UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES (—-.,•; \\ : ,^ BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES AND OTHER TALKS ON KINDRED THEMES HOOKS BY ARTHUR T. HADLEY Prni,isiii:i) }i\ C'liARi.Ks Scribner's Sons IjACCALArREATE ADDRESSES, AND OTHER Talks on Kindred Themes. Net, $1.00 Freedom and Responsibtlity. Net, $1.00 The Education of the American Citi- zen. 8vo. Net, $1.50 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES AND OTHER TALKS ON KINDRED THEMES BY ARTHUR TWINING HADLEY PRESIDENT OF YALE UNIVERSITY NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1907 Copyright, 101)7, by ARTHUR TWIXINO HADLEY Published. March, 1907 TROW DiRECTORy PRlNTINO «ND BOOKBINDINQ COMPANV NEW YORK DC Z3Z5- H 11 b PREFACE The greater part of tins volume is made up of talks to students. Some were delivered at the opening of the academic year. These deal chiefly '*^ with the moral and religious problems of college X life. Others were given on the Sunday of Com- "" mencement week, before the graduating classes of the university and their friends. These deal with the questions which a man must answer when he makes choice of a career. At the time when most of these addresses were delivered I did not expect that they would be col- lected or preserved in a published book. They were prepared as talks to a changing audience, not as chapters in a permanent volume. Issuing them, as I now do, in answer to requests from a ^- number of graduates and friends of the university, a it has seemed best to leave them as nearly as pos- sible in their original form. Under these circum- stances it was inevitable that the same thought 369^79 vi PREFACE should reappear iu cliffereut addresses, with very slight ehauges of wording. For these repetitions I ask the reader's indulgence. I have added at the close of the volume three talks addressed to a wider range of hearers, on moral questions connected with educational work. One of these was delivered in the Old South Church in 1901 ; another at the Second Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia in 1903 ; and a third at the dedication of the Broadway Taber- nacle in 1905. I am under obligation to the rep- resentatives of these churches for permission to use this material; and also to Messrs. T. Y. Crowell & Company, for allowing me to reprint the bacca- laureate address on The Greatness of Patience, which they had already issued in separate form. New Haven, January, 1907. CONTENTS BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES: page The Greatness of Patience (1900) .... 3 The Christian Standard of Honor (1901) The Temptation in the Wilderness (1902) The Spirit op Devotion (1903) . The Large View of Life (1904) Religious Rules and Religious Ideals (1905) The Choice of a Faith (1906) .... TALKS ON THE OPENING SUNDAYS OP THE COLLEGE YEAR: A Christian Democracy (1901) 109 Public Approval as a Moral Force (1902) . . 120 Responsibility to Ourselves and to Others (1903) 131 Moral Lessons of College Life (1904) . . . 143 Fixity op Purpose (1905) 155 The Christian Ideal (1906) 165 MESSAGES OF THE COLLEGE TO THE CHURCH : The Development of Public Spirit (1901) . .177 Education and Religion (1903) .... 191 The Public Conscience (1905) 203 BACCALAUEEATE ADDRESSES THE GEEATNESS OF PATIENCE " Followers of them who through faith and patience inherit the promises." As a man approaches the end of his college course, he wishes to know what that course has done to prepare him for the work which is to fol- low. What are the special advantages which he enjoys for the life that is before him ? What are the special dangers to which he is exposed ? These questions, as they are commonly asked, refer to the intellectual side of college life. What sort of preparation has your study here given you for the professional work that is to come ? To this question there can be but one answer. You are told, and truly told, that your preparation has been one of theory rather than of practice ; that if you will submit your theoretical power and breadth of intellectual vision to the exigencies of practical life, it will stand you in good stead and enable you to become leaders in whatever lines of work you may choose; but that if this knowledge of theory causes you to disregard the necessities of practice 3 4 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES it w ill 1)0 a source of weakness instead of strength, ami will unfit you for the exorcise of any useful intiuence on tlie aifairs of your fellow men. All this has been said so often that it has become commonplace. But there is another and more important aspect of the whole matter, which has been less fre- quently considered. What does a college course accomplish in the way of moral preparation ? W^hat are the spiritual advantages which it gives ? What are the spiritual dangers to which it lays men open? You have received from your friend- ships in college, and from the associations of your college with the historic past, a wealth of inspira- tion, a constant stimulus to the formation of high ideals. Will you be able to carry this inspiration and these ideals safe through the various exigen- cies of life in a somewhat unspiritual world ? Will you be able to give your fellow men the benefit of what you have received, in such a way as to make you a moral leader in an age which craves such leadership ? Or will your ideals be so remote from every-day dealing with the affairs of life that your God will become a god of the dead and not of the living? THE GREATNESS OF PATIENCE . 5 All depends upon the question whether you have patience, in the largest and truest sense of the word. Patience bears the same sort of rela- tion to faith that practical power bears to theoreti- cal insight. It is the union of these two attributes of faith and patience which is the necessary con- dition of spiritual achievement. Either of these qualities without the other is undeveloped and im- perfect. Nay, each is necessary to the other's very existence. Without patience we may sometimes see what is popularly called faith; without faith we may sometimes see what is popularly called patience; but in neither case does popular usage conceive the words in their truer and profounder meaning, Faith, in its true meaning, is not a mere devo- tion to intellectual formulas or spiritual ideas which stand apart from the events of daily life. It is easy to pretend to be devoted to spiritual truth, and even to deceive one's self by that pre- tence, as long as this spiritual element is not brought into rude contact with practical affairs. Yet only by such rough contact, and by the exer- cise of that patience which is involved, can this faith be