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COLLEGE AND RELIGION 
 
 Talks to College Students by a College Teacher 
 
 WILLIAM HARDY ALEXANDER, Ph.D. 
 
 Professor of Classics at the University 
 of Alberta, Canada 
 
 BOSTON 
 RICHARD G. BADGER 
 
 THE GORHAM PRESS 
 
Copyright, 1920, by Richard G. Badger 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 Made in the United States of America 
 
 The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The seven addresses herein are selected from 
 my Sunday morning talks to students during the 
 past three years. They have been chosen mainly 
 because I have been able to ascertain through 
 chance expressions of opinion among the young 
 men and women themselves that these are all 
 talks which have awakened a response in the 
 hearers. I am bold enough to hope that this 
 judgment may be endorsed in a wider field. 
 
 Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. 
 June, 1920. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 1 "And to Virtue Knowledge" .... 9 
 
 2 Proving and Holding Fast 20 
 
 3 The Alchemy of Struggle 32 
 
 4 A Great University 46 
 
 5 Faint yet Pursuing 59 
 
 ^6 Making the Grade 78 
 
 7 Commencement 93 
 
COLLEGE AND RELIGION 
 
COLLEGE AND RELIGION 
 
 "AND TO VIRTUE KNOWLEDGE'* 
 
 "And besides thisj giving all diligence, add to your faith 
 virtue, and to virtue knowledge.'* 
 
 2d Epistle General of Peter, 1,5. 
 
 I HAVE heard it said that teaching is a monot- 
 onous profession; perhaps I have even thought 
 so sometimes. It does involve a good deal of rou- 
 tine ; t's must be crossed and i's dotted, amo is con- 
 jugated this year just as it was last year, (x + y) ^ 
 continues to furnish the same old result. The 
 same old experiments must be set up to prove the 
 same old laws of nature, the same old volumes 
 translated, the same old difficulties explained, 
 and, as student tradition runs, the same old lec- 
 tures delivered. But all this overlooks the com- 
 ing into our college life year by year of a new 
 generation of young scholars with all the won- 
 der of varying personality they bring with them 
 and all the possibilities they suggest. It was old 
 
10 College and Religion 
 
 Friedrlch Froebel, I think, who used to doff his 
 hat to the children he met in the streets because 
 he saw in them the leaders of to-morrow; he had 
 the courage to carry into action what the real 
 teacher feels at heart. Then, too, from each 
 new class the wise teacher drains a draught of 
 the wine of youth which it has so abundantly to 
 spare, and renews with it his hope and faith and 
 courage for the task of life. His is the great 
 and the unusual opportunity, too often under- 
 valued, to combine within himself a growing vol- 
 ume of experience and the gaiety of youth, which 
 at the best is an ideal existence, and at the worst 
 affords a means of growing old gracefully. 
 
 But it is not the teacher who has all the privi- 
 leges; what of you before whom to-day swings 
 open the portal of college life? Why, it is no 
 exaggeration, even if it is sadly trite, to say that 
 the world is yours at that age. Fortune coquettes 
 with you at eighteen, twenty, twenty-two, while 
 she seeks to know what is in you ; by the time you 
 are forty, she proves more a step-mother than a 
 mistress, and puts you definitely in your place 
 and bids you stay there. That is the reason why 
 with each returning college year there comes a 
 
^'And to Virtue Knowledge'' 1 1 
 
 yearning desire In my mind to say a word in sea- 
 son, not of a sort to save you from every mis- 
 take, because there are no such golden words as 
 that for the game of life, but such as might set 
 you thinking about one or two fundamentals in 
 that game. It will be kindlier advice than sopho- 
 mores give freshmen, though probably no better 
 meant. 
 
 Writing many hundred years ago an ancient 
 father of the Christian faith, Simon Peter, was 
 moved to lay down for the youthful society a sort 
 of curriculum, very remarkable for its range and^ 
 yet equally for its conciseness. *'And besides this, 
 giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, and 
 to virtue knowledge." This is the substance of 
 one course or period of training in the school of 
 character. The first post-graduate course fol* 
 low^s; *'and to knowledge temperance, and to tem- 
 perance patience, and to patience godliness." A 
 fairly ambitious programme! But there is yet 
 another post-graduate course to which you are ^ 
 admitted after qualifying in the former two; "and 
 to godliness, brotherly kindness, and to brotherly 
 kindness, love." Fortunately for us we do not 
 now have to take into account these post-grad- 
 
12 College and Religion 
 
 uate studies; you are just becoming undergrad- 
 uates, and graduation, even from the first course, 
 is blissfully far removed in a haze of golden days. 
 So we open Simon Peter's calendar at the under- 
 graduate course once more and read again in this 
 catalogue which for brevity is unrivalled among 
 college catalogues : "And besides this, giving all 
 diligence, add to your faith virtue, and to virtue 
 knowledge." 
 
 Is this as simple as it looks? "Giving all dili- 
 gence;" is it easy to give diligence? Is it easy 
 to go farther yet and to give all diligence in the 
 prosecution of a study or the cultivation of a 
 character? You and I know that it is not, and 
 yet here it is made a prime condition, a pre- 
 requisite of getting along at all. And now you 
 are anticipating the worst; well, it must none the 
 less be said that you will not gain much knowl- 
 edge to add to virtue without diligence. Genius 
 has been defined times without number as a ca- 
 pacity for hard work, and there is nothing for 
 which I have a more profound respect, nothing 
 from which I anticipate sounder and more endur- 
 ing results, than the patient industry that gives ^ 
 "all diligence." Here is the point. When you 
 
'^And to Virtue Knowledge^* ly 
 
 are studying, give "all diligence." Don't be half 
 on the football field and half at your text book; 
 don't mix your dress for the sophomore hop with 
 fragments of Quintus Horatius Flaccus. When 
 you are doing calculus, concentrate and do cal- 
 culus; build those castles in Spain some time to be 
 sure, because building castles is a knightly occu- 
 pation and Spain is a fair country, but don't build 
 in calculus time. When you tell your instructor 
 that you spent three hours in preparation, be 
 sure in your own conscience you are not giving 
 him one hour of preparation and two of war sub- 
 stitutes. 
 
 But did you ever realize that the making^ of 
 character, the "adding to your faith virtue," is, 
 just as much as your studies, a matter of dili- 
 gence? Just consider a moment the wondrous 
 chemistry of character; in that laboratory there 
 are a hundred experiments going forward, many 
 of them fraught with absolutely determinative 
 results for your happiness and welfare, but you 
 will have to give all diligence in the watching of 
 them. It is a tedious business to be sure and 
 entails hanging around the laboratory a good 
 deal, but then there is no other way; God has 
 
14 College and Religion 
 
 appointed this, and you and I must walk in it. If 
 you want a character that is worth while to your- 
 self and to other people you must "keep your 
 heart with diligence, for out of it are the issues 
 of life." Keeping your heart means among other 
 things setting a guard upon the tongue, it means 
 the calling in of idle thoughts and of thoughts 
 that have gone wandering in forbidden ways, it 
 means discerning sound and true motives and 
 translating them into actions sound and true. A 
 great sage was once asked what was the happy 
 life and replied: "The life that brings the few- 
 est regrets." There will be many years for you 
 to live when youth is passed; in those years it 
 will be great gain that your life in retrospect 
 should bring you the minimum of regrets. All 
 this may sound dull, but it is not necessarily so 
 tedious as it seems. You girls know how it *was 
 with the knitting when you began it, how pain- 
 fully you watched and counted, and then by and 
 by it became an instinct and you plained-and- 
 purled with an unconscious ease. It is not quite 
 so simple in adding character to your faith, but 
 in a general way it is the same ; such is the nature 
 of the will that a good resolution adhered to a 
 
''And to Virtue Knowledge'^ if[ 
 
 few times in succession forms the nucleus of a 
 good habit, which in turn almost automatically 
 engenders good deeds. "Keep your heart with 
 all diligence"; trifle with your studies a bit if you 
 will, but beware of trifling with your self-respect, 
 your sense of honor, your finer nature, your per- 
 sonal cleanness. These are all sensitive material 
 and can be so irreparably damaged, and so life is 
 soured and spoiled sometimes in its beginning and 
 all its gold early turned to tinsel. 
 
 But you remember that Simon Peter spoke of 
 this character, this ^'virtue," as an addition to 
 your faith. Of faith let us take to-day the widest 
 possible view; faith is a deep-seated belief in the 
 reality of life and its purposes. That sort of 
 faith seems to ^e fundamental; it is the sort of 
 thing you have to have at the very base of your 
 life if you are to go on living at all. Why get 
 knowledge, why get character, why get temper- 
 ance, why cultivate a dozen other good and en- 
 gaging qualities if you are but a squirrel in a 
 cage, working his poor treadmill furiously and in 
 the end accomplishing nothing? I hope you have 
 this faith in the real worth of life, in the reality 
 of the Eternal behind life, and in the reality of 
 
1 6 College and Religion 
 
 the task which in collaboration with God you 
 must perform. Such a faith has nothing to fear 
 from a university course; it is capable of making 
 the adjustments that a widening knowledge will 
 certainly suggest. 
 
 "And to virtue, knowledge." First faith in 
 life and the reality of its purposes, then char- 
 acter built upon that faith, then knowledge the 
 better to enable you to act your part whatever 
 that may be. There opens up before you the glori- 
 ous opportunity to complete the necessities of 
 faith and character with the grace and the beauty 
 of knowledge. There is the whole field of litera- 
 ture ancient and modern, sacred and profane, 
 in which is gathered all the thought of all the 
 
 mm 
 
 ages to which you are now in the fullness of time 
 become the heir, and not only is thought there 
 but you will find it decked out with all the choice 
 flowers of the garden of language. There is 
 the marvellous book of science, that grand and 
 stately volume the leaves of which are the starry 
 heavens, the ocean-floors, and the eternal hills; 
 you are to have a chance to peer at all the mys- 
 tery within. There is the scroll of history preg- 
 nant with meaning for the present and for the 
 
'^And to Virtue Knowledge'* 17 
 
 future to those who can Interpret it and read 
 understandingly therein, the store-house of the 
 political and economic wisdom of a hundred gen- 
 erations and more of men. Surely no slackness, 
 no arms that hang down or knees that are feeble, 
 will keep you from getting what in these fields is 
 justly yours. 
 
 For the fact remains that these things must be 
 added, and that the addition means work. Some- 
 how or other it does not seem to be the order of 
 the universe that you can get anything that is 
 worth while for nothing. The fine fruit of litera- 
 ture, the revelations of science, the lessons of his- 
 tory, do not enter into the fabric of your being 
 unsolicited and unwrought for; they are all pearls 
 of great price, and the price must be paid or there 
 is no transaction. Don't think that you can add 
 knowledge to yourself simply by attendance at 
 college; knowledge is not an infection which you 
 can incur at a seat of learning. No, you will not 
 get much in the way of knowledge merely by at- 
 tending lectures and seeing demonstrations and 
 hearing interesting talks; you will have to offer 
 more substantial coin than that. I hope you have 
 come prepared with the price. 
 
1 8 College and Religion 
 
 We may not to-day discuss those stages of edu- 
 cation which the apostle represents as lying be- 
 yond the first course, but there are such stages, 
 and an advance through these is what constitutes 
 the full sum of education. Temperance, patience, 
 godhness, brotherly kindness, love, — that is quite 
 a formidable list. But are there any qualities in 
 that list with which one who is seeking the per- 
 fection of manhood or womanhood would care 
 to dispense? And if there are not, is it not de- 
 sirable that we should know the way by which we 
 may go on to attain all of them in some measure, 
 even if we know that we cannot adequately attain 
 in all? Now you know how it is at college; you 
 must pass through certain lower courses to reach 
 the more advanced courses, and you must obtain 
 certain lower degrees as the passport to higher 
 degrees. Are you aware of any principle in the 
 great university of life which should cause things 
 to be different there? No, it is line upon line, 
 precept upon precept, here a little and there a 
 little, the winning of this or that as a vantage 
 ground from which to push on to something else. 
 
 There is nothing in my reminder that knowl- 
 edge is an essential step tFat is inconsistent with 
 
*^And to Virtue Knowledge*' 19 
 
 the best of good times; it is your privilege with 
 all this to reap a full harvest of the joy of youth.- 
 Still, youth is a season of preparation, too, and 
 if you are ever to perform this great sum in the 
 addition of qualities, you must be setting about it 
 even now. God speed you as you begin and bring 
 you in good time to the complete result. 
 
PROVING AND HOLDING FAST 
 
 "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.*' 
 
 I Thessalonians, 5, 2i. 
 
 This fifth chapter of First Thessalonians is 
 remarkable for the number of abrupt, pithy say- 
 ings it holds in small compass. That is not St. 
 Paul's ordinary style ; he runs rather to long sen- 
 tences, and sometimes gets himself so involved 
 that he never succeeds in getting out of the tangle 
 again even with the vigorous aid of all the com- 
 mentators. But another mood was on him this 
 day, and he writes very simply and directly, as if 
 remembering how much like inexperienced chil- 
 dren in a naughty neighborhood these Christians 
 of Thessalonica were, and how much therefore 
 like children they would stand in need, not of 
 long, doctrinal sermons, but of practical precepts 
 on which to lean in hour of trial. And so they 
 come, these maxims, in a veritable string of 
 pearls, each beautiful in itself but yet more beau- 
 tiful in the necklace wherein it is set. 
 
