEGE WOMEN
steamers make all passengers one. Lifeboats do not stand for civic discriminations. The recognition of a common origin unites: "God hath made of one blood all nations of men." A common atmosphere unites: we are not " strangers and foreigners, but fellow-citizens." A common battle and one campaign unite: we all march to the strains of the Battle Hymn of the Republic of man. A common agony and loss unite. The door posts of thousands of homes, cottage and palace, bear, or are to bear, the finger-prints of blood. As a French nurse said to a friend of mine, speaking of the German bombing of hospitals, " All wounded men are brothers!" A common destiny unites: the government of and for and by the people is to be saved and perpetuated. " There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus."
In the year 1871, Bismarck, maddened by the French resistance, said, " We shall shoot, hang, and burn. After that has happened a few times, the inhabitants will finally come to their senses." Against such a policy, all men are joined. Every German pastor takes this solemn oath: " I will be submissive, faithful, and obedient to his Royal Majesty, —
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and his lawful successors in the government, — as my most gracious King and sovereign; promote his welfare according to my ability; prevent injury and detriment to him; and particularly endeavor carefully to cultivate in the minds of the people under my care a sense of reverence and fidelity toward the King, love for the Fatherland, obedience to the laws, and all those virtues which in a Christian denote a good citizen; and I will not suffer any man to teach or act in a contrary spirit. In par- ticular, I vow that I will not support any society or association, either at home or abroad, which might endanger the public security, and will inform His Majesty of any proposals made, either in my diocese or else- where, which might prove injurious to the state. I will preach the word as His Gracious Majesty dictates." Against such autocracy and such submissiveness, all people are united. Such differences give to the independent, self-respecting mind and will of the college woman, by sheer contrast, a sense of the unity of all worthy peoples. Such a sense of unity belongs especially to the college women of this America of ours which has, for decades, been a leader and guide in the higher education of women.
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THE WAR AND COLLEGE WOMEN
Second. The war also creates a sense of directness in thinking and in interpretation. War wipes out the superfluous. On battle fields baggage trains are few and short, muni- tion trains many, long, heavy. Thinking in war time is rather tangential than circular. War writes commands. It gives orders. It does not ofi"er intimations or suggestions. To see clearly, to think straight, is the method. Diplomacy palavers and parleys, and bar- gains, and delays, and lingers: — war strikes and it strikes hard. The belligerent mood and method affect the college mind. Mental discursiveness is narrowed, intellectual luxu- riousness aboHshed. The method of interpre- tation becomes simpler. Contrast the style of Henry James and the style of a good war correspondent. Involutions and evolutions, nouns which have no verbs, and verbs without nouns, participles which have no relatives, thrown into a formless linguistic ether, clauses flung about like stars in some endless milky way, thoughts which are feelings, and feelings which darken thoughts, — contrast such a style with the direct progressiveness and orderly interpretativeness of the writing of a good correspondent from the battle front. Such is the contrast between the thinking of the older
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time of academic analysis and of this day, of the Red Cross work, the Liberty Loan, and of War Savings Stamps,
Third. It also seems to me that a further effect of the war on the college woman is to give strength to her right of individual choice in essential concerns and to enlarge the field in which her right may properly be exercised. One of the most impressive and significant re- marks of any social philosopher of modern times lies in the simple sentence of Sir Henry Sumner Maine in which he says that " The movement of the progressive societies has hith- erto been a movement from status to contract." It is a succinct interpretation of the method of content of social progress. It means the casting off of a condition fixed by birth or by environ- ment and the putting in its place a condition which is under one's own control. It represents a passing from a determination made by others to a determination made by oneself. Of course these last decades form the period of this greatest change. But the war has given special speed to the change. The war has called upon the individual to do his own best and in his own best way. It has mobilized all forces, personal as well as communal. If it has increased duties, as it has, it has also multi-
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plied rights. The calls to service are no longer given alone at the teacher's desk, or at the marriage altar. They are also given by business, by social service, by professional and other vocations. The demand for human power without regard to sex has created for college women the right of choice. The elec- tive system of studies has prepared the way to the elective system of works. Such a change has tremendous meanings for you and meanings equally tremendous for the effective- ness of all human service.