made better than an illusion. Nor are we 6 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES to understand by patience that calmness, akin to apathy, which takes evils without resistance — which passively endures what comes, because too inert to strive for anything better. Not by such patience has any man inherited promises. The indifference which can take things calmly because of the absence of a fixed purpose has nothing in common with that true patience which achieves calmness in spite of disappointment. In speaking to an audience like this, very few words are required as to the meaning of faith and the need of exercising it. You are not likely to fall into the error of those who are content with that visionary idea of faith which is remote from the problems of practical morality; nor are you likely to interpret this word as it has been inter- preted at some times and in some places, in the sense of mere assent to theological creeds. These creeds have their uses. The habit of mind which enables a man to assent to creeds contributes to his practical efficiency by relieving him of mental un- certainty. It enables him to range himself side by side with those engaged in a common purpose, and gain that coherence of activity which is the result of such organization. But this intellectual part of THE GREATNESS OF PATIENCE 7 faith is not its most important part. It is not in itself more meritorious to be able to accept a creed than to be able to accept a geometrical propo- sition. The real faith that moves the world is a different thing. It connects itself not with for- mulas, but with ideals ; not with propositions, but with men. The man who holds to ideals, and believes in men, has the elements of faith in his character, whether he find it easy to give reasons for his faith or not. With this sort of faith, the college atmosphere in which you have moved has been charged to the utmost. You know what it is to trust one another. You know what it is to work for ends which 3'OU cannot see or even measure, and find a joy in so doing. You know what it is to base your estimates of life's success on something higher than commercial standards. If you have not received the stimulus to faith in the years of your college course, I know not where you are to find it. It would be as ill-timed to emphasize the necessity of faith as compared with patience as it would be to emphasize the necessities of theory as compared with practice. Your dangers lie not in the direction of failing to understand the meaning 8 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES of faith :in(l ilie nocossity of coiiibining faith with your patience. They are all in tlu^ direction of inisunrlerstancling what is meant by patience, and of underrating the constant necessity of its exer- cise by the man who would give effect to his ideals and his principles, to his beliefs in man and in God. He who fails in this understanding, and tries to exercise faith without patience, may wreck the efficiency of his Christian life, and even the life itself; just as he who fails to understand the need of working out his theories in practice, and tries to develop the former without the latter, wrecks his professional success as engineer or lawyer, as physician or man of business. By the word patience, as I use it this morning, I do not mean primarily or chiefly that quality of uncomplaining physical endurance with which the term is most often associated. Not that I would for a moment undervalue this virtue of bearing evils without complaint. It is at once a mark of power over one's self, and a means of power over others. And yet this patient endur- ance of physical suffering is chiefly valuable as a symbol of something higher. As the spirit is of more importance than the nerve-fibre, so is spir- THE GREATNESS OF PATIENCE 9 itual endurance a thing of greater importance than the enduring of pliysical pain. Patience, in its highest sense, is this spiritual endurance. It means quiet determination in the face of discour- agement. It means the readiness to wait God's time without doubting God's truth. It is characteristic of this kind of patience that it is hardest for the best and strongest men, be- cause it seems to involve a limitation of that part of their nature which makes them best and strong- est. To the man of no faith and no fixity of pur- pose, moral disappointments are nothing. To the man burning with zeal for God, they are a darken- ing of the heavens. It was not the half-hearted Aaron who dashed the tables of the law in pieces when he saw his people worshipping the golden calf, but Moses, the man of God. The same fire and inspiration which made Moses a leader, put him, and puts every man like him, under a temp- tation to jeopardize the success of his leadership by a self-centred haste. " If thou be the Christ, cast thyself down from the pinnacle of the tem- ple." This was a temptation to which Jesus was accessible, because of his consciousness of the power to achieve sudden and dazzling results ; and 10 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES one which he resisted in virtne of that yd higher power to subordinate his personal ability and per- sonal glorv to tlic permanent service of the world. But why must tluit uuin wlio sees farther than his fellow nieUj and is conscious of possessing more power, be under this injunction to exercise patience ? Why shall he not use his insight and his ability to gain quick results instead of slow ones? Why do we bid him wait, instead of in- trusting his s])iritniil fortunes to a hazard whose issue he believes liimself able to foretell ? In the first place — to put the matter on the low- est ground — we insist on the virtue of patience because no living man is likely to be wise enough or brilliant enough to dispense with the necessity of using it. No matter how unbroken a chain of successes he may enjoy, unforeseen sources of fail- ure are bound to arise at some time; and only the man who has schooled himself to keep his vision steady and his faith unshaken in the midst of such failure can recover the lost ground. He who has trained his nerves solely for the stimulus of suc- cess, has placed himself in a position where a sin- gle failure may wreck his whole life and life work. If ever there w^as a man who by mental endow- THE GREATNESS OF PATIENCE U ment and fortunate circumstances seemed able to dispense with the necessity of patience, it was Na- poleon. Unrivalled as a general in his day, and perhaps in any other day, he had a faith in his star which carried him triumphantly through fif- teen years of victory. But to that faith he did not add patience ; and tlirec years of defeat