 20 
 
Proving and Holding Fast 2i 
 
 *'Follow that which is good." Follow it, you 
 observe ; don't be worried for fear that you may 
 possibly get ahead of it. The good is an ideal; 
 you and I have never caught up to it and never 
 will altogether, so great is the handicap the good 
 has over us. Never mind; the point is not to sit 
 down supinely but to be up and doing, to follow, 
 — and that impHes motion, activity, — in a good 
 lead. 
 
 "Be at peace among yourselves." Paul, you 
 remember, was a travelling bishop, episcopos, 
 overseer, with quite a big diocese to cover and a 
 good many churches to visit on his round. I im- 
 agine it is a trying experience; how weary he 
 must have got of it all and them all sometimes 
 with their eternal bickerings in which he had to 
 act as umpire, adjuster, peace-maker and diplo- 
 matist until he must have wondered what use 
 there was in trying to preach the "peace of God 
 that passeth all understanding" to pagans when 
 his Christian converts squabbled so pettily and 
 wrangled over such futile points of difference. It 
 would be a better world for nations and for in- 
 dividuals if we could only make up our minds to 
 "be at peace among ourselves." 
 
22 College and Religion 
 
 "Rejoice evermore I" What a good word! 
 
 Don't frown, growl, or grguch; smile, laugh, be 
 
 happy, "rejoice evermore." And "evermore," 
 
 notice, — not just simply when you're feeling good 
 
 and well-disposed and kindly, but at those other 
 
 times too when your nerves are on the rack and 
 
 you are sorely put to it for the next move, trying 
 
 to keep your head 
 
 "when those about you 
 Are losing theirs and blaming it on you." 
 
 The happiness that you do not have to use on 
 prosperous days lay aside as your balance for the 
 days that are dull and full of sorrow and pain. 
 Is it true what Father Faber wrote : 
 
 "Mostly men's many-featured faces wear 
 Looks of indifference or of blank despair"? 
 
 One does not like to think so, but does our coun- 
 tenance bring sunshine where it goes? 
 
 "Pray without ceasing." But how shall we of 
 the modern world, crowded with pressing duties, 
 innumerable engagements, insistent worries, and 
 thronging cares, — how shall we "pray without 
 ceasing"? Most of us solve it, I fancy, by ceas- 
 ing without praying, from which state only five 
 
Proving and Holding Fast 23 
 
 minutes or so on a Sunday morning delivers us. 
 But perhaps it all hangs on what you call prayer. 
 You remember the psalmist's description of the 
 stars, "there is no speech nor language, their 
 voice is not heard." That is the way with un- 
 ceasing prayer; it has no speech nor language nec- 
 essarily, perhaps its voice is not heard, but just 
 forms one of the diapason undertones of the har- 
 mony of the world. "Work is prayer" says the 
 punning Latin, and it Is true that we can so hallow 
 and ennoble our work that it Is all a prayer, and 
 that men see upon our faces reflected a glory that 
 comes from contact with the infinite. "Pray 
 without ceasing." Prayer is like everything else 
 in human experience; the reward is for perseve- 
 rance, there are no honors to the slacker. 
 
 But of all these maxims the acme is reached 
 in that which rings down the long hall of the 
 ages with encouragement to scholar and thinker;' 
 "prove all things, hold fast that which is good." 
 The two parts of this must not be separated. 
 "Prove all things," — there you have the appeal 
 intellectual which should be graven in letters of 
 gold on tablets of silver at the gate of every 
 school and college, and made axiomatic to their 
 
24 College and Religion 
 
 being. Get knowledge and understanding, and 
 use them to try, test, and prove the propositions 
 moral, intellectual, spiritual, political, social, 
 which force themselves on your consideration in 
 these times. Don't jump at conclusions; proved' 
 all things, think them out to a finish, force them 
 to undergo the acid test of thought. And, mark 
 you, "all things"; there is none exempted before 
 this tribunal, no, not one. Into the crucible of 
 thought must go all our problems, and" that means 
 our religious problems as well as the others. 
 "Prove all things" ; as Plato puts it with the fine 
 courage of the Greek intellect, "let us follow the 
 argument whithersoever it leads," regardless of 
 the fact that it may cross abruptly at right angles 
 the lines of traditional belief and social conven- 
 tion, resolved that for us at least there must be a 
 resolute facing of the issues and not merely a 
 turning away of the eyes to vanity from pain. 
 
 But that is not all. St. Paul adds, "hold fast 
 that which is good." This is really what I want 
 to engage your attention in, the pleasure and in- 
 deed the privilege of entertaining some definite 
 convictions. There is a class of people who suffi- 
 ciently comply with the duty of proving all 
 
Proving and Holding Fast 2$ 
 
 things; they read, they study, they meditate, they 
 go through all the intellectual motions prepara- 
 tory to reaching a conviction, but never, so far 
 as any one can discover, have they actually enter- 
 tained a definite conviction on any thing. When 
 you endeavor to ascertain their views they be- 
 come as elusive as an eel and about as valuable 
 intellectually. And the remarkable thing is that 
 many of them pride themselves upon it and speak 
 of their mental attitude as impartial, detached, 
 unbiassed, and what not. Nay, I record with 
 peculiar shame that the consensus of civilized 
 mankind has given to s,uch a state of mind the 
 epithet "academic," which indicates how com- 
 monly in human experience professors get so in- 
 terested in merely testing all things that they 
 never attain to certainty in anything. 
 
 Now the intellectual test and the intellectual 
 conclusion are of no avail unless translated into 
 action. The mystic who stays forever up on the 
 Mount of Transfiguration plays no part in the 
 uplift of the world; it is the man who comes 
 down among the crowd again with shining face 
 that really counts. The real leader of mankind 
 is some Moses who scales the Sinai peak and 
 
 /^^ 
 
26 College and Religion 
 
 brings back the law to the men of the plain. So 
 then to intellectual judgment must be added moral 
 resolution, to stand fast in the plain by what you 
 feel you have on the mountain discovered to be 
 true. A fine phrase that "hold fast" ! To stand, 
 to hold fast, to have some definite ideal of good 
 in religion, government, education, and society, 
 some exact purpose in life, some ordered view of 
 man and existence, and to have the courage, the 
 uncommon courage, to stand by your views, to 
 have some definite convictions, — there is the 
 measure of a man or a woman. "-^ 
 
 This does not mean just being obstinate; con- 
 stantly in warfare the tactician will change his 
 mind about the real value of a position and will 
 relinquish it because he no longer thinks it worth 
 while to hold it. So it is with every one of us; 
 entertaining some definite convictions need prove 
 no obstacle to change as we keep constantly prov- 
 ing them from time to time. If a man tells me 
 that his views have not changed in ten years, I 
 suspect him to be the victim of a strange disorder, 
 the sleeping sickness. There is a dash of senti- 
 ment, no doubt, in saying that my father's politi- 
 cal convictions are good enough for me, but it 
 
Proving and Holding Fast 27 
 
 does not argue much exercise of the thinking 
 power. The conservatism of the mule is not 
 usually the subject of a eulogium. 
 
 But what, you say, are these few definite con- 
 victions which you esteem it a pleasure and in- 
 deed a privilege to entertain? I hope you do not 
 suppose I am going to inflict my particular set 
 upon you or to suggest that there is any standard 
 ready made to which you can make yours con- 
 form. It would be a dull world if we were all in 
 agreement; it is out of the variety of convictions 
 that progress arises. And if I have said "some" 
 or "a few" it is only to suggest that there is an 
 irreducible minimum of conviction which is essen- ^ 
 tial to distinguish a man or a woman from a 
 jelly-fish. 
 
 Oh these jelly-fishes in human life I They float 
 everywhere upon its sea. They have no convic-ii--- 
 tions about the social order in which they live, 
 whether it is right or wrong, or partly right and 
 partly wrong, and why; they are jelly-fishes float- 
 ing in the tide of social conventions. They con- 
 tract, — ^you know how sensitive jelly-fishes are I 
 — at the bare mention of politics and at the idea 
 of any one having strong and positive opinions 
 
2 8 College and Religion 
 
 upon the parties and their policies, especially a 
 woman, assuming apparently that government is 
 a kind of Providence surrounding their lives, until 
 some awful cataclysm comes in history and the 
 government demands some return in service, yes, 
 even from jelly-fishes. They have no views upon 
 morals, private or public, except so far as these 
 relate to the possibility of scandal; as to the ori- 
 gin, significance, and probable evolution of the 
 moral ideal, as to its relation to religion, as to 
 the possibility of its existence apart from religion, 
 they have no convictions. And in religion the 
 jelly-fishes run true to type; they are always 
 found in very safe and very shallow waters, never 
 venturing out into the depths of the stirring tide, 
 especially when it draws once again into the vasty 
 deep. 
 
 But why the pleasure and the privilege? First 
 then, the privilege. A privilege, as its derivation 
 indicates, was a special legal enactment under the 
 Roman law in favor of some specific individual, 
 or some special right acquired by an individual 
 and recognized as valid by the law. It was some- 
 thing which distinguished him from the general- 
 ity and set him apart. If you have a few definite 
 
Proving and Holding Fast 29 
 
 convictions upon life at which you have arrived L^ 
 after proving them this way and that, you have a 
 privilege, never doubt it. God has legislated spe- 
 cially in your case and conferred on you a privi- 
 lege. But remember'^that privilege like nobility, 
 If it carries rights, implies responsibilities as well; '^ 
 not for no purpose have you been emancipated 
 from the servitude of the jelly-fishes. This privi- 
 lege of having some definite convictions is a cry-z- 
 ing need of our modern world; there seems to be 
 abroad a general tendency to blur in every de- •- 
 partment of human thought, to talk increasingly 
 about ''suspension of judgment" which is often 
 just a ponderous term for laziness, to get into 
 that condition, that painfully "academic" condi- 
 tion, which was never better described than as 
 "always learning and never coming to a knowl- 
 edge of the truth." 
 
 The pleasure you may think rather doubtfully 
 of; the person of even a few definite convictions 
 is likely to encounter trouble among the jelly-fish, 
 some of whom nature has endowed with stings. 
 Yet there is pleasure after all, the pleasure of 
 standing square with the truth as you saw it and 
 the pleasure of having exercised strength rather 
 
30 College and Religion 
 
 than just having yielded to lassitude, weakness, 
 and convention. It is not pleasure as the world 
 commonly defines it; "peace I leave with you, my 
 peace I give unto you; not as the world giveth, 
 give I unto you" but a peace which the world can 
 neither give nor take away. It is the summa 
 voluptas, the highest pleasure of philosophy, the 
 satisfaction in the exercise of the supremest 
 powers of being. The world's lash will hurt and 
 its sting will wound unless you are constituted 
 with a peculiar skin of indifference round about 
 you, but you will be compensated by the pleasure 
 you will find in your own society, and after all, as 
 Stevenson put it, to keep friends with one's self, 
 to preserve self-respect, is no mean task. 
 
 I shall not pursue this thought farther; it is for 
 you to make the personal decision for or against 
 being a jelly-fish, though I should be sorry to 
 think that any of you would thus deliberately 
 climb down the ladder of life to a lower order of 
 being. I hope some of you will think it worth 
 while to try in your college years to get some con- 
 victions, to escape the reproach of Laodiceanism.. 
 "I know thy works that thou art neither cold nor 
 hot ... so then because thou art lukewarm and 
 
Proving and Holding Fast 31 
 
 neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my 
 mouth." In the plan and purpose of God there 
 is neither room nor place for the inveterate com- 
 promiser in the road of progress ; men and women 
 and churches and universities and societies and 
 nations must prove all things in their constitu- 
 tions, must attain some measure of conviction, 
 must hold fast. And saith the Lord: "To him c^ 
 that overcometh," — the warrior, you observe, not 
 the jelly-fish — "will I give to eat of the tree of 
 life which is in the midst of the paradise of God." 
 
THE ALCHEMY OF STRUGGLE * 
 
 Ah, you say, that is an odd-looking word, that 
 "alchemy," not one of the friendly counters of 
 everyday speech! It is a rare word now, but 
 time was when the fond hopes of Europe centred 
 upon it, for was not alchemy the magic that was 
 to transmute all metals into gold? Getting rich 
 quickly is no new dream; every age has its own 
 form of the delusion, and of all these forms 
 none is quainter, none more fascinating, than the 
 search of the alchemists for the philosopher's 
 stone, the medium by which all baser elements 
 were to be converted into the noblest element of 
 them all. Alchemy of the Middle Ages has settled 
 down into the no less fascinating and far more 
 scientific pursuit of Chemistry, but for all that 
 we turn back a little wistfully at times to the days 
 when magic hovered around the crucible and the 
 test-tube, and when the man of science himself 
 
 * The writer acknowledges gratefully that the whole idea 
 of thus interpreting Jacob's struggle comes to him from a 
 sermon of the Rev. William Channing Gannett, entitled 
 "Wrestling and Blessing." 
 
 32 
 
The Alchemy of Struggle 33 
 
 believed in the occult properties of the elements 
 he worked with. 
 