Fourth. Yet a more important effect of the war on college women is what I shall call an increased sense of trusteeship. For whom is the college woman a trustee? For humanity. What does the college woman hold in trust.? The future of the race. What does she possess that makes her worthy of being a trustee? She has manner, or manners, which make her at home in any society. Her knowledge is not en masse^ but is articulate and orderly. Her disciplined thinking, though clear and close, is yet rich without ornateness; logical in argu^ ment, persuasive in reasoning, yet apt in illus- tration. Her heart tender without gushing- ness, aspiring without visionariness, broad in sympathy without being thin or artificial,
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swift without hurry, delicate without over- refinement, her love of the beautiful inspiring without being fantastic, her convictions keen to detect the right and the wrong, yet free from casuistry, rejoicing in the right seen and chosen, persistent without stubbornness, and firm without obstinacy, gracious without obsequiousness, generous and yet self-respectful — she has, in a word, her whole strong, dis- ciplined womanhood to make her the best trustee for humanity. She " suffereth long and is kind." She " envieth not"; she " vaunteth not " herself, " is not pufi'ed up "; " doth not behave " herself " unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, undureth all things." She " never faileth." These are some of the things which make the college woman worthy of being a trustee for the future of the race. Does she know the elements of her trustee- ship? Does she feel the significance of this trusteeship? Does she realize the impres- siveness of it? Thousands of students, tens of thousands of graduates, give answer with bowed heads and with trembling, speech- less lips.
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Fifth. Yet another result of the war on the soul of the college woman of America is found in an enriched appreciation of religion. It is not a formal religion which is the more deeply respected in this crisis. It is not a faith spelled in the alphabet of ecclesiastical denominational- ism, or which is stated in the articles of the creeds. It is rather a religion as simple as it is real. It is a religion which has for its chief and central constructive truth, the idea of God. The idea of God is the chief constructive truth in the intellectual interpretation of faith. The idea of God is the chief idea found in the Hebrew system, whether it is expressed in the Ten Commandments or in the requirements of Micah's sententious imperative of doing jus- tice, loving mercy, and walking humbly. It is also the constructive motive in the Beatitudes of Christ, and the first and controlling force in His commandment of loving God supremely. The Christian faith is a simple faith in its ele- ments, as it is a real faith in its power over the human character. The war has abolished the accidents and incidents of the thinking of the college student about the divine and the eternal and has brought him face to face with the central, constructive, substantial, facts. I do not believe it is true that in religion, as
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Tennyson once said, one must choose between bigotry or flabbiness. One can and does believe strongly in the fundamentals. Face to face with death, he thinks of the eternal. Alone, separated from ordinary associates and associations, he is touched by the presence of the great Companion.
How unHke such a conception of religion is that which is found in certain of the older systems of theology which are designed to in- terpret religion. I turn, for instance, to Dwight's Theology, bound up in five volumes, and I at once read of the doctrines regarding God, — the existence of God, the unity of God, the attributes of God, the decrees of God, the sovereignty of God, the works of God as seen in his creation and in His providence, and the providence of God as seen in the depravity of man, its universality, its degree, its pre- vention; and all this set forth in some thirty- four sermons, and the thirty-four sermons being less than one-quarter of the one hundred and seventy-three sermons which represent the whole system. These sermons were first preached to college students. The war has done away with such elaborate expositions and interpretations of religion. This emphasis upon simplicity seems to have
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a certain application to what may be called a belief in the eternal and beneficent purpose of God in human affairs. The undergraduate mind, like every other mind, is now bewildered. What does it behold? In a universe of orderli- ness, of law, it sees disorder and lawlessness. In a universe designed apparently for love and for beneficence, it beholds hatred and evil working. In a universe planned for material growth and development, it beholds premature loss and destruction. In a universe ordained to create happiness and satisfaction, it finds misery, pain, suffering, woe. In a universe in which righteous omnipotence is supposed to rule, it sees abominable evil rampant, and often triumphant. In such a state the mind of the student is bewildered, as his heart is stirred and his will partially atrophied. And yet, as he reflects on these contradict tions, I believe he comes somewhat to per- ceive and to believe in the purpose of God, righteous and eternal, hidden in these things. If there be a God at all — and the student cannot give up this assurance — ■there must be something good to come out of this evil. He hears Tennyson's " Two Voices,'* and Whit- tier's " My Soul and I," and he must believe that, if the universe be not devilish in origin
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and demoniac in agency and hellish in destiny, beneath these present evils there must be the soul of righteousness and of goodness.
The religion which is worthy of the college woman is therefore broad in its outlines. It represents the common denominator of at least five historic faiths which are chiefly affected in this crisis, the Protestant, the Jewish, the Roman Catholic, the Greek Catholic, and the Nestorian. But the com- mon denominator is a belief in one God, God the Father, Maker of heaven and earth.