sufficed to cast to the winds all that fifteen years had won. The individual successes had been many, the in- dividual failures few ; but the net result was ruin. Contrast with his career the career of Frederick the Great a half century earlier. Less eminent as a general, surrounded by a more formidable and persistent coalition of foes, defeate'd almost as often as he was victorious, he yet preserved his tenacity of purpose. Once, on the evening after the battle of Kunnersdorf, his endurance was stretched to the very limit. The whole continent was fighting against him. Through his own fault of judgment, he had lost a field that was nearly won, and lost it so completely that scarce three thousand men were left about his standard. If ever a man might despair, Frederick might well have done so then. His endurance which re- mained undaunted in this adversity was a quality 12 BACCALAURIOATI': ADDRIISSMS wliic'Ii in \\\c tinal result counted for more tliiin any military irenius, however brilliant. The lesser general sueeeeded where the greater general failed, l)ecause the one had that divine i^atience which the other had not. Take an instance yet nohler — nol)ler because it involves the character not of one man, but of a whole people — that of Rome after the battle of Canna?. An army representing the entire strength of the republic had been, sent into the iield for what seemed a final struggle against Hannibal. Through the use of ignoble arts of tlie l)olitician, the command of this army had been secured by a man whose skill in military affairs was far from being commensurate with his skill in politics. So fatally had he mismanaged his battle that there was left scarce a family in Rome that was not mourning the loss of its best blood. The younger officers among the handful that es- caj^ed with their lives proposed that they should flee to foreign parts; but the unfortunate general showed that, whatever might be said of his politi- cal and his military career, he possessed the divine spark of patience. Without excuses for failure, he led his broken handful back to Rome; and the THE GREATNESS OP PATIENCE 13 members of the Senate, though they had been his opponents in politics, and though they had suf- fered losses of brothers and sons through his mis- conduct, met him with no reproach, but with pub- lic thanks " because he had not despaired of the republic." It was on that day that Rome showed her right to conquer the world. Against such pa- tience no obstacle was powerful enough to stand. But the injunction to exercise spiritual patience is based on other and higher reasons than those of worldly wisdom. Not only is patience a surer means of attaining success amid the imperfections of human knowledge and the uncertainties of human fate than intellectual brilliancy ever can be, but the successes which are won through its ex- ercise are of a higher character. The achievement which comes through trial and failure is nobler in quality than that which seems to come of itself. Without patience we may have individual deeds of great splendor, but they stand as something separate from the doer. With patience, the deeds become so inwrought into the character of the man that his success or failure in externals is a small thing, as compared with that success which he has achieved in himself. He is a leader to be loved 14 RACr.M. AUREATE ADDRESSES ami trnstt'il, as well as to be admired and followed. r>aek to the days of the '' imieh-endiiring divine Ulysses," this truth has been recognized. The man who can endure has that element in his life Avhieh makes him at once a prince and a god — a leader of men, and a sharer of the divine attri- butes. He has won a glory which is independent of changes of fortune. We are often told that the modern world cares little for these things; that it worships success, and success alone. Xever was there a greater mis- take. The homage which the world renders to suc- cess apart from character is not worship; it is something totallj- different. That success which is independent of character may be admired, and it may be envied; but it does not command that element of personal adoration which is the essen- tial feature in worship. The man who succeeds in doing greater deeds than his fellow men, with- out possessing greater attributes of soul, may receive the plaudits of a mob which has no aspira- tions for anything better than selfish aggrandize- ment; he can never become the leader of a nation whose citizens possess patriotic ideals. When it becomes true of any country that its public senti- THE GREATNESS OF PATIENCE 15 ment cares for nothing but external tokens of power, it is the surest sign that this people has passed the zenith of its course and is hastening to a decline. America has not reached this stage. Our country still aspires to be led by men who shall prove their claim for leadership, not by con- crete material achievements, but by their character and their ideals. This superior importance of character over achievement has been expressed in a hundred dif- ferent ways. Goethe puts it into concrete lan- guage when he says that to do something is the ideal of the philistine, and to be something the ideal of the gentleman. St. Paul puts it into theo- logical language when he speaks of the need of justification by faith, as something transcending justification by works. Jesus Christ puts it into the mystical language which is the most complete and truest expression of the whole, when he says that the kingdom of God is in our hearts. The success which is thus wrought into a man's character has this further element of greatness, that it is a means of help and inspiration to all those about him. It attracts them instead of re- pelling them. Mere brilliancy or intellectual at- 10 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES tainnionl bv :in individual rarely has an uplifting effect upon the |)eople as a whole. On the con- trarv, the success which results from power with- out patience tends to place a man apart from his fellow men. He has achieved it in isolation; in isolation he enjoys it while it lasts. That bril- liancy which is the exclusive privilege of the few leads the many to meet its results with distrust; and this distrust on the part of the people is met with disdain on the part of the leader. The people fear a brilliant man because they cannot follow him; the brilliant man despises the people for the same reason. Such a man can hardly escape the fate of Paracelsus, who " gazed on power till he grew blind." Overwhelmed with the importance of his own scientific discoveries, he desired to see the world at once regenerated by his own efforts. ^Mien men refused