 I could have been more thoroughly modern, 
 more strictly up-to-date, by making my subject, 
 *'The Chemistry of Struggle," but I believe it 
 would have been at the sacrifice not only of ro- 
 mantic suggestion but even of actual truth. 
 Chemistry implies an exact science wherein from 
 things given follow inevitably certain things found 
 and demonstrated; the magic touch has passed 
 away like "the glory from the earth." But I am 
 not willing to admit that it is just a precise science 
 that explains the phenomena with which I pro- 
 pose to deal; there is in them a touch of an- 
 other something, magic if you will, other than 
 mere material forces and above them, which 
 makes me cling to the less usual term "alchemy." 
 And then too in the processes I shall consider the 
 alchemist's goal is in part at least reached, and 
 base metal is transmuted divinely into pure gold 
 of character. 
 
 The story of Jacob's wrestling as we read it in 
 the chapter of Genesis is an eerie legend of that 
 sort which men of learning call etiological; it is 
 one of that class of legends which purport to give 
 
34 College and Religion 
 
 the historical explanation of some name, some 
 custom, some religious rite. Among the children 
 of Israel a strange practice prevailed of "eating 
 not of the sinew which is upon the hollow of the 
 thigh," and as men questioned themselves and 
 others upon the origin of things in a more sophis- 
 ticated age, the story of Jacob and the Mysterious 
 Wrestler emerged. Such legends are common in 
 the lore of all nations, arising from the natural 
 and insatiable curiosity of man about himself and 
 his environment. 
 
 But like many another legend, though of little 
 worth from the standpoint of history or science, 
 it is full of the deepest spirit of poetry. What a 
 series of pictures you have there, so perfectly em- 
 balmed in the arnber of tradition! The lonely 
 Jacob, weary and depressed; the nameless visitor*, 
 all unannounced, who comes to grips with him; 
 the close-locked wrestle througTi the long night 
 hours; the miraculous touch; the desire on the 
 stranger's part to be gone before daybreak, as all 
 fairies and demons and ghostly visitants have 
 ever wished; Jacob's invincible hold; his demand 
 for blessing as the price of release ; the new name 
 of Israel, "prince with God" ; the mystery of the 
 
The Alchemy of Struggle 35 
 
 stranger's name preserved throughout; Jacob's 
 shrewd guess and commemorative name, Peni-el, 
 *'God's face"; and then, as he crosses the brook 
 Jabbok, sunrise, the golden dawn, daylight once 
 more. I do not know that any literature con- 
 tains a story more successful in combining in a 
 short compass all the elements of fear, wonder, 
 surprise, charm, beauty, — all that goes to make a 
 great poem or drama. 
 
 But the really great poem or drama never re- 
 mains content with mere success of form or ar- 
 rangement of material; it uses these but as a 
 shrine for the Spirit of the whole. It is not far 
 to seek here. All night long in those silent hours 
 men usually give to repose, Jacob wrestled body 
 to body with a man of mystery who even lamed 
 him before the struggle ended, but Jacob refused 
 to relinquish his hold till from this Presence he 
 had gained a blessing. Then when he thought 
 it all over, he got a new view of what had been 
 so fearsome in those night hours of agony, and 
 concluded that he had seen in that struggle noth- 
 ing other than "God's face." So, limping, he 
 crossed the brook to join his company, and the 
 sunshine burst full upon him in all its dawn-glory. 
 
36 College and Religion 
 
 Night, struggle, sorrow, anxiety, all these gone; 
 as a prince he had wrestled and proved his power 
 with God, and as he wrestled, he had seen God's 
 face. Here in simplest, loveliest language stands 
 revealed the most eternal of truths, that from 
 wrestling comes blessing, from darkness light, 
 from storm calm, and coronation from the long 
 determined fight. 
 
 But you say to me : **Ah, that is only a story 
 after all, and it happened so long ago and so far 
 away!" Wrong; no one of us escapes the expe- 
 rience of Jacob, though it seldom strikes us as 
 poetry or seems to be jewelled in a poetic setting 
 when it does come, at least, that is the way we 
 feel. Each one of us wrestles, desperately some- 
 times, with mysterious forces that rob us of the 
 hours of sleep. Some go down to defeat in that 
 struggle so that they can have only God's mercy 
 and not his seal and sign of approval, but others 
 endure to the end, steadfast under maiming even 
 of the heart and soul, and become princes with 
 power, gaining a blessing so great that we find 
 no words so adequate to describe it as the old 
 words ; they have seen God face to face. 
 
 He comes to us in different forms, this Mys- 
 
The Alchemy of Struggle 37 
 
 terlous Stranger who l^ys hold of us so suddenly 
 as he emerges from the unseen, and with so 
 powerful a grip. One of his very commonest dis- 
 guises is failure. Often to the student above all 
 others the Sable Wrestler comes thus. The 
 courses at college prove harder than one had 
 thought, or perhaps, worse yet, we feel that we 
 have not the powers of mind we imagined we had. 
 The first test-results are best veiled by charity, 
 the daily quizzes are a succession of trials, the 
 professors appear to be the mind-readers of what 
 you know not. Those are hours of darkness in- 
 deed, and out of them the wrestler descends upon 
 your soul and says: "Better give up. This is 
 the wrong path for you to go. You have missed 
 your calling. You are a failure." Dear lad or 
 girl, he is touching the sinew in the hollow of 
 your thigh to break your grip, but if you will 
 "stay with him,'' as our phrase is, you will extort 
 from him a blessing, even your heart's desire, and 
 you will realize that you have been at Peni-el, 
 and seen God's face. For the Sable Wrestler is 
 none other than God and in the grim wrestle of 
 the soul he sifts out the hearts of men and learns 
 who best may serve as his collaborators. "You 
 
38 College and Religion 
 
 will not hear me now," cried the young Disraeli 
 to the jeering Commons, ''but the time will come 
 when you will have to hear me," and ultimately 
 he spoke in that same chamber as Prime Min- 
 ister. Professors who have not appreciated your 
 freshman efforts may form an entirely different 
 estimate of you before you graduate. 
 
 Or he may come to you in the form of a re- 
 curring temptation, the one to which your own 
 heart tells you you are peculiarly susceptible, "the 
 sin that doth so easily beset you." It will startle 
 some of you to have me suggest that this is God's 
 hand too, but I prefer to explain it thus than to 
 be forced to the dualism of God and Devil. 
 Well, in this matter of the recurring temptation 
 we are all on common ground; "there is none 
 righteous, no, not one." Oh, the strength of the 
 Wrestler when he comes on this wise! He lays« 
 hold of the very roots of your soul with a giant 
 strength, especially when, like Jacob, you are 
 lonely, harassed, and depressed, wrestles with 
 you through the black hours of your soul-night, 
 and withers the sinews of your resolution. Time 
 and again he has come off so nearly victorious 
 that only a sudden and violent effort saved you. 
 
The Alchemy of Struggle 39 
 
 but at last you gather up all your soul's force and 
 say: "I must get the better of this thing now 
 and here." The Temptation realizes your mood, 
 would fain be gone, but you grip it all the harder 
 and will not let it go "except it bless thee." And 
 presently you emerge a victor. The alchemy of 
 struggle has refined your character in its retorts; 
 base metal has come forth pure gold. You know 
 that that temptation will have no power against 
 you forever; you are a prince with God and have 
 prevailed; and in your struggle you have seen 
 God's face. There is the magic of our alchemy; 
 through things temporal you have seen things 
 eternal, and they have exefcised their charm. 
 
 Sometimes the Black Wrestler is curiously 
 negative, as when he attacks you in the form of 
 sheer inertia, physical, mental, or spiritual slack- 
 ness. It is not then what he urges you to that is 
 significant; it is what he would seek to withhold 
 you from. All about you is work ready for your 
 hands, your brain, your heart, but somehow noth- 
 ing happens; it is clearly your move but no rock 
 is more firmly rooted. The times are calling, oh, 
 So loud and clear. Up, soldier, shoulder the rifle 
 and take the field for freedom! Up, reformer, 
 
40 College and Religion 
 
 mount the rostrum and speak a word for ad- 
 vance! Up, teacher and preacher, forget out- 
 worn traditions and beliefs and lift up the torch 
 of the larger light, proclaim the wider gospel I 
 For the love of all mankind, don't be a priest or 
 a Levite and pass by on the other side ; don't en- 
 roll yourself among the do-nothings when there 
 is such a call for recruits in the army that is fight- 
 ing for the positive purposes of God. Grip the 
 Dark Stranger of Inertia, even when you feel him 
 laming you. Grip him, man ! Grip him, woman I 
 Say: "Yes, I will go, I will work, I will fight, 
 I will believe!" Oh, the boundless power of a 
 positive purpose ; it can say to mountains of doubt 
 and discouragement and despair "Be ye removed 
 hence and sunk in the depths of the sea!" No 
 mere negation ever got anything anywhere. 
 Come to grips then with inertia, doubt, hesita- 
 tion, irresolution, hold fast to your purposes, and 
 as the spirits of inertia leave you, you can de- 
 mand of them the blessing. And in doing posi- 
 tive service, in performing this duty and that 
 rather than rebelling against it, you will see that 
 great, new light which is called God's face. 
 Perhaps he comes disguised as illness, either 
 
The Alchemy of Struggle 41 
 
 some sudden physical disaster or a chronic malady, 
 and by touching your soul's sinew would reduce 
 you to miserable, hopeless, helpless, complaining 
 invalidism. Assuredly this is a painful wrestle 
 by the brook Jabbok; there is none more so. You 
 cannot run and play, skate or dance, like the other 
 boys and girls because of the cruel illness that 
 left you hurt and maimed those many years ago ; 
 God grant you grace, child, for you have a hard 
 wrestle to go through! Or you cannot see the 
 flower's rare blossom break into bloom or catch 
 the fleeting smile on a baby's face because the 
 light in you is gone out by reason of that bullet 
 at Passchendaale ; perhaps from the struggle God 
 can make light the darkness! Or you are just a 
 little sick all the time with a malady that cannot 
 be quite dislodged, and this is a perpetual trial 
 because you live on the edge of the pleasant land 
 where the healthy people are rushing about so 
 vigorously; even in this there may be more of 
 hope, more of prospect, than you had supposed.' 
 For think now! William, Prince of Orange and 
 the third king of that name in the roll of British 
 sovereigns, a statesman of wide vision and a gen- 
 eral of skill and courage, was racked constantly 
 
42 College and Religion 
 
 by asthma, both at home and In the field. Paul, 
 the great apostle, had a thorn in the flesh, "the 
 messenger of Satan to buffet him" as he calls it, 
 for Paul was really a dualist in his conception of 
 the moral government of the world. Parkman, 
 whose historical works have illuminated Cana- 
 dian history, was half-blind all his days from a 
 blow struck during his residence at Harvard Col- 
 lege. John Milton's light 
 
 , was spent 
 Ere half his days in this dark world and wide. 
 And that one talent which is death to hide 
 Lodged with him useless,' 
 
 and yet from that darkness emerged Paradise 
 Lost, Or, if you will go to ancient Sparta, you 
 will find there one Tyrtaeus, a poet, who though 
 lame fired by his song^he souls of warriors for 
 the fray. How many a sick room you can think 
 of in your own experience where the patient suf- 
 ferer has wrestled with pain, not one night only 
 unto the breaking of the day but many a night, 
 and refused to give in, to go without the bless- 
 ing, and has suddenly gained at last the vision 
 splendid to illuminate what was dark and unrea- 
 sonable before, so that callers, as they go out 
 
The Alchemy of Struggle 43 
 
 from the room, whisper reverently, *'Peni-el, 
 God's face." The process of this alchemy is te- 
 dious to a degree, but its distillate is a rare es- 
 sence indeed, the attar of roses of life. 
 
 But sometimes the Sable Wrestler who comes 
 upon us out of the night is the darkest shadow 
 that can fall across a human soul, death, the 
 death of one we loved far better than life itself; 
 "would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my 
 son, my son!" Then indeed the sinew of the 
 soul is withered, and the wrestler bids fair to 
 elude our grip and leave us nothing but the recol- 
 lection of an hour when all the sky went black 
 at once. Into the inner secret of a struggle such 
 as that it is not given us to penetrate save by 
 experience, nor is it considerate or profitable to 
 attempt a psychological dissection. I will just 
 say that in these long years of war I have seen 
 fathers and mothers, wives and sweethearts, go 
 through the agony and emerge with faces reflect- 
 ing triumph over that last enemy, which is Death. 
 God only knows how they won out, but I think in 
 the end they must have had a glimpse of His 
 face. 
 
 And so throughout it is the story that Greek 
 
44 College and Religion 
 
 drama proclaimed and that Jesus confirmed when 
 he set his face steadfastly to go to Jerusalem, the 
 story of characters *'made perfect through suffer- 
 ing.'* 
 
 Cross that liftest up my head, 
 
 1 dare not ask to fly from thee; 
 I lay in dust life's glory dead, 
 
 And from the ground there blossoms red 
 Life that shall endless be. 
 
 Suffering is the solvent which in the chemistry of 
 character precipitates the unworthy elements and 
 leaves the soul pure. It is not the native nugget 
 which has the fairest shape but the gold refined 
 under intense heat in the furnace and beaten into 
 form under the infinite blows of the goldsmith's 
 hammer. It is not the subject that came easiest 
 to you that you really remember best or that goes 
 most deeply into the tissues of your life; it is the 
 one at which you wrestled even unto tears. It is 
 not as a rule the child of ease and luxury who 
 serves best the world and lives in the grateful 
 hearts of men but some rail-splitter of Illinois, 
 tried as by fire and refined by suffering till he 
 reaches an apotheosis in the hearts of his country- 
 men and of the world. A strange alchemist this 
 
The Alchemy of Struggle 45 
 
 life of ours, working quietly, though we know it 
 not, to decompose and reconstitute our natures. 
 You may laugh at the idea of conversion, but it 
 is a process going on every day in your heart, not 
 suddenly like the electric flash except in rare in- 
 stances, but by the slow and steady operation of 
 soul-change. There is much to hearten us in that 
 reflection; "no afiliction for the present seemeth 
 joyous but grievous, but in the end it worketh the 
 peaceable fruits of righteousness." Up then and 
 on, if we have been hesitating to take hold of life 
 steadily and whole and trying rather to dodge its 
 difficulty and distress; let us wait on this side of 
 the brook Jabbok, strong of heart, fortified in 
 resolution, for the Wrestler who will join us pres- 
 ently to try for a fall. 
 