Sixth. A still further result of the war upon the college woman, and the last which I shall name, lies in the intensifying of moral passion. Moral passion is moral sentiment sharpened to a cutting edge. It is feeling devoted to ethical ends. It is ambition raised to the power of highest beneficence. It is sentiment touched with a sense of righteousness, quick- ened by a sense of wrong suffered, and moving toward results lying in the realm of character. It is often the result of moral purity incarnated, and it quite as often aims toward banishing the moral outcast and criminal. The un- speakable things which have been done in this war, which I shall not harrow you by repeating,
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make an equally unspeakable appeal to the heart of the college woman. She appreciates the enormity of these horrors. She under- stands — although no one can understand fully — how far these horrors transcend and transgress all the laws of war and of moral codes. She feels their terribleness, for she knows the hearts of her sisters who suffer in degradation. Her passion she declines to tear and to relieve its depths in mad ravings. She prefers rather to re-affirm the categorical im- perative of Immanuel Kant, and she feels the degradation of a nation which has forgotten him, or which, remembering him, can still believe that his " I ought " leads to Belgian, Polish, Serbian, and Roumanian atrocities. She has God as moderator in her worthy hates. But she feels the moral passion to the depths of her soul, and she would wipe from the world such horrors with the full floodtide of penitence and righteousness. Her thoughts and her feelings of horror for the past and of hope for the future are well expressed in that glorious sonnet of Rupert Brooke:
" Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead !
There's none of these so lonely and poor of old. But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. These laid the world away; poured out the red,
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Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, That men call age; and those who would have been,
Their sons, they gave, their immortality.
" Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our dearth. Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain.
Honour has come back, as a king, to earth, And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And Nobleness walks in our ways again; And we have come into our heritage,"
These great results of the eflFects of the war on college women — an increased sense of the unity of all human life, a sense of directness in thinking and in interpretation, a sense of strength in the right of individual choice in essential concerns and an enlargement of the field in which this right may be exercised, an increased sense of trusteeship, an enriched appreciation of religion, and an intenser moral passion — are in these times achieved in a new world in which two great political and social movements are also going forward toward a worthy conclusion. I refer first to the move- ment for prohibition. Intemperance is one of the direst of all enemies of the human race. It breaks the laws of economics: it is waste. It breaks the law of hygiene: it is destructive of fibre. It breaks the laws of morah; it
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whets the appetite to sin. It breaks the laws of the State: it is the direct, or indirect, cause of four-fifths of all crimes. It hurts the home of which woman is the heart. Intemperance will not be wholly cast out by statute, but some of its worst results will be wiped out. Women will be the chief beneficiary of this tremendous social betterment. A second movement refers to the giving of the vote to women. This cause has been progressing while this war has been waging. In England, — that most conservative nation, — the grant has been made in no small part as the result of, or as the condition of, the great conduct of women in the war. This grant is sure to come in every American commonwealth. The pro- hibition movement and the suffrage movement are at once cause and result. The prohibition of the liquor traffic has given clearer vision for seeing, and stronger will for doing, civic duty, and the clearer vision and the stronger will have given ample power for wiping out the base traffic in intoxicants.
It is not a little significant that while the soul of the college women is touched by the great results to which I have alluded, these two fundamental social and civil enlargements have been going forward.
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To the Members of the Graduating Class:
My sermon is done. The Marys of our texts still stand in the shadow of the cross. Women are still standing in millions of homes and are thinking of their beloved, or kneeling in prayer for the preservation of their husbands and sons, and brothers, or for the comfort of their own broken hearts. But the Marys soon went forth from the shadow of the cross and presently saw the Master risen from his broken tomb. American and other homes are in the times yet to be to find other revelations. Out of this college you go. Your four years here spent have been the four years of the war. Almost unconsciously to yourselves, the war has wrought upon you. The great results, which I have briefly interpreted, have been reenforced by the college days. These results your life, I hope, will also confirm. The effect of the past four years, I pray, may be the promise of like fruitage in the next four and forty years. May life increase to you its higher unities. May your thinking be direct without being narrow, and simple without being bare. May you become yet more and more worthy to cultivate the enlarged field of your own great choices. May you ever be possessed by a keen sense of rich trusteeship
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for the world. May your religion become broader, deeper, more real, more vital; and may the moral passion for the best be your daily heritage and your hourly strength, at once your inspiration and your reward. I welcome you to a world in a year which needs you, your ablest, your best, as no former year has ever needed you. I summon you to glorious tasks, to the entrance into richest privileges. I hear your answer to the sum- mons, " Here am L Send me."
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UNIVERSITY OF CAUFORNIA LIBRARY