to accept the quick regenera- tion which he i)roposed, his first state was one of intolerance ; his second was one of discouragement and of failure. The success which he coveted was to do good to the people in spite of themselves, by a sudden miracle of power — a miracle which was not forthcoming, and which will never be forth- coming to him who knows not the middle ground THE GREATNESS OF PATIENCE 17 between the impatience of intolerance and the im- patience of discouragement. It is not a man of this kind who can lead the people. It is rather the man who is content to win his success through failures and trials — a man of the type of William the Silent, of Washington, or of Lincoln, De- feated in detail, these men rise from each defeat stronger in themselves, and stronger in a mutual understanding between themselves and their fol- lowers. The success of such men is not an indi- vidual possession, but one which is shared with their fellow men. It is success of the kind whose highest exemplification is in the New Testament story of Him who died for all, that all might live. Gentlemen of the graduating class: l^ever has there been a time in the world's history when these lessons of patience have been more needed. New scientific discoveries, new methods of economic organization, new political opportunities in the quick revolution of the world's kaleidoscope, have put in your hands a power to use for evil or for good. There is so much chance to show what you can do that you are in danger of forgetting the need of proving what you are. I entreat you never to let the consciousness of this power lead IS BACCAT.AUREATE ADDRESSES you to prefer the joy of its exercise to the assur- ance of its subordiuatiou to great ends. You hold that power as trustees for your feUow uien. Never allow yourselves to shape a selfish definition of success in whose creation and enjoyment they shall have no share. True success in politics or in busi- ness lies not in tlie gaining of authority, Lut in the wise use of authority as leaders of those who look to you for guidance. True success in art or literature is not to be sought simply in the develop- ment of new ideals, but in the interpretation and expression of those ideals in such a way that they shall be a jiublic possession. May Yale be buried deep under the sea if ever she begins to teach her men so to define success that it may be purchased at the price of self-centred isolation ! The great achievements of history are those which have been worked out with others and for others. This co- operation can only be obtained at the price of pa- tient waiting. Real leadership belongs to the man who can patiently feel the needs and limitations of other men, and who has that power of self- renunciation which will enable him to compass this result. However much you may be able to dazzle the multitude or lead tlie multitude, tlio THE GREATNESS OF PATIENCE 19 respect of your own conscience, under God, is the one enduring possession. In patience, in the pro- foundest sense of the word, shall you possess your souls. Thus, and thus only, can you rise above the caprices of fate in achieving a character and a fixity of purpose which it is beyond the power of fortune to take away. Thus, and thus only, shall you enter into the estate of him who hath " three firm friends, more sure than day or night ; Himself, his Maker, and the angel Death." THE CHRISTIAX STANDARD OF HOXOR " We are members one of another." Three hundred years ago the man who left college to go o\it into active life found a wide range of careers open before him. Xo social bar- riers or conventional restraints restricted his choice between good and evil. If he were bent on nothing higher than personal pleasure and adven- ture, he might turn buccaneer and sail for the Spanish main on a career of piracy ; or he might become a professional soldier, and engage himself for year after year in wars which, as then con- ducted, were little better than piratical ; or he might attach himself to the fortunes of some great man, whose followers countenanced one another in a career of dissolute ease. Any and all of these evil things he could do without forfeiting his hope of what the world called success. If, on the other hand, he desired to live a life of usefulness to his fellow men, whether as min- 20 THE STANDARD OF HONOR 21 ister, as statesman, or as scientific discoverer, he assumed the risks — and serious risks they were — of ending his life in exile or in martyrdom. He took his choice between selfishness without pen- alty, and unselfishness without reward. He was face to face with a parting of the ways ; a decision as to his life's purposes which was clearly defined, and which when once made was not easily recalled. To-day the case is far different. The college graduate now enters a life where the choice be- tween selfish and unselfish ambitions, between good and evil careers, is not thus sharply marked. We live in a world where the man who would be successful in serving himself must at the same time be occupied in serving others. We no longer respect the pirate, the libertine, or the soldier of fortune. The careers which appeal to ambitious men are careers of large public service, whatever may have been the underlying motive with which such service was rendered. The successful en- gineer is the man who builds bridges that will carry traffic and designs machines that will do work for the million. The successful physician is the man who has proved his power to heal disease. The successful minister is the one who can reach 22 BAt'CALArUEATE ADDRESSES the wauls of tlu)usaii(ls that hear liiiii. The suc- cessful business man is lie who has proved his abil- ity to provide the masses with the things that they need by an efficient grasp of new and progressive methods. Even in those careers where the tempta- tions of selfishness are greatest, the necessity of this public service still remains manifest. The highest ambition of the lawyer can be realized only by him who lives to conserve the social structure instead of undermining it. The highest honor as a political leader falls only to the man who has been loyal to his associates and to his ideals. The fact that we have been able to secure this degree of coincidence between selfishness and un- selfishness is the most important characteristic of modern civilization. That we have ceased to re- spect the robber and to burn the minister is a central historic fact which shows that we have ad- vanced beyond the savage state. The gain in sci- entific knowledge and material comfort which is sometimes thought to constitute the essence of civ- ilization is hardly more than an incidental