A GREAT UNIVERSITY, ITS COURSE 
 AND ITS DEGREE 
 
 Pilate therefore said unto him: Art thou a king then? 
 Jesus answered: Thou sayest that I am a king. To this 
 end was I born and for this cause came I into the world 
 that I should hear witness unto the truth. Every one that 
 is of the truth heareth my voice. Pilate saith unto him: 
 Pf^hat is truth? S. John i8: 37-8. 
 
 Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him: 
 If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed. 
 And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you 
 free. S. John 8: 31-2. 
 
 Within twenty years after the landing of the 
 Pilgrim Fathers there was founded in New 
 Towne, the future Cambridge, a college, the 
 avowed purpose of which was, as the stranger 
 may read from the inscription at the Main Gate 
 facing the First Church, to secure a continuance 
 of a godly and learned ministry for New Eng- 
 land when their first pastors should lie moulder- 
 ing in the dust. This was in 1636, and within a 
 short time it received the name of its first bene- 
 factor for its own, and became Harvard College 
 
 46 
 
A Great University , Its Course and Degree 47 
 
 in memory of John Harvard, minister of the 
 church in Charlestown. There is no single finer 
 thing at Harvard to-day than the statue of John 
 Harvard sitting thoughtful and intent near Me- 
 morial Hall, and the simple words on the base, 
 "John Harvard, Founder," compare favorably 
 with the rather lengthy inscriptions to which Har- 
 vard runs. 
 
 It was a small foundation, that original Har- 
 vard College, but it was truly as the Harvard 
 Ode says *'the first fruits of the wilderness," and 
 if meagre for long years in equipment and 
 scholarship, how rich it was in promise and in the 
 development of men of character and worth! 
 Much Latin and Greek of a kind, some very ele- 
 mentary mathematics, some attention to writing 
 clearly and to speaking, a little philosophy, that 
 was about all the College offered, a veritable 
 "oatmeal porridge" of education, the modern 
 student would be apt to say. But you remember 
 perhaps how upon BoswelPs praising oatmeal and 
 Dr. Johnson's bursting forth: "Oatmeal! Faugh! 
 In Scotland the food of men, in England the food 
 of horses!" Bozzy countered nicely by replying: 
 "Ay, Doctor, and where will you find finer men 
 
48. College and Religion 
 
 and finer horses?" The limited curriculum was 
 soundly learned, and by it the soil of those young 
 New England minds was broken for the sowing 
 of great thoughts. If at the Harvard College 
 of that day the student's field was circumscribed, 
 perhaps it would be fair to say that in the Har- 
 vard University of to-day the field is all too vast. 
 And what a great university the tiny college 
 of the seventeenth century has grown to be I Old 
 Massachusetts Hall that carries us back two hun- 
 dred years is but one among many brethren to- 
 day. In that dear old yard with its lofty elms 
 and green lawns, a place whose quaint simplicity 
 is represented in the homely word *'yard," have 
 grown up many structures dedicated to all the 
 ologies, with the plain old dormitories Stoughton, 
 Hollis, and Holworthy, still standing among them 
 as the landmarks of venerable tradition. And 
 away beyond the old yard, which no doubt seemed 
 ample room for the college of early days, the 
 great university has spread, evep seeking new 
 acres of earth's fields as the field of knowledge 
 grows. For Harvard jias been true to university 
 tradition and has followed the gleam; where a 
 new trail of truth seemed to open. Harvard has 
 
A Great University ^ Its Course and Degree 49 
 
 been ever ready to pursue it. "Let us follow the 
 argument whithersoever it leads," Socrates used 
 to say to his circle, and could you think of a finer 
 inscription to be written over the front gate of 
 any university that was sincerely interested in 
 learning? Let us not just follow the argument 
 for a while till we see if it is going to bring us 
 into conflict with the religious and economic con- 
 ventions of society; no, let us have the courage to 
 follow it whithersoever it leads, even if that be 
 to loss of supposed friends and discomfort and 
 some real unhappiness for the time being. I make 
 bold to think poorly of a university training that 
 has not inspired students with the "whitherso- 
 ever" idea of Socrates, and the success of a uni- 
 versity should be measured by the spirit of in- / 
 quiry it arouses in its scholars. If it is doing/ 
 that, then there is no endowment too precious 
 for the state to give such an institution or for 
 private benefaction to provide. It is the chief 
 glory of Harvard University that in It academic 
 freedom to think out and to speak out exists 
 practically unchallenged. 
 
 There was another founder once, a preacher 
 like John Harvard, who established In his life- 
 
50 College and Religion 
 
 time a sort of peripatetic college, picking up his 
 students everywhere. You remember how he 
 found them. There were two of them who were 
 
 / fishing, and the teacher said: ''Come along to 
 my school and learn a greater fishing trade than 
 that, the fishing for men's souls!" One was fol- 
 lowing the plough, another had a dull job in the 
 Customs House^a third was a young doctor with- 
 out a practice, — all of these heard the Founder's 
 call and were prompt to enroll in this strolling 
 university, the history of which has occupied ever 
 since so large a space on the canvas of human 
 history. Were there any academfc inducements 
 held out to them such as the B.A.'s and M.Sc.'s 
 and Ph.D.'s and all the other alphabet of decora- 
 tions that glitters before the student of to-day? 
 Was there any prescribed course for them to fol- 
 low or was all work just one glorious elective 
 after another in the school of Jesus? Was it a 
 
 A school of really high aims, or was it, like some 
 , modern institutions, founded to bolster up ancient 
 prejudices and decayed superstitions? 
 
 In the second passage I read you, Jesus, after 
 challenging strenuously a hostile public opinion, 
 speaks again in the midst of a group of those who 
 
A Great University, Its Course and Degree 51 
 
 had believed on him and speaks so plainly that 
 many even of these go their ways and walk no 
 more with him. What a strange college head is 
 this, boldly daring to offend students and to send 
 them away because he knows that they are not fit 
 for the course he has in view, a course which will 
 lead through Gethsemane to Calvary! But 
 among the words he utters at that time we find 
 some that deal with Jesus' view of the possibility 
 of reaching truth and the way of coming at it. 
 "If ye continue in my word, then are ye my dis- 
 ciples indeed, and ye shall know the truth." *'Con- ^ 
 tinuing in the word," — there you have the condi- 
 tion laid down upon the fulfilling of which you 
 may remain in college ; by so continuing you show 
 yourselves ^'disciples indeed," or, as we should 
 say, real students. And what is the net result 
 of so continuing and of being disciples indeed? 
 Why, "ye shall know the truth," — a liberal edu-^ 
 cation, you see, the thing so often talked about 
 at college and so seldom got. This is no unat- 
 tractive calendar, this of the school of Jesus, espe- 
 cially in this last result so surely promised; let us 
 investigate it a little. 
 
 "Continuing in my word," — I do not see that 
 
52 College and Religion 
 
 we must seek to attach to that phrase any mystic 
 or peculiar significance; It seems to me to indicate 
 nothing more than abiding by the Teacher's rule 
 of life, using It constantly, illustrating it, so far 
 as may be, in every deed and in every word. And 
 did he then give, as other masters have done, any 
 rule of life, any "word" whereby we might walk? 
 Do you remember the story of that shrewd and 
 clever man of law who stood up to tempt him 
 and asked: ''Master, what shall I do to Inherit 
 eternal life?" and was made according to the 
 soundest pedagogy to give the answer himself: 
 "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy 
 heart and with all thy soul and with all thy 
 strength and with all thy mind, and thy neighbor 
 as thyself." "Ay," said the Master, "thus do 
 and thou shalt live." 
 
 Eternal life begins here and now, since only 
 by our life now are we prepared to step into life 
 hereafter, so that the answer to the man of law 
 gives the key for all life; "this do and thou shalt 
 live," now and evermore. Love the Lord thy 
 God with all thy powers; put thyself body, soul, 
 and spirit in harmony with the Eternal Purposes ; 
 get in tune with the Infinite ; be a co-worker with 
 
A Great University, Its Course and Degree 53 
 
 God, help him to realize his work of creation by 
 being loyal, kind, upright, honest, pure, by identi- 
 fying thyself with all those great moral forces 
 of the world to which life points through the ages 
 of experience as to beacon-lights. Love thy 
 neighbor as thyself, but lay not in thy zeal for thy 
 neighbor too little stress upon thyself. Cultivate 
 thyself, read, study, mark, learn, inwardly digest, 
 get to love good music, to appreciate great books, 
 to hang fondly upon rare pictures; raise thine 
 own level and with it shall rise thy love for thy 
 neighbor, thy desire that he too may enter in to 
 the kingdom of the Beautiful and the Good. 
 
 And if we continue in his word, if we co-oper- 
 ate with God in his great purposes as revealed in 
 experience and marked out by history, and if we 
 cultivate ourselves and love our neighbor as our- 
 selves, what shall be our reward? Mark you, we 
 are elevated to the glorious company of disciples, 
 discipuli, pupils, students. What a rare privilege I 
 The student always thinks the teacher is to be ^ 
 envied, the teacher constantly envies the student 
 the chance that is his to go apart and study, un- 
 burdened by routine and committee meetings. 
 Some fortunate ones are able to devote their 
 
54 College and Religion 
 
 lives to study, and the mark of a rising civiliza- 
 tion will be the extent to which we make it more 
 possible for the deserving to do so. Disciples 
 indeed! Much as I admire the winners of the 
 V.C. and the D.S.O. and the D.C.M. and B.A.'s 
 and Ph.D.'s and LL.D.'s, I admire still more 
 those who are called to God's school to be "dis- 
 ciples indeed." I do not know that they will ever 
 get a parchment or win a degree such as other 
 schools have to offer, but I am certain that they 
 are promised a wonderful knowledge, and that 
 after all is what counts. I had rather have the 
 knowledge without the degree like Charles Dar- 
 win who upset the world of thought than the 
 degree without the knowledge for examples of 
 which one might not need to go far afield. 
 
 And what is this promise? What is the prom- 
 ise made in the calendar of God's school for those 
 who are enrolled for its courses as "disciples in- 
 deed?" "And ye shall know the truth." We go V 
 into this school, matriculating by loving God and 
 our neighbor and ourselves, and we shall know 
 the truth. What truth? Of science? The root 
 of life, the secret of the rocks, the magic of the 
 elements? Oh, no, not that! Of history? The 
 
A Great University, Its Course and Degree 55 
 
 real right and wrong of things, the Inwardness 
 of the motive for this and that? Oh, no, not 
 that! Of politics? The best form of govern- 
 ment, the best way of administering the best form 
 and of rectifying the less good? Oh, no, not 
 that! What truth then? Friends, the truth that 
 will dawn upon us in proportion to the soundness 
 of our matriculation knowledge in Jesus' law of 
 life is this, that above science and history and 
 politics and literature and language and art, 
 comes the question of our integration into the 
 Eternal Not-Ourselves, the question of our rela- 
 tionship to God and man not as scientists or poli- 
 ticians or men of letters or linguists or artists, but 
 as men and women with pulsing human hearts. 
 That, I believe. Is the answer to Pilate's question: 
 What Is truth? and I think that Jesus' whole life 
 and his death are a commentary in support of this 
 fundamental proposition, that you must as a hu- 
 man soul apart from all your dignities and pre- 
 tensions get into touch with God and all other 
 souls. 
 
 I said there was no degree in the school of the 
 "disciples Indeed." Perhaps that was wrong, for 
 hear the rest: ''and the truth shall make you 
 
§6 College and Religion 
 
 free." How one almost gasps at that word! 
 *'Free," — ^the hopes and the ambitions of suffer- 
 ing humanity are gathered in that word; for free- 
 dom men and women too have died cheerfully 
 and bravely; the magic of freedom's name drew 
 our young men by tens of thousands overseas to 
 withstand tyranny rampant. That word "free" 
 has been ever the slave's sigh and the freeman's 
 boast. But this freedom has been largely a ques- 
 tion of the absence of physical restraint; it can- 
 not compare with the freedom that truth shall 
 confer upon us. The freedom truth brings in the 
 school of the disciples is the freedom of soul that 
 comes to the man who has realized his mission 
 in the world as God's partner. For him life takes 
 on a larger meaning; God's in his heaven and I 
 am on the earth to do his will, not a mere arbi- 
 trary will imperious and tyrannical but a will that 
 is seen through all time making for righteousness. 
 Petty tasks grow great, little spheres large, one 
 talent grows to five, ten, or fifty in the atmosphere 
 of the New Freedom. I am free, free, no subject 
 of a tyrant God but the willing abettor of Infinite 
 Mind and Spirit which seeks to realize itself in 
 its dealings with mankind, the willing helper who 
 
A Great University, Its Course and Degree 57 
 
 chooses to collaborate, being free to reject. Is 
 there any freedom of which you have ever heard 
 or read to compare with that? 
 