conse- quence of this development of ideas. This civilized public sentiment is a safeguard against all unbridled license. It takes away from THE STANDARD OF HONOR 23 every one of us the temptation to pursue those careers which a few centuries ago were regarded as the most natural occupations of a gentleman. But in thus protecting us against the grosser forms of temptation, it exposes us to new and more subtle dangers. The very fact that the successful pur- suit of selfish ambition compels a man to do so much for others leads many of our younger men to think that they can trust to selfish ambition as an underlying principle of all their public activity; and in their professional relations it leads them to disregard those finer principles of honor which are the consummate flower not only of chivalry but of Christianity. Life is a game whose rules have been drafted and redrafted by successive generations, until the penalties for their violation generally outweigh any probable advantages which such violation might give. Under these circumstances the out- ward acts of the unprincipled or selfish player tend to approximate more and more nearly to those of the Christian gentleman. This conformity of out- ward acts may be so close as at times to tempt the gentleman to forget that he is a gentleman and lead him to play in less strict conformity to the 24 BACCALArRKATM ADDRESSES rulrs wlioii lie hclicvrs tliiit llic pcimltv for llioir violatiou cjumct lie iiiijioscd. Ii iiuiy even lead tlic Christian to forgot that he is a Christian, and encourage him to conform his standard of conduct to that of his fellow contestants. But the differ- ence of spirit remains the same ; and if we allow our standard thus to be lowered the best possibili- ties of life are at an end. For selfishness, though it will accomplish much for society, will not accomplish everything. There remains a need for the acceptance by the members of society of self-imposed obligations going beyond the strict letter of the rules or purview of the umpires. The greater the liberty which a man en- joys in his social and professional life, the more necessary is it for his own character, for the in- terests of his fellow men, and for the permanence of our civilization as a whole, that he should rec- ognize these wider obligations which no authority can enforce except his own conscience. The larger his power and the newer the field in which he works, the more imperative is the necessity that he should treat life as a trust. It is, I think, the distinguishing characteristic of a gentleman that he accepts self-imposed obli- THE STANDARD OF HONOR 25 gations. Distinctions of dress, of speech, or of manners, however important, are but superficial things as compared with this underlying spirit. And it is this readiness to accept self-imposed ob- ligations which constitutes the fundamental char- acteristic of a Christian. The only difference in the meaning of the two words is that the gentle- man may regard these obligations as resulting from his duties to a restricted class, and capable of acceptance only by that class ; while a Christian receives them as a trust on behalf of the commu- nity as a w^hole, and has faith to believe that as time goes on the whole people will be capable of thus accepting them. Of course there are other conceptions of Chris- tianity which are widely prevalent. Some men — - less common, fortunately, to-day than they were a century or two ago — judge a Christian by his creed. This is like judging a gentleman by his dress. Some judge him by his church affiliations. This is like judging a gentleman by the society in which he moves. Some — and to-day a yet more numerous class — judge him by his outward acts. This is like judging a gentleman by his accom- plishments. But the spirit of Christianity goes 26 H.UX'ALAL'HEATl': ADDKllSSKS deeper than all this. J^ct mo quotx? the words of a man who hail a good understanding of the scope of true Christianity, if ever there was one. " Though 1 have the gift of prophecy, and under- stand all niystorios and all knowledge, and though 1 have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." Kot good works is it that constitute Christianity, but the spirit which " beareth all things, believetli all things, hoj^eth all things, endureth all things." I said a moment ago that the spirit of a gentle- man might be more restricted in its spupathies than the spirit of a Christian. But I believe that the time is at hand when the two must more and more definitely coincide if the modern civilized world is to maintain its institutions and its morals. One of the distinctive things about the Chris- tian spirit has been its essentially democratic character. ]!^ot for a class and not for a tribe, but for the whole community, were its ideals framed and its obligations accepted. Throughout the Middle Ages the church, in spite of its hierarchi- THE STANDARD OF HONOR 27 cal organization, was the great democratic body — the one place in the social order where the poor man had his chance. When the church was thus democratic and civil society was not, it was in- evitable that there should be a distinction between those civil or social virtues which were arranged within an aristocratic framework and those broader ideas of virtue on which the church laid stress. In the days when civil order was upheld by a few men who could fight it was inevitable that personal courage and other qualities essential to a ruling class in a lawless society should be un- duly emphasized in the moral standards of that class; that the man who possessed these qualities should be regarded as a gentleman, even though he failed to possess other things which were equally important in the community as a whole. In these rude days the church, working for a peo- ple who were unable to fight, laid relatively greater emphasis on the more passive virtues of obedience, of forbearance, and of peaceful love. But with the coming of democracy in the po- litical as well as the spiritual world, the historic reason for this distinction is done away. Where political power falls into the hands of all men, wc 28 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES fan no longer let the possession of one group of (liialities condone the absence of others. No man is henceforth high enough to allow the practice of jiolitical virtue to excuse the habitual violation of person;! 1 morals, nor is any henceforward low enough to allow a traditional creed of personal morals, inherited from social conditions of the past, to justify his non-acceptance of political obli- gations. The people as a body cannot rest con- tent with the practice of those personal virtues of older times which did well enough when they were Inif the subjects of a ruling class. They must learn to accept trusts. As the extension of indus- trial and political power gives them wider discre- tion in their conduct they must charge themselves with self-imposed obligations to a commensurate degree. The Christian must be in the best sense of the word a gentleman. To such a high and broad conception of Chris- tianity you are called. On the men of your gen- eration rests the duty of promoting in your own life and that of others the acceptance of a Chris- tian faith which rises beyond the bounds of creeds or organizations or good works and which will make vou members of a church universal. THE STANDARD OF HONOR 29 Gentlemen of the graduating class: These obli- gations which rest upon the men of your age as a body rest with special heaviness upon you. Yale was founded by Puritans — that is, by men who understood the character of life as a trust. It has from the first been national and democratic in its sympathies. It has trained generation after generation of men who recognized their duty, not to any single class or locality, but to their fel- low men as a body. Of these traditions you have enjoyed the benefit. Slight indeed has been the effect of your college course if it has not taken you outside of yourselves and into a broader and more Christian atmosphere of loyalty to large ideals. God forbid that we should on this account seem self-righteous, or believe that our spirit of Christian democracy is more perfect than it really is. It has faults and weaknesses and distortions enough to guard us against any such ill-timed pride. But with all the faults that can be reck- oned up against it, it yet remains a priceless jewel ; something whose influence in our education and in our life goes far beyond the worth of any mere book learning or technical knowledge. It will not make you less active in the work of your several :?0 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES fallings, or less ambitious of success in the lines that you shall choose. But it will at critical points infuse into this work a spirit which will make it a means of service to your fellows and of progress to the race; and it will so order this ambition that its attainment will not be staked upon the pre- carious chances of success or failure for the mo- ment. If you have learned its lessons, your con- ception of life will be so large that you can rise above those events which the world counts failure, but which are really tests of endurance for the true hero. If we can carry into our work a readiness to value men as men, independent of their external surroundings; an intense devotion to things out- side of ourselves ; and, above all else, a habit of looking at life as a measure to be filled instead of a cup to be drained ; then shall we realize our high- est possibilities for our country, for humanity, and for the progress of God's kingdom. THE TEMPTATION IN THE WILDERNESS " For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin." In reading the account of the temptation in the wilderness we can hardly help being impressed and overawed by the way in which it anticipates our own experience when we first go out into active life. The higher each man's powers and possibilities are, the more is he likely to have to face the whole series of temptations which fell to the lot of the Master nineteen centuries earlier. Materialism, ambition, self-exaltation — these are the forms under which evil is going to set its most subtle and dangerous snares for our feet. The first of the three temptations comes to us all alike. The second will sooner or later come to the ma- jority of those who are here to-day. The third comes to relatively few; but those few are the men of rare endowment, who have most of the power of God in their own hearts. 31 32 BACCALAUREATi: ADDRESSES You are iioiuii; out into a wilderness. The temp- tations Avliicli von are to face may not be any harder to resist than those to which you have be- come accustomed during your college life. But you have to meet them with less support from those about you. In any good college a man finds himself part of a community in which each takes his share of others' burdens. The standards of that community may not always be ideally high ; but, such as they are, each man helps his fellows to live up to them. Especially is this true of a college like Yale ; and the help which you have gained from your associations here should stand }ou in good stead when you come to face the great temptations by yourselves. But the pressure of these temptations has only been deferred : it has not been avoided. You have them before you, and you have to face them alone. The first that meets you is that of materialism. " If thou be the Christ, command that these stones be made bread." For years to come this will be dinned into your ears from every side. " Of what use is a college education," men will tell you, " except as it enables you to make a living ? " " Of what use are ideal standards," the press will THE TEMPTATION 33 saj, " as compared with the hard necessities of daily life ? " You will probably be in a position where you will feel these hard necessities. The need of money comes home with vastly increased force to the man who has to earn that money him- self; and it requires a hard struggle for him to retain his ideals amid the pressure of immediate physical want. Still harder is it for him to retain his ideal where those about him are so engaged in the winning of bread that success in this seems to them the one test of power which marks a man as stronger than his fellows. Far be it from me to say anything against the value of this struggle for self-support. It is a hard taskmaster, which keeps you from dreaming. It furnishes a stimulus which brings out some of your best powers in a way in which they never could be developed otherwise. Modern business competition has been so arranged that in serving himself each man, on the whole, tends to serve others. But when, in the stress of this effort, a man forgets that there is anything higher — when he ceases to regard it as a means for the ordering of society, and makes it an end in itself, — then he destroys the possibility of what is best within him ; 34 BACX:^ALAUREATE ADDRESSES and till' ixroatiM' wore those possibilities, the larger is the loss to the world. It is written, " Man shall not live by bread alone." If you have it in you to give men something more than bread, be sure that any failure to account for the added talents will be heavily reckoned against you when the final account is nuule up. There is no more pervasive danger than