 And with this freedom comes peace. Think of 
 that, to be at peace and to be free. What nation 
 would not be satisfied with that or what individ- 
 ual? Well, upon our great freedom in God 
 supervenes peace, the peace of God that passeth 
 all understanding. When the soul knows itself 
 free and uses that freedom to re-dedicate itself 
 to the great purposes of the Eternal, there comes 
 to it inevitably a sense of abiding peace, and by 
 that we may best measure our progress in free- 
 dom. Poor Pilate, though the procurator of the 
 Caesar, knew neither freedom nor peace; Jesus, 
 the Galilean peasant, knew both. We are per- 
 mitted to enter into a like experience, one that 
 we can hardly afford to forego, to know the truth 
 and to have the truth make us free. 
 
 And so the end of true university training like 
 the object in God's school which I have been dis- 
 cussing, is the attainment of freedom through 
 truth. It is clear that much so-called university 
 training, measured by this test, is sadly to lack, 
 but the ideal remains. Even so there are many 
 
58 College and Religion 
 
 who think they are quite far up in God's school 
 and have as a matter of fact no matriculation 
 standing; never mind, their assumptions cannot 
 affect the truth for which God's school stands. It 
 is in the combination of the purposes of these 
 two schools, the university and life, that great- 
 ness of soul lies, and no one can afford to aim at 
 less than greatness. It is for few to attain the 
 seats of the mighty but not all the mighty are 
 great; we may all be great, Truth's freemen, 
 God's noblemen. I hope you will not be satisfied 
 till you have added the degree that is conferred 
 in the school of God to your academic distinc- 
 tions. I do not know any better wish for your 
 happiness with which I could send you away ; it is 
 the secret of happiness that I have told you. May 
 f you find it. 
 
FAINT YET PURSUING 
 
 *'And Gideon came to Jordan and passed over^ he and 
 the three hundred men that were with him, faint yet pur- 
 suing" Judges 8:4. 
 
 The primitive traits in our nature are mani- 
 fold but elusive; they dwell unnumbered in the 
 inner chambers of our spirit and yet we know for 
 them no other name than Legion, for they are 
 many. They are within us subtle undertones that 
 stir to music when in speech or written word the 
 charmed vocables emerge that can play the chords 
 strung first in our remote forefathers and trans- 
 mitted to us by heredity's mysterious laws after 
 thousands of years; there are passions that rouse 
 them from a sleep that was so death-like that we 
 had not known they even existed in us. In a sense 
 other than is usually given to the phrase we are 
 the "heirs of all the ages"; there abides in us still 
 some figment of those generations that have 
 passed before, bound up in the marvel of your 
 personality and of mine. And thus it is that 
 
 59 
 
6o College and Religion 
 
 hearts that are gentle and that have never medi- 
 tated violence, feel a surge of emotion, a thrill 
 of ecstasy, as they read of the jousts of Arthur's 
 knights of the Table Round where spears splin- 
 tered and knight and horse went down thunder- 
 ously. It is the joy of battle that moved in the 
 heart of our remote sires in old, unhappy, far-off 
 days when fighting was the rule and peace the 
 exception, when men could truly speak of "the 
 bloom and the beauty, the splendor of spears." 
 And it is because of this no doubt that many of 
 the narratives of the Old Testament, utterly to 
 be condemned on any logical or humanitarian 
 grounds, are still read with avidity by souls that 
 in reality are living within the dispensation of the 
 Newer and the Better Testament. 
 
 It is among these narratives that the story of 
 Gideon which I read you in part this morning 
 falls. You recall how it ran. There is Israel's u 
 primitively conceived God closely following the 
 doings of his chosen people and speaking directly 
 to Gideon, the marshal of the host. There is the 
 self-elimination permitted to the faint-heart and 
 the coward, and there is the quaint test proposed 
 for the special selection of the instruments of 
 
Faint Yet Pursuing 6 1 
 
 Jehovah's vengeance. There is the MIdlanite's 
 dream and its sudden and fearful interpretation; 
 there is the attack with its odd stratagem of 
 pitchers, lamps, and trumpets, and that resound- 
 ing battle-cry: "The sword of the Lord and of 
 Gideon.'^ And then the pursuit of the shattered 
 host beyond Jordan by Gideon's little band, 
 "faint yet pursuing." 
 
 A story for a story's sake needs absolutely no 
 excuse, and the narrative of Gideon and the three 
 hundred is a story of adventure well and graphi- 
 cally told. It is a story of resource and courage, 
 even if it ends in blood and iron as well. I am 
 truly sorry for the person whose blood does not 
 pulse faster and whose every nerve does not tingle 
 as he reaches this point: 
 
 And the three companies blew the trumpets, 
 and brake the pitchers, and held the lamps in 
 their left hands and the trumpets in their right 
 hands to blow withal ; and they cried : The sword 
 of the Lord and of Gideon. 
 
 Oh, the rush of that sudden surprise, the wild 
 fury of the midnight attack, the glare of the 
 lamps, the blare of the trumpets, and the raucous 
 chorus of that pealing battle-cry ! 
 
62 College and Religion 
 
 It is a bad fashion that at once proceeds to 
 allegorize in every last detail a story such as that, 
 which was to the Israelites no allegory whatever 
 but a national legend of surpassing worth. As 
 well try to allegorize Sir Walter Raleigh, Drake, 
 Frobisher, Hawkins, and Sir Richard Grenville 
 of the **Revenge"; they are no allegory to sons 
 of the British stock but a part and parcel of our 
 rude island story. I do not propose to fall into 
 the trap, but I confess that my fancy has been 
 caught with one phrase of the story particularly 
 as being an inspiration to all who fight even 
 though on other fields than those of war; it is the 
 phrase that ended the lesson, "faint yet pursu- 
 ing." Perhaps I may be excused for making 
 through this a transition from Gideon to our- 
 selves, from his warfare with Midianites to our 
 own struggles with ourselves and our environ- 
 ment. 
 
 Not all that I have to say will be appreciated 
 as much by you who are young as by those who 
 have travelled somewhat further along the way 
 of life. You young people can sense the value of 
 that word "pursuing," but hardly yet, let us hope, 
 has there entered into your lexicon of life the 
 
Faint Yet Pursuing 63 
 
 word "faint." But it sometimes happens that 
 words we hear at one time, fall then upon stony 
 ground and bring forth no fruit, while later on 
 in other associations they are recalled and spring 
 marvellously to life and bring forth a return some 
 thirty, some sixty, and some an hundred fold# 
 You cannot yet in the merciful providence of God 
 appraise the faintness of later days, but I should 
 like to think when that faintness comes to any 
 one of you, some word of mine may leap to you 
 along the years, some word that may^ keep you, ^ 
 however faint, still pursuing. As for those others 
 of us who have to confess to increasing age and 
 occasional spells of faintness under the burden 
 and heat of the day, no word of heartening or 
 Encouragement ever needs a special plea by way 
 of justification. You have known what it means 
 sometimes to wonder how it would be if some 
 morning you just did not wake up at all to re- 
 sume those duties that seem to be grinding out 
 your very soul ; you have been half in love with ^ 
 easeful death. Your soul has been rasped and 
 torn in wrestling with pitiless detractors and in 
 answering false accusations; you have been put 
 upon the various racks that society ingeniously '^ 
 
64 College and Religion 
 
 applies to lovers of the beautiful and the true. 
 Your life looks like a failure in retrospect and 
 in prospect like torment. You have become very 
 faint, and pursuing does not any longer appeal 
 to you. You are wrestling In your Gethsemane 
 with black doubts ; you pray that this cup may 
 pass from you, but you are a little doubtful about 
 adding as Jesus did: "nevertheless, Father, not 
 my will but thine be done." 
 
 It does not follow that your friends or even 
 your family know how faint you are; they see In 
 you a little malaise, a bad headache, which leaves 
 you desirous of being left alone more than usual, 
 or perhaps they find you indisposed to talk. It Is 
 greatly to the credit of our humanity that so 
 many wrestlings of soul, yes, even to the utter- 
 ance, as the old knights used to say, are carefully 
 concealed from those who would be unnecessarily 
 troubled and disturbed by the black cloud that 
 hovers over us. Men fight their soul-battles as 
 they go about their business, women as they ar- 
 range the details of a household day, and often 
 the world is not much the wiser. "Never morn- 
 ing wore to evening but some heart did break,'* 
 but for each one that succumbs there are many 
 
Faint Yet Pursuing 6^ 
 
 that fight the same battle and win through with 
 blood and tears. 
 
 Pursuing seems to me, objectively in the story 
 of Gideon and subjectively with each of us, to 
 relate to ends and ideals. Gideon's purpose was 
 to destroy his enemies utterly; his aim was really 
 then to obliterate the object of his pursuit. Our 
 end and object is supposedly different; we wish to 
 catch up with our ideals not to destroy them but 
 to take them in our arms of affection and make 
 them our own. But there is a curious fatality in 
 this business of pursuing ideals after all ; so often 
 as we overtake our ideals, we really slay them, 
 and start the pursuit anew. The ideal that you 
 set up for yourself five, ten, fifteen years ago you 
 have undoubtedly in some measure attained, but 
 the attainment was unsatisfying because at once 
 you realized that other ideals lay ahead and that 
 you had actually caused your old ideals to perish 
 and had set out to pursue the new. And so you 
 came to understand that there are many senses 
 in which "to travel is better than to arrive." 
 
 This shifting character of ideals is something 
 that all of us should try to understand. It seems 
 to be the fashion for those who undertake to ad- 
 
66 College and Religion 
 
 vise young people upon commencement days and 
 other such high days, to talk to them a great deal 
 about preserving their ideals. Well, I fear that 
 ideals preserved are like a good many other pre- 
 served things, excellent museum material and 
 nothing more. What is really wrong with a large 
 number of people of mature years but of imma- v 
 ture intellectuality and spirituality is that they 
 literally fulfilled the advice so liberally ministered 
 to them and preserved their first ideals till these 
 ideals became mummified and their owners with 
 them. Th€<>3.dvice that would be of real service 
 would be to tell them to prepare to alter their 
 ideals as soon as they found themselves overhaul- 
 ing their first objective, to remind them that 
 ideals are not fixed and invariable things, and 
 finally to add by way of warning perhaps that 
 each new ideal should be higher and harder than 
 the last. 
 
 Of course this is harder to explain than the 
 other and harder to get understood too, but that 
 does not excuse either speakers or hearers from 
 the effort. It is disconcerting as well to have to 
 learn that no finality in ideals can be prescribed. '^ 
 In that respect ideals are like learning. There is 
 
Faint Yet Pursuing 67 
 
 no finality in learning; learning is a quest of which 
 we do not know the end. The end of learning is 
 not the acquisition of a body of facts to be dis- 
 charged upon the head of some luckless examiner ; 
 it is the pursuit of matter-of-fact truth from one 
 of her lairs to another. The attainment of some 
 particular point in this quest brings no finality; 
 becoming a B.A. or an M.A. or a Ph.D. brings 
 no release so far as the cause of true learning is 
 concerned. Learning is a road that runs up a 
 hill and tops a crest over which we cannot see. 
 Ideals likewise are elusive; we pursue them from 
 one stage to another, and, if we are the right sort, 
 we shall be pursuing them to the journey's end. 
 But I hope that no one \^ill think that the alter- 
 ation in ideals which is the mark of a truly pro- 
 gressive life excuses one altogether from the at- 
 tempt to cultivate ideals. As well say that be- 
 cause there is no known finality to learning, we 
 should abandon research and give up the cult of 
 knowledge. Humanity well knows that we can- 
 not certainly descry the end of knowledge, and 
 yet in every civilized state large expenditures are 
 made to advance that very knowledge the end of 
 which is doubtful. And so with our ideals; we 
 
68 College and Religion 
 
 cannot certainly affirm that you at twenty must 
 take an ideal to serve you through all your life, 
 or even promise that with a constant adaptation 
 of ideals you will achieve a definite goal, but we 
 do not think for a moment that this absolves you 
 from the necessity of ideals. 
 
 Still, the cynic might ask, as in every age he 
 has asked: "Why have ideals at all when you 
 admit that the end is uncertain? There are the 
 pleasures of life which are understandable, im- 
 mediately realizable, and unprovocative of dis- 
 cussion about abstract ends." Against this one 
 can set with confidence all the belief and the ex- 
 perience of the race. Here it is again as it is 
 with knowledge. There are hosts of people who 
 have little or no use for knowledge in their own 
 lives, but they will nearly all join in the opinion 
 that the cultivation of truth, the pursuit of mat- 
 ter-of-fact knowledge, should be promoted in our 
 universities. So with ideals. It is a poor sort of 
 business man or professional man who does not 
 lay claim to ideals for the conduct of his business 
 or his profession; the ideals may be low in all 
 conscience or he may in practice contradict them, 
 having one set of standards for public speech and 
 
Faint Yet Pursuing 69 
 
 another for private action, but the fact that he 
 will talk of ideals at all is a tribute to the power 
 of the ideal in the world. Ideals are the voice of 
 God to humanity; you may avoid the call of that 
 voice as it comes through this medium or that, 
 but I do not see how you can actually avoid it in 
 human experience and in the consensus of human 
 opinion. After all there was something in that 
 dictum of St. Augustine's: securus ijdicat orhis 
 t err arum. 
 