the danger of thinking that the money standard is everything; that ability and business honor, and love and marriage, are all marketable commodities. The stress of hunger may excuse the wrong. The blinding influences of modern life may explain the commonness of the error. But no explanation can condone the error and no ex- cuse can undo the wrong. For the man who has outgro\vn this first set of temptations toward materialism, and who has learned to make a living without sinking all his ideals therein, there waits a more subtle set of temptations — the temptations of ambition. If you have passed successfully the tests of the first hard years of life in the office or the shop, you will find wide fields of success opening before you. Where will you seek that success? Is it to be in the accumulation of a large fortune, no longer as THE TEMPTATION 35 a means of physical comfort, but as a means of in- fluencing the actions of others? Shall it be in social position among your fellow men ? Shall it be in political office and in the conduct of the af- fairs of the nation ? Each of these ambitions has in it much that is noble. The millionaire, the social leader, the political chieftain, all have in their hands enormous power for good. It is just because of the existence of this power that the danger comes close home, and comes home closest to the very strongest among us, of subordinating all other ends to these immediate objects. The strong man, if he will worship money, is offered the prize of industrial power; if he will worship office, the prizes of politics lie before his hand. Whether they are more surely gained in this way than any other I shall not undertake to say; but certain it is that the devil will be at hand to show you overwhelming reasons to believe that that is the only way in which they can be gained — that you can commune with the object of your wor- ship only by falling down at its feet, and forget- ting that there is any other god. What answer did Christ give to this proposal? Not that of the ascetic who undervalues the world. 36 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES The C'liristian knows the worth of worKlly intlu- ence just as well as he knows the worth of worldly industry. But the man whose gjos go not beyond this intlueuce has sinned against the Holy Ghost. It is written, '' Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve." Some day you will come face to face with this choice, at a time when it will determine the outcome of your whole life. Will you fall down and worship the devil for the sake of all the kingdoms of the world ? If you by your daily thoughts and your habits of action prepare to answer this question wrongly, then you may perhaps gain the whole world — or perhaps not, for it takes a strong man to hold the devil to his promises. If, on the other hand, you prepare to answer this question aright, then you may lose all the kingdoms of the world, or you may gain them — and it makes no real difference which. Christ on Palm Sunday, with all the fickle multitude falling down before him, was not one whit the greater than the same Christ five days after, when the multitude were crying against him, when his very friends shrank away in fear, and when he half doubted lest his own God had for- saken him. THE TEMPTATION 37 But there is yet another temptation, less uni- versal than either of these named, but to him for whom it comes yet more difficult to resist. It is an interesting thing to note that the order of temptations is different in the two accounts which have been handed down to us. Matthew makes as the culmination of the whole the tempta- tion to worship the devil in order that Christ may receive the kingdoms of the world. Luke the phy- sician finds a more profoundly true climax in another impulse, less easy for the multitude to un- derstand but harder for the leader of the multitude to resist. " If thou be the Christ, cast thyself down from the pinnacle of the temple." This is no common temptation; no vulgar craving for bread to satisfy hunger ; no equally vulgar, though more intellectual, desire for authority over one's fellows. It is the desire of the strong man, con- scious of his power, to assert that power in the face of all nature. To do something out of the common run of work, something whose possibilities have been unrealized by the vulgar mind — this is the dream which all great men cherish, and to which some of them subordinate everything else. To dazzle the world by campaigns like those of ISTapo- aG95i79 38 BACCALAUKKATI': ADDREvSSES Icon, by acbievcments in literal uro liko tliosc of Goethe; to compass the almost miraculous discov- eries which have awaited the pioneers in explora- tion and science — these are prizes to attract the ambition and unsteady tlio judgment of any man. And ev(>n auumg th(>s(> who do not de- lude themselves with the belief that they arc set apart from the common lot, the temptation to sacrifice all other considerations to those of professional ambition, and to sink the man in the achievement, comes witli a force wellnigh irre- sistible. And what is the answer when this temptation is suggested ? " Jesus said unto him, It is written. Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." It was just because he had God's power and God's spirit in him that he felt the ability to dazzle men by his achievements and was exposed to the temptation which this ability carries with it. But the man w^ho subordinates himself to his achievements and who, in the greatness of the expression of the power, loses his sense of personal responsibility, has used the attributes of divinity to despoil him- self irreparably of the substance. It is not enough for a man to be greater than his appetites and THE TEMPTATION 39 greater than bis ambitions; be must be greater tban bis works. This is not an easy idea to grasp ; but it is a ter- ribly important one. Paul, Augustine, and Lu- ther have in their several ways tried to express it in the doctrine of justification by faith. Goethe, in his Wilhelm Meister, has given it form by say- ing that it is the philistine's ideal to do some- thing; the ideal of the true nobleman is to be something. It is not the startling deeds that make the man, but the character which is be- hind them. A man who is over-anxious to accom- plish specific results, however noble, who has fixed his whole heart thereon and his whole purpose therein, has fallen short of the full conception of the Christian life. " The kingdom of God cometh not with observation." The greatest things that a man can do are quite as likely to result from his failures as from his successes. He who sets his ambition on the actual