 And now you will have no difficulty in under- 
 standing why in the pursuit of the ideal we grow 
 faint. Through the arch of the ideal 
 
 Gleams that untravelled world whose margin 
 
 fades 
 Forever and forever when I move, 
 
 and it is just because the margin fades and the 
 delectable land retreats before us that we grow 
 weary and faint. We yearn for finality; experi- 
 ence teaches us that there is none, and we are in- 
 clined to resent the discovery. Still, the laws of 
 life are here ; they were here before we were and 
 will abide after we are gone. They sprang out 
 of untracked eternity and to eternity they will 
 stand unchallenged. Like Margaret Fuller then 
 
70 College and Religion 
 
 we must "accept the Universe" and make up our 
 minds that happiness is most to be realized in 
 conforming to its laws. And of these laws none 
 is more certain than just this, that we slay our 
 ideal when we attain it. That is why I say so 
 often that life is a quest that never ceases. In so 
 far as we are true men and women we are all 
 Knights of the Round Table questing after the 
 Holy Grail, the vision of the perfection of the 
 spirit. Among us all there will be few Sir Gala- 
 hads to whom was vouchsafed the revelation of 
 the holy vessel 
 
 "Clothed in white samite or a luminous cloud" 
 
 but there is no reason why there should not be 
 many a Sir Bors who despite imperfections of 
 character had a vision which never faded from 
 his mind and spiritualized all his life thereafter. 
 And remember how the Knights of the Round 
 Table fared in that quest, how they endured all 
 manner of hard living, how they sojourned in the 
 open under no canopy save heaven, how they 
 fared afar 
 
 "O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent," 
 amid storms and cold, through strange peoples. 
 
Faint Yet Pursuing 71 
 
 in peril of their lives, and with constant challenge 
 of battle; they were often very faint with their 
 pursuing, very heart-sick, very weary. To be 
 sure we have not the outward glamor of knight- 
 hood about us, but it is ours to live the life of 
 chivalry none the less; we too may win worship 
 by knightly deeds, and we too carry shields of 
 the spirit whereon is graven an escutcheon that 
 we may not sully upon pain of shame that burns 
 and stings. Our jousting days come sometimes 
 when we are riding triumphant in the lists and 
 bearing down opponents with our well-placed 
 spears while the pavilions ring with applause, 3ut 
 there are the other days too when the search for 
 the ideal carries us far away from Camelot and 
 the Table Round with all its goodly fellowship 
 into the land of dragons and oppressive men, a 
 land where every turn in the woodland trail may 
 bring a challenge and a combat. 
 
 There is no purpose served by denying that in 
 those days we shall grow faint; it would be but 
 contradicting the experience of the elders and 
 creating an atmosphere of delusion for the young. 
 The real point is to consider what shall sustain 
 us in those days of faintness when we doubt the 
 
72 College and Religion 
 
 value of those ideals we have been following, in 
 those days when we would fain make an end of 
 further ado. I think there are two such things, 
 and you know them as well as I; they are retro- 
 spect and prospect. If a situation is bad, the 
 only elevation of spirit you can win is gained by 
 looking elsewhere, not to the neglect, mark you, 
 of the desperate situation, but to the heartening 
 of ourselves for handling it. Retrospect serves 
 to remind us of those golden days when we 
 seemed to be establishing contact with our ideals ; 
 they were days of rare inspiration for each one 
 who has known them, those days when 
 
 this earth he walks on seems not earth, 
 This light that strikes his eye-ball is not light. 
 The air that smites his forehead is not air. 
 But vision, yea, his very hand and foot. 
 In moments when he feels he cannot die. 
 And knows himself no vision to himself. 
 Nor the high God a vision. 
 
 To lay up by earnest striving the memories of 
 such days for ourselves is the best insurance 
 against growing faint as we pursue ; they form the 
 gallery of the soul where it may in moments of 
 dejection contemplate the thing that it hath been 
 and draw strength from the view. 
 
Faint Yet Pursuing 73 
 
 And then there is prospect. We are tempo- 
 rarily disillusioned, or our ideals are undergoing 
 one of those shifts that come periodically in a 
 normal life, and the present seems to afford noth- 
 ing to look out upon; with retrospect over 
 brighter days let us couple the prospect of days 
 ahead when the clouds shall lift again. The wind 
 does not always lash the trees nor the storm 
 lower from the sky; there is radiance still ahead, 
 be sure. From the temporary disillusionment we 
 shall recover and with a deeper faith as our re- 
 ward; we shall find presently new ideals just a 
 little higher than those we have slain by over- 
 taking. And apart from all this commonplace 
 philosophy, we are Knights of the Great Adven- 
 ture, which of itself always irradiates the future, 
 and makes the present, however hard, seem but 
 a stepping stone to experiences rich and strange. 
 It was the spirit of Ulysses of Ithaca : 
 
 The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks ; 
 The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the 
 
 deep 
 Moans round with many voices. Come, my 
 
 friends, 
 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. 
 Push off, and sitting well in order smite 
 
74 'College and Religion 
 
 The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds 
 To sail beyond the sunset and the baths 
 Of all the western stars until I die. 
 It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; 
 It may be we shall touch the happy isles 
 And see the great Achilles whom we knew. 
 Though much is taken, much abides, and though 
 We are not now that strength which In old days 
 Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we 
 
 are, — 
 One equal temper of heroic hearts. 
 Made weak by time and fate, but strong In will 
 To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 
 
 This is the spirit of the Great Adventure, and 
 it comes from one who had grown faint often 
 enough in the wars at Troy and the long wander- 
 ings after before he reached his rocky Ithaca. 
 "Though much is taken, much abides," and he 
 knows the worth and the strength of the resolute 
 will that recuperates itself. 
 
 O well for him whose will is strong, 
 He suffers but he cannot suffer wrong, 
 He suffers, but he cannot suffer long. 
 
 But that is not quite all. There is a touch of 
 finality to our ideals that I must not pass by; thatt 
 touch is their association with God. All our 
 ideals lead up to him and in him find their end; 
 just what that end is and Its ultimate significance 
 
Faint Yet Pursuing 75 
 
 no system of philosophy or theology has ever at- 
 tempted to show. It is here that faith comes in 
 as faith inevitably must somewhere and some- 
 how; God is the end, and we must trust God 
 therefore for the validity of that end. And then 
 too with regard to the relation of our ideals to 
 God, we are to remember that, so far as we may 
 judge, this world of God's is incomplete, and that 
 for its completion, our collaboration is needed, 
 else the work will not be done as it should be. 
 
 Creation's Lord, we give thee thanks 
 That this thy world is incomplete. 
 That battle calls our marshalled ranks. 
 That work awaits our hands and feet. 
 
 What though the kingdom long delay 
 And still with haughty foes must cope? 
 It gives us that for which to pray, 
 A field for toil and faith and hope. 
 
 The real reason, it may be, for this constant shift 
 of ideals and for the faintness that comes to us 
 in the long pursuit of the unattainable, as it seems 
 to us, is that it is a section of the cosmic plan 
 revealed in the life of each one of us. The watch- 
 word and keynote of the universal scheme would 
 seem to be development, and this is an assiduous 
 
76 College and Religion 
 
 process. It is a process that means change and 
 readjustment, and changes and readjustments 
 bring weariness oftentimes. Still 
 
 Since what we choose is what we are 
 And what we love we yet shall be, 
 The goal may ever shine afar, 
 The will to win it makes us free. 
 
 The very source of our freedom is the liberty to 
 pursue the ideal, and it is this pursuit brings 
 weariness, and the weariness earns the liberty, 
 and there your circle is complete. Your liberty 
 is bought with a price. That too 1 feel is part of 
 the cosmic plan, that there is nothing worth while 
 that can be had for nothing. 
 
 Finally then my own consolation in the press 
 of unceasing and exacting duties is the belief that 
 the things I do are minute but necessary cogs in 
 the mill of God, and that the whole machinery is 
 impeded to the extent that my part of it is im- 
 perfect. I know that if I fail Him, God cannot 
 fully develop His work as He would like to do. It 
 is as George Eliot wrote in her poem Stradi- 
 varius : 
 
 If my hand slacked 
 I should rob God, since He is fullest good. 
 
Faint Yet Pursuing 77 
 
 Leaving a blank instead of violins. 
 
 //^ could not make Antonio Stradivari's violins 
 
 Without Antonio. 
 
 And thus by the very demands of duty I rise to 
 the divine, or realize the divine that is in me. I 
 shall be faint but I shall not fail; I shall be still 
 pursuing. "The sword of the Lord and of 
 Gideon." 
 
MAKING THE GRADE 
 
 I THINK it is Punch that has a story of an Eng- 
 lish loafer who delivered himself as follows: 
 "Work! W'enever I 'ears that word, I goes all 
 of a tremble!" There are those who without 
 being loafers probably feel that way about exam- 
 inations; the mere word sets them all of a trem- 
 ble. Few there be who look with favor upon 
 examinations, but remember that this applies to 
 examiners as well as to their victims. 
 
 The examinee thinks that examination season 
 is a time when the examiner, a ruthless, cruel, 
 calculating and cunning individual, gloats over the 
 sufferings of his candidates as they attempt in the 
 words of the negro preacher *'to solve de insolu- 
 ble, to expHc de inexpHcable, and to unscrew de 
 inscrutable." But as a matter of fact (and this 
 is quite different from the fiction of it) the ex- 
 aminer sees before him but a vista of thirty, forty, 
 or even a hundred and forty papers in which the 
 same time-honored passages of literature and the 
 
 78 
 
Making the Grade 79 
 
 same immemorial traditions of science will be ex- 
 hibited in unbroken monotony until the drowsi- 
 ness of the Lotos-Eaters* Land steals over him, 
 and he becomes quiescent over the half-marked 
 page, just an ordinary mortal overcome with 
 sleep. He realizes as he reads the futility of 
 examinations. He knows that they are in some 
 respects sheer matters of knack, the knack which 
 some students possess for writing papers, that 
 often they are matters of mere chance, success or 
 failure turning on the last formula at which the 
 examinee glanced before he dropped his note- 
 book and advanced with a firm step to the scaf- 
 fold. Time and again too he thinks he discerns 
 under a confusion of words a probability that the 
 question is really being answered, and then he 
 wonders whether the information is really there 
 or if he is not in charity supplying the key that 
 unlocks the riddle. Futile they certainly are, but 
 just how shall we dispense with them? 
 
 And of course the examinee reahzes much of 
 this futility too. He knows how much knack 
 counts for, especially if he has the gift himself; 
 it will spread a little knowledge to a wonderful 
 thinness over quite an area. Time and again he 
 
8o College and Religion 
 
 has probably experienced, now with joy, now with 
 sorrow, what matters of freakish chance they are, 
 and how even with the best of preparation it is 
 still necessary that the luck break with you a little 
 at least. He realizes that the last answer he 
 wrote was a trifle mixed up, but time pressed and 
 he could not go back to amend or clarify. And 
 knowing all these things and considering himself 
 always and uniquely the sufferer, he is apt to treat 
 the whole process as a more or less amiable hum- 
 bug and to regard examinations as series of select 
 puzzles for the mystification of the student and 
 his reduction to a proper state of humility In 
 the intellectual world. 
 
 Of course there is justification for all this. 
 There have always been and always will be exam- 
 inations that are unfair both in conception and 
 phrasing. There are papers in which the whole 
 object Is to show the examinee that he knows 
 nothing, others which seem designed to prove 
 that the examiner knows everything. This of 
 course is wrong. To demonstrate to a student 
 his ignorance is poor business unless it be for the 
 elimination of conceit or the stimulation of effort; 
 to exhibit your learning is a poor piece of vanity 
 
Making the Grade 8 1 
 
 in a world which is such a guess-work world at 
 best. The real object of examinations should be 
 to ascertain, subject to all the known difficulties 
 of the method, the relation of the examinee to a 
 broad summary of the year's work; the more 
 minute investigations should have been made 
 sooner. But one has to be at the game a long 
 time to realize this; the worst examinations are 
 those set by very young and very earnest instruc- 
 tors who have just got through with being exam- 
 ined themselves. 
 
 One of the most delightful things about exam- 
 inations is the modesty, real or affected, of ex- 
 aminees when the ordeal is over. To be sure, I 
 have heard that girls actually get together and 
 go over papers they have written and compute 
 their percentages, though it seems too horrible to 
 be true, but among the lads of my time an exam- 
 ination once written was absolutely committed to 
 the vasty deep of the oblivious past, and the hon- 
 ored formula of reply in event of your being 
 asked how you had done in a paper, was simply: 
 "Oh, I guess I made the grade." I have called 
 it an honored formula; honor strictly required 
 that it should be used as well by the proudest com- 
 
82 College and Religion 
 
 petitor as by the poor literalist to whom the 
 phrase was not only an answer to a friend but a 
 prayer, in the phrase of Henley, "to whatever 
 Gods may be." It was a phrase that apparently 
 indicated a fine contempt for results, a noble in- 
 difference for fate and its decrees, and a philo- 
 sophic recognition of the essential futility of the 
 whole business. 
 
 At the same time we were all interested be- 
 yond what our fixed and conventional phrase im- 
 plied, no matter what our affected indifference. 
 The best student wanted to know how far he had 
 left the "grade" behind; the student who hoped 
 that luck and the examiner's satisfaction in his 
 last meal would play into his hands, had but one 
 grade in mind and that a humble one, but he had 
 it very much in mind night and day. And ap- 
 parently there must be many such; are not the 
 long lists of equals which regularly terminate our 
 class-lists eloquent testimony to this truth? Most 
 often "making the grade" looks to the minimum 
 of achievement, not to the maximum. 
 
 And so one might go on indefinitely philo- 
 sophizing about examinations, but no amount of 
 philosophy would remove the examinations, even 
 
Making the Grade 83 
 
 as while there may be a philosophy which thinks 
 away matter, you still cut yourself with a knife 
 or bump your head in the dark hall. It has not 
 been my purpose in this ramble to suggest a pleas- 
 ant age in prospect wherein the wicked examiner 
 shall cease from troubling and the weary student 
 be at rest. True we have quite a band of amiable 
 women who gather at mothers' clubs and such- 
 like agencies of what is called uplift, to pass reso- 
 lutions against children and young people being 
 compelled to learn anything whatever or to prove 
 by any method that they have learned anything, 
 but society seldom worries much over these pro- 
 nouncements and usually smiles the smile of long 
 experience at these pacifists of education and 
 passes by on the other side. Rather I have it in 
 mind to urge that examinations with all their ap- 
 parent one-sidedness and unfairness and their ele- 
 ments of luck and knack and all the rest, are not 
 so very remote from the general experience of 
 life, that all life is really an examination in which, 
 whether we stop to realize it or not, we are can- 
 didates in the presence of the Great Examiner. 
 Now this may not reconcile you to life, this hav- 
 ing it compared with an examination, but perhaps 
 
84 College and Religion 
 
 it will reconcile you to examinations to learn that 
 they are really a microcosm of life, and being 
 reconciled to examinations is very important at 
 least several times a year. 
 
 Any examination that amounts to anything is 
 of course a genuine test of powers, power of 
 memory, power of reasoning, power of expres- 
 sion. It is in part a review of work traversed 
 but it is also an inquiry into your ability to con- 
 vert that old work to new uses. You memorize 
 the formulae of mathematics and the proofs for 
 these, but can you use them for the solution of 
 novel propositions? You can translate all the 
 assigned Latin of your course, but can you take a 
 piece of unseen Latin and make an understand- 
 able rendering of that? You have performed 
 certain analyses in your chemistry course; how 
 are you going to fare with the analysis of the un- 
 known compound that you meet at examination 
 time? You will hear a great deal of grumbling 
 against examinations because they insist on going 
 appreciably farther than the mere memory and 
 trying out the reason as well; this is very child- 
 ish if you really believe that a university has 
 some duties in the field of education. Well, life 
 
Making the Grade 85 
 
 goes pretty much as examinations go. There is 
 always plenty of review on the back-work, so 
 much of it that the most patient of us at times 
 get tired and sigh for relief from monotonous 
 and humdrum duties, and perhaps it is because we 
 get rebellious that we do not always make the 
 showing we should on this part of life's paper. 
 We are inclined to say: "Oh, I've done that 
 thing ten thousand times and done it carefully and 
 well; what's the use of bringing this up again?" 
 just like the examinee who says: "Aw shucks. 
 Professor X. has heard me translate that passage 
 half-a-dozen times; why does he come asking for 
 it here again on his paper?" and forthwith pro- 
 ceeds to do a sloppy piece of work. Perhaps life 
 and examinations are both wrong; at all events 
 they are curiously alike. 
 
 But life brings every now and then, sometimes 
 in very rapid procession, a series of original prob- 
 lems for solution, and then the examination be- 
 comes critical. Everything that you have ever"^^ 
 come to know through previous experience, every 
 atom of accumulated judgment, is required to 
 face the new situation and to reason out the new 
 conclusion. Well, did you ever meet the type 
 
86 College and Religion 
 
 of examinee who, after first objecting to one ex- 
 amination on the ground that it needlessly cov- 
 ered the old trails again, next assails a second 
 examination because it made too much demand 
 on the reason? You will find plenty of people 
 acting that way in life's examination too. While 
 things are going as they have always gone, they 
 will be found complaining of the monotony of 
 their existence; when life's storms descend upon 
 them in the form of loss, sorrow, frustration of 
 plans, sickness, situations which call for reason 
 applied to experience for a solution, you will find 
 them reproaching God for having deserted them 
 or laid upon them a burden greater than they 
 can bear. But that is rather feeble. We are 
 apt to think poorly of the student who cries : "I 
 don't want to have to face any new situation on 
 my examination because that is something I can't 
 prepare for;" in like manner we have a right to 
 sense a lack of moral fibre in one who in life 
 prays for tasks equal to his strength rather than 
 seeks strength to measure up to his tasks. He 
 will not make much of a showing in life's ex- 
 amination; he may "make the grade" in the poor- 
 est sense of the term, but you will not need to 
 
Making the Grade 87 
 
 bother looking for his name in the first division. 
 He is not the material from which is made a 
 Moses or Elijah or Socrates or Jesus or John Hus 
 or Savonarola or Galileo or Cromwell or Lin- 
 coln or Cardinal Mercier or the other names be- 
 fore which we bare our heads. They were con- 
 cerned with something better than making the 
 grade, and so have won immortality. 
 
 Examinations are not ideal arrangements; no 
 more is life. Examinations, sometimes by malice, 
 more often by inadvertence, are unjust; life is 
 likewise full of little injustices which are usually 
 the result of carelessness, forgetfulness, or sel- 
 fishness, and of greater injustices which can be 
 set down mostly to sheer malevolence, and you 
 have to take these injustices little or great along 
 with the rest of the paper. A good deal of your 
 education comes in the handling of these, and the 
 test of your education will lie in the manner of 
 man or woman you emerge from this part of the 
 test. And remember that the real examiner who 
 knows his business, never reads very far in the 
 answer-paper before he discovers the error of 
 inadvertence in the paper that he has set and 
 makes due allowance for it; so too I doubt not 
 
88 College and Religion 
 
 that God, the Great Examiner, as he looks over 
 the answer-papers of life realizes how unfair his 
 paper has been at times and in places to poor, 
 stumbling individuals, and just cancels the score 
 in the Book of Life. 
 
 The grades are hard to decipher in the returns 
 from life's examinations except for the few con- 
 spicuous firsts we have all agreed to recognize. 
 We are not very certain about our own perform- 
 ances, and the best people in the world, like the 
 pleasantly diffident students I mentioned, will 
 hardly do more than express the hope that they 
 have made the grade. We are in the situation 
 of a large class after the papers are handed in; 
 certain ones, we know, have passed and passed 
 well, but the fate of the general run of the class 
 is in the hands of the examiner. So we stand in 
 life. Some certainly have ''made the grade" by 
 devoted lives and heroic deaths; the common run 
 of us write on and the Great Examiner in no 
 way signifies what the result is. For ourselves, 
 we shall probably learn only otherwhere how 
 well or ill we wrought; others who remain after 
 we have passed on, may be able to say of us that 
 we got through. If dying we still live in a tender 
 
Making the Grade 89 
 
 heart or two that was the better for our living, 
 I doubt not that, whether with distinction or no, 
 we shall have made the grade. 
 
 St. Paul saw well enough that there are no 
 one hundred per cent papers in life's examinations, 
 and so he wrote: *'We have all sinned and come 
 short of the glory of God." Most of us are 
 humble enough to admit at each day's end that 
 the result St. Paul indicates is correct; what 
 bothers us at the day's end is the sense of failure 
 that it often brings, the sense that we cannot 
 truthfully cry "Vixi ! I have lived!" The glory 
 of God is our ideal, the finest moral and spiritual 
 ideal we can form for ourselves, not some phys- 
 ical nimbus or halo, as some people seem to think, 
 who have never got any further through the 
 wilderness than Mt. Sinai; it is the sun of our 
 hopes, the star by which we steer our way, a sun 
 that glows and a star that brightly beams, 
 illumining all of life if we will but suffer it. 
 The ordinary ideals of our life we sometimes 
 overtake; this is in us the infinite ideal, and of it 
 we necessarily fall short. But there is no need 
 for gloom over that, no need to found upon St. 
 Paul's word some appalling theory of everlasting 
 
90 College and Religion 
 
 damnation by an offended God; the real gloom 
 is for those who reck nothing of the glory of God 
 or of the fact that they fall short of it. They 
 simply isolate themselves from moral develop- 
 ment and lose much of the zest of the life that 
 now is, and, I should conjecture, imperil their 
 chances of progress in any life to come that there 
 may be. 
 
 I have spoken once or twice of the Great 
 Examiner under whom we are all candidates and 
 whose papers we take, consciously or uncon- 
 sciously. It is not possible to say much of Him 
 because His revelation of Himself Is such an in- 
 dividual experience that it almost eludes telling 
 and in the telling seems to lose its certainty and its 
 charm. But those who have known Him best, do 
 not report Him as the stern and savage Examiner 
 of whom we have so often heard, always more 
 ready to pluck a candidate than to pass him. 
 Indeed if He were such. He would be no fit 
 Examiner in the scheme of the Universe, and 
 God and the Universe are one. You as students 
 would have a very poor opinion of a notorious 
 "plucking" examiner who stopped more people 
 than he passed because it suggests to your mind 
 
Making the Grade 91 
 
 injustice, and we may not form a conception of 
 the Great Examiner which is unjust, which re- 
 flects upon His justice. The conceptions of God 
 in the past were not flattering in this regard; now 
 through the influence of liberal thought we feel 
 that God as our Examiner wants to find out, not 
 how bad we are, but how much progress we have 
 made in appreciating the good, the beautiful and 
 the true. It is true that He does not set easy 
 papers, but He sets no papers that cannot be 
 done, although some can be solved and answered 
 only with blood and tears. And they must be 
 taken; we cannot decline God's papers, because 
 we are in fact at work upon them every minute 
 of our lives. 
 
 And that is the way in which the Great Ex- 
 aminer's papers avoid the charge so often laid 
 against examinations, that they have the result 
 of encouraging a cram towards the last. I am 
 afraid that there is no cram towards the last that 
 will avail us much in God's papers; I have no con- 
 fidence in mystic formulae which will at the 
 eleventh hour save the situation and suddenly 
 prepare an obviously unprepared candidate. 
 That might possibly work at times in the 
 
92 College and Religion 
 
 academic life; It will not work here. The ex- 
 amination is continuous; it Is the building of 
 character, and character-building is a process that 
 is life-long, and it may be longer than even that. 
 It is folly then to postpone any distinct effort on 
 this examination; ''now is the accepted time and 
 now Is the day of salvation." Begin to think, 
 not prigglshly but seriously, of thoughts, words, 
 and deeds, as part of your examination mate- 
 rial, and study day by day to frame your answers 
 a little less short of your own best Ideal, which 
 stands to you for the time being as the "glory of 
 God." Then again — and this Is good advice 
 both for man's examinations and for God's — do 
 not fasten your gaze too much on the examina- 
 tion material but keep an eye on the goal. It is 
 bigger than the processes that bring you there, 
 just as an education is bigger than Math. 6 or 
 Latin 51. And only by cherishing the golden 
 vision of the goal both In education and In life 
 shall we escape the soul-weariness that examina- 
 tions always bring; it is the will to win the goal 
 that emancipates us from examination drudgery 
 and makes us the free sons of God. 
 
COMMENCEMENT 
 
 This is the ceremony which the English call 
 ''convocation." For myself I prefer the New 
 England term "commencement." Convocation 
 suggests to my mind all the dignitaries on the 
 platform, governor, justices, chancellor, presi- 
 dent, deans, professors, in a quite dazzling and 
 unintelligible array of hoods and gowns and caps. 
 But to the reflective mind these are not the figures 
 of interest on the day of graduation; the vital 
 feature is the galaxy of young seniors in the audi- 
 torium below, whose gowns are simple black and 
 whose hoods do not so much suggest a spectro- 
 scopic analysis. It is of them we should be think- 
 ing; it is their day of days when the period of 
 academic preparation is completed and they are 
 ready at last to "commence," to enter upon the 
 larger field. By all means let it be "commence- 
 ment," which turns the spot-light on the proper 
 place ! 
 
 It is a pretty thought contained in that word, 
 
 93 
 
94 College and Religion 
 
 rather a heartening thought too for a good many 
 of you, I imagine. College days have been so 
 joyful and on the whole so carefree despite pro- 
 fessors, classes and examinations, that to some 
 this day we call ^'commencement" takes on rather 
 the aspect of the everlasting end of all things; it 
 seems impossible to visualize life without the 
 accompaniments I have just mentioned, and from 
 what we cannot visualize, we usually shrink. 
 And so these to whom I have just referred 
 
 feel like one who treads alone 
 Some banquet hall deserted. 
 Whose guests are fled, whose garlands dead. 
 And all but he departed. 
 
 But courage! Life does not consist merely in 
 the repetition of one type of experience; its mar- 
 vel and wonder is made up in the succession 
 of different experiences. You remember how 
 Shakespeare has put that view in his seven ages 
 of man; what he states cynically, I believe in 
 practically as the thing that gives savor to living. 
 It has been good to be a student, it has been a 
 time of rare joys, wonderful friendships, ripen- 
 ing knowledge, frolicsome diversion; all true, but 
 would you deliberately choose to remain forever 
 
Commencement 95 
 
 an undergraduate? No, you would not even if 
 you could, because an instinct tells you it is not 
 the law of the best life to live in a state of 
 arrested experience, no matter how high or holy 
 that experience may be. "Lord, it is good for us 
 to be here," said Peter on the Mount of Transfig- 
 uration, "let us therefore make all preparations to 
 stay here," but God knew^ better and drew the 
 vision to a close so that with Jesus the disciples 
 might return to the plain to pick up the thread of 
 life once more in the field of action. And so I 
 have said that if any of you are feeling just a little 
 gloomy about this day which marks the end of 
 your undergraduate course, you should find cheer 
 and encouragement in this good word "Com- 
 mencement" which will serve to remind you that, 
 while no doubt much is left behind, it is left be- 
 hind only that you may step through the open- 
 swinging portals into a larger life. 
 
 Let us think for a moment of what you are 
 leaving; I dp not refer now to the frolics and 
 the fun and the friendships, but to the proper 
 work of a university. You are leaving the place 
 where for the first time In most cases you came 
 to know Intellectual responsibility. You came to 
 
g6 College and Religion 
 
 the university from the routine discipline of the 
 school-room; that has been gradually relaxed 
 through your several years until at the last lec- 
 tures had quite succeeded recitations, and in the 
 happier instances, frank conversation between 
 student and teacher had succeeded lectures. In 
 this way you were learning to stand intellectually 
 on your own feet, and so gradual on the whole 
 has the process been that your instructors have 
 realized the change better than yourselves. 
 Well, you must leave that process behind now so 
 far as further formal development of it at the 
 hands of your college instructors goes; the ques- 
 tion for you is, are you going to leave it behind 
 actually as well as formally, or are you going 
 to carry out into the new life, the commencement 
 of which lies so near, this principle of intellectual 
 responsibility for yourself? In the church, in the 
 political party, in the community, are you going 
 to lean or are you going to do your own thinking? 
 The great test of your education is the capacity 
 it has developed in you to think straight and to 
 think through; are you going from your very 
 commencement to demonstrate that in some sense 
 you really have gained an education? Your 
 
Commencement 
 
 97 
 
 answer is a very vital concern to the social group 
 of which you are to constitute a unit. 
 
 I have used the phrase "to think straight"; 
 that implies that you do not allow yourself to be 
 drawn in this direction or in that overmuch by 
 bias, prejudice, or distorted vision, but that with 
 your eye fixed on the Pole Star, you steer for the 
 goal of decision. "Shun thou extremes," save in 
 those crises which will arise from time to time 
 when, as Sumner, the great Massachusetts Sena- 
 tor, said upon the issue of slavery: "There is no 
 other side"; ordinarily have much regard for the 
 arguments from this side and from that, and 
 decide in calmness the issue. I am not pretend- 
 ing that this is any simple or easy thing, or a 
 thing in which men and women ordinarily succeed 
 very well, but it is for you above all people to 
 try in virtue of your education. 
 
 You are leaving behind you your instruction in 
 intellectual method, thinking straight, and your 
 instruction in intellectual aim, thinking through; 
 you are also leaving behind an atmosphere con- 
 sciously permeated with the love of the true and 
 the beautiful for their own sakes, a little kingdom 
 in which the rarest treasures are often "all the 
 
98 College and Religion 
 
 charm of all the Muses flowering in a lonely 
 word," or, it may be, the discovery of a new star- 
 world swimming into our astonied ken. It is the 
 realm of the Mind, a realm where all who com- 
 prehend are kings and there are no slaves. I 
 hope you have learned to think well of that en- 
 chanted garden which you can carry with you 
 anywhere if you really love its brooks and flow- 
 ers, so that the darkest place can be made light 
 and the hardest road easy and the roughest places 
 plain and the saddest days more cheerful and pain 
 relieved and death assuaged in the contemplation 
 of that garden and in sweet recollections that 
 gather around it. Do not forget it as you go 
 out into a world where thought for its own sake 
 and beauty for its own sake is rather at a dis- 
 count, the world whereof the poet felt wearily 
 obliged to write 
 
 The world is too much with us; late and soon, 
 Getting and spending we lay waste our powers ; 
 Little we see in Nature that is ours; 
 We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! 
 
 That single inspiration which above all others 
 a university training should provide is such that 
 he who has received it can afford to laugh at the 
 
Commencement 99 
 
 person who tells him that the real prizes of life 
 lie elsewhere than in the life of the mind. 
 
 But do not understand me as warning you at 
 the very time of the commencement of your life 
 in the world, against that world. It is not an 
 ideal world, but good, bad, or indifferent, it is 
 our world, and we must treat it as such. There 
 is much justice in Thomas Carlyle's grim re- 
 joinder when some one reported to him that 
 Margaret Fuller, the great transcendentalist, had 
 said: "I accept the Universe." "Egad!" said 
 the Chelsea sage, "she'd better; she's in it!" I 
 do not warn you after the manner of some against 
 loving the world and the things that are in the 
 world. It is in many ways a great world, surely, 
 full of wonderful experiences, opening many ave- 
 nues of interest and usefulness before us, offering 
 posts that it is honorable to fill, containing untold 
 store of objects of art and beauty; it would be 
 folly to advise you against that world. All I 
 asked was that in that world you should seek to 
 maintain some sort of mental perspective, a 
 wholesome respect for thought, for straight 
 thought and for thought leading somewhere. 
 Sometimes, it is true, such an attitude will find 
 
100 College and Religion 
 
 you cutting prejudice against the grain, but if 
 you have the grace of speaking the truth in love, 
 which seems to me as a virtue to overtop faith, 
 hope, and charity, you will be able in the end to 
 make the old world hear you. 
 
 Let us now for a little turn from the old life 
 to scan the design of the new more closely. On 
 your commencement day you stand fortunately 
 on one of life's ridges from which you look back- 
 wards to be sure, but forwards as well; you con- 
 template the plain and the foothills along which 
 you have come to your present eminence, and you 
 see that to gain the next ridge, you will have 
 to go down through a valley, the Valley of Ad- 
 justment, I should call it, your freshman year in 
 the post-graduate university of life. What shall 
 be your aims and hopes as you prepare to leave 
 the elevation which for a short space you gain 
 on Commencement Day? 
 
 There are three attitudes in any one of which 
 you may leave college, the attitude of the indif- 
 ferentist, the frankly selfish attitude, and the atti- 
 tude of helpfulness and service. Of the two 
 former I dread most indifferentism for any one 
 of you. I can conceive of a selfishness directed 
 
Commencement ' ' ' * '.'-'■ 'joi-' 
 
 towards noble ends, and solely or chiefly vitiated 
 by a desire to figure in the world's approving 
 gaze; Laodiceanism is more serious. I do not 
 mean that there are not just compromises which 
 can and indeed constantly must be made in life, 
 but what I want to urge upon you is this, the 
 pleasure and the privilege of having a few definite 
 convictions. One gets out of patience with the 
 "perhaps's" and the "may he's" and the "I didn't 
 mean's" and the "can't really say's" of so much 
 of our modern conversation, which leave one 
 wondering whether he is dealing with vertebrates 
 or jelly-fish. Hold at least some few definite 
 opinions, not dogmatically but upon thoughtful 
 and reasoned bases, and be prepared to maintain 
 your ground courteously but firmly in the face of 
 opposition. This does not preclude you from the 
 possibility of changing your opinions in the light 
 of better evidence and more mature considera- 
 tion; indeed, if in the next five or ten years you 
 have not materially altered most of your present 
 ideas, I should suspect that mental ossification 
 had set in. 
 
 But if you escape indifferentism and avoid 
 selfishness, there still remains the question of 
 
102 College and Religion 
 
 what is the helpful and the serviceable in life. 
 I wish here to record my dissent from much ad- 
 vice and exhortation that is put forward under 
 this head; I mean that wild urge toward social 
 service and the like which is so zealously applied 
 by good-intentioned people to college graduates 
 of recent standing. The young college graduate 
 is a natural mark for every enthusiast connected 
 with such enterprises; he is regarded as a useful 
 ally because of his education, and as a person 
 who having neatly canned the products of four 
 years' thinking, will never have to lay in any 
 further store, but is available for committee 
 meetings and executive meetings and conferences 
 night and day. Consider carefully before you 
 thus commit yourself. Your education is but 
 just begun ; it is, like everything else at this time, 
 but at its commencement, and you need most of 
 the time and leisure which will be yours for the 
 next two or three years for consolidating by read- 
 ing more extensively those positions already 
 roughly established in college work. The great 
 trouble with so many people is that in reading 
 the second of the terms of eternal life which 
 Jesus laid down, they do not preserve an even 
 
Commencement 103 
 
 stress throughout, and yet the injunction reads: 
 "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself J' And 
 I strongly believe that in many cases there will 
 not be much profit derived by neighbor from 
 being "loved" by some social worker who has 
 not taken the time to improve himself. There 
 is no sense in going out to lift humanity up unless 
 you are really sure that you are on a higher level 
 than they. 
 
 This much by way of warning: it would be 
 equally regrettable that you should merely wrap 
 your talent in a napkin and bury it so that you 
 might present it at least undiminished to your 
 Lord. The first duty awaiting you is this, that 
 you should perform with the utmost efficiency 
 and devotion the work which is given you to do. 
 You remember how the apostle puts it, "he that 
 teacheth, on teaching, he that exhorteth, on ex- 
 hortation, he that ruleth, with diligence." That 
 is the first thing; that duty rendered, engage in 
 some form of social activity, but without violence 
 to the need of your own soul for study, refresh- 
 ment, and repose. If there be those who feel 
 no need of these, well and good, — for them, that 
 is, though I doubt if it is well and good for the 
 
104 College and Religion 
 
 rest of us, — but the educated man must have them ; 
 it is doubtful if he is an educated man if he does 
 not want them, and it is certain that he will hardly 
 remain an educated man if he does not get them. 
 
 You will see that I am not proclaiming to you 
 that it is your duty to sally forth into a cruel 
 world to slay dragons, to liberate oppressed 
 princes, or to redeem princesses laboring under 
 some magic spell; all that is very romantic and 
 appealing, and there will be many commence- 
 ment speakers to dwell upon the glorious careers 
 opening before you. I am seeking rather to hold 
 up for you an ordinary, common-sense ideal 
 which may serve to sustain you as you gradually 
 discover that it is but seldom that our feet cross 
 the trail of true romance and that for most of 
 us life is the daily round and the common task. 
 Still, it is the faithful performance of that round 
 that makes civilization possible, and as for us 
 individually it may be that in the grind we be- 
 come more perfectly polished gems. 
 
 I have said a good deal about loving yourself 
 and a little about loving your neighbor, but there 
 is yet one thing needful; there is the first com- 
 mandment of the simple duologue of the Man of 
 
Commencement 105 
 
 Nazareth, in which is enjoined upon us the love 
 of God. To explain to you what the term signi- 
 fies to me would be an address in itself and is 
 moreover unnecessary to our purpose; whatever 
 our several interpretations, in the end it comes 
 to this, that if we feel we can conscientiously use 
 the phrase "love of God," we are recognizing 
 some sanction upon life other than such as are 
 merely obvious, that our souls reach out beyond 
 the bourne of time and space and seek Him who 
 is Eternal, abiding in the heavens, that we believe 
 in the great purposes of this Eternal whom we 
 call God, and are convinced that He stands in 
 such a relation to us that it is indeed true that 
 believing in Him, we shall never perish. It is the 
 third of three animating ideas which most of us 
 feel we need; we must first get into harmony 
 with our own self, next, relate that self to society, 
 and, finally, achieve a philosophy of our position 
 in regard to the Infinite, the Not-Ourselves. _ I 
 should think, at all events I should hope, that 
 your years in college have not made this last task 
 any less possible for you, but rather far more 
 feasible and attractive. It will be strange indeed 
 if difficulties have not arisen by the way, it will 
 
io6 College and Religion 
 
 be strange if your thought of God is quite what 
 it was four years ago, but God will be God just 
 the same; the point simply is that He has given 
 you a new revelation of Himself in a dozen fields 
 of thought, and your conception has altered and 
 expanded. As I have said, I cannot presume to 
 dictate any ready-made theology on which we 
 could all agree, but I should like to feel that we 
 are in tolerable harmony on this at least, that 
 back of Diversity lies Unity, back of Discord, 
 Harmony, back of the Transient the Eternal, 
 back of Man and Nature, God, and that we are 
 dignified in our mortal existence with the great 
 privilege of being His collaborators, fellow-work- 
 ers together with Him in the achievements of pur- 
 poses which are ultimate, even if we cannot 
 always see the goal. There is a great dignity 
 lent to human life by such a belief, and ennobling 
 is just what you will often feel your life requires 
 as the bloom of youth begins to fade. Youth 
 in itself ennobles life at one stage with the sheer 
 joy of living; later, when the pulse beats not so 
 fast, you will find the need of some high calling 
 of God to make life seem worth while. I trust 
 that at such a time some word, thought, inspira- 
 
Commencement 107 
 
 tion of your college days may be the golden key 
 for the solution of your problem; a university 
 that has done something for the spirit as well as 
 for the mind is gratefully remembered as an 
 Alma Mater. 
 
 Some of you, as I hinted, are thinking of things 
 as finishing because your course here is at an end, 
 but really you are just toeing the mark for the 
 race of life. It is actually a relay race in which 
 you are the next team, the team to whom your 
 immediate predecessors hand on the torch. 
 Yours is the task to hold it high, to keep it burn- 
 ing brightly, and to deliver it without fail to those 
 who shall in turn follow you. 
 
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