accomplishment of things which he can see and understand places himself at the mercy of chance. For the sake of some good that he may or may not realize he abandons those habits of mind and qualities of heart which do good every day, and perhaps most good of all when 40 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES their effect is wholly unconscious to Lim that ex- ercises it. What is marked out as the character- istic of the righteous in the day of judgment i It is not that they have followed creeds ; it is not that they have kept laws ; it is not even that they have achieved mighty works. It is that they have done more than they knew. " Then shall the righteous say, Lord, when saw we thee . . . sick and in prison, and ministered unto thee ? " With each day of your lives and with each broadening of your experience this truth will come home to you with added force: that a man's value to the world lies not in the things which he sees at the time, nor even in those which the world sees at the time ; but in those innumerable movements set at work by his character — for evil if this be evil, for good if this be good — working themselves out in ways un- known and not to be fully revealed until the last day. Gentlemen of the graduating class: We need these teachings to-day more than ever before. More than ever do we need to take to our own hearts the lessons of Christ's temptation in the w^ildemess in each of its several forms. The world to-day is full of dazzling possibilities in THE TEMPTATION 41 every direction. To him who is tempted by things material there is a keener struggle for possession than our fathers knew, with more wealth at the end and infinitely more possibilities of use of that wealth. To him who has set his heart on social distinction and fame there is in modern society, whether industrial or political, a more highly or- ganized activity than in any previous age ; larger masses of men to be moved, and more inspiring lines in which to move them. To him who despises the vulgar accessories of wealth or of power there are wider chances than ever before for the exercise of that power in scientific discovery or in any of the other forms of achievement which shall last when the men and the fortunes about us have crumbled into dust. The theatre of life, as you view it to-day, offers on a grander scale than ever before profit to the manager, fame to the actor, and inspiration to the dramatist. Not since the age of Queen Elizabeth have such possibilities of enterprise and discovery faced the strong men of the nation. It is for you to decide whether you use these opportunities for the sake of what you can gain from them in wealth or power and glory, or whether you will accept them as trusts, and put 42 RACCALAUItEATK ADDRESSES your life into the iK-rfiiniiaiKv of the trust. What dangers await yon in the former career, even if your powers be great and your ideals high, let the disgrace of Raleigh and the yet deejier disgrace of Bacon serve to testify. What unknown and un- seen influences may grow out of your quiet ac- ceptance of trust you may learn from the history of the Puritans — despised often and rejected in high places, whose spirit nevertheless grew irre- sistibly stronger and whose failures, as long as they remained true to their trust, were not so much failures as foundations of success. When Eliot went to the Tower it placed a Hampden in the field. When Hampden rode broken-hearted to his death his work was taken up by a Cromwell, with strength enough behind him and in him to shape a nation's history. It is not from personal ambi- tion, even in its most refined form, but from self- ^ subordination, that the Cromwells and the Lin- colns come — men from the people, holding their power in trust, and subordinating themselves to God's plan as they see it, even as Jesus thus sub- ordinated himself and made his life and death alike a means of working out a world's salvation. If vour education is wortli anvtliinir, and if your I THE TEMPTATION 43 Christianity is worth anything, let it teach you thus to live for the people ; not to go into life for the sake of what you can get out of it in wealth and influence and the accomplishment of any of those things by which the world measures success — but to take life for what you can put into it, to be a part of the world about you and subordinate your wants and ambitions to its needs and pur- poses. Thus can you make yourselves indepen- dent of the accidents of life ; thus can you have the assurance that, whether in success or in failure, in life or in death, ye are Christ's, and Christ is God's. THE SPIRIT OF DEVOTION "And David longed, and said, Oh that one would give me to drink of the wat^r of the well of Bethlehem, which is by the gate! "And the three mighty men brake through the host of the Philistines and drew water out of the well of Bethlehem , that was by the gate, and brought it to David: neverthe- less he would not drink thereof, but poured it out unto the Lord. "And he said, Be it far from mc, O Lord, that I should do this: is not this the blood of men that went in jeopardy of their lives? Therefore he would not drink it." Judged by material standards, this is a tale of folly from beginning to end. It was foolish for David to utter his wish ; it was doubly foolish for his captains to risk their lives to compass it; it was trebly foolish for him to waste the gift which had been won at so much risk. I do not mean that all who read the story would criticise it in this way. In an episode like this, we instinctively feel that there is something which makes such criticism inadequate and impertinent. But when we are dealing, not with some excep- tional matter of ancient history, but with this 44 THE SPIRIT OF DEVOTION 45 every-day world of the twentieth century, and are vahung little deeds of heroism instead of great ones, we are prone to use material standards, and call them by the specious name of common-sense. We are apt to judge work by its definite and measurable results; to make these results the mo- tive of service and the criterion of success ; and to condemn as misplaced sentiment anything which sacrifices or risks a tangible chance of physical comfort and security for an intangible manifesta- tion of loyalty or devotion. Amid much that is good in our twentieth century spirit, this over- valuation of material enjoyment and of tangible success constitutes a grave danger. All the achievements of modern science and of modern democracy will be worth little if, in the long run, they teach people to regard knowledge for the sake of the return which it will bring, and to measure success in life by the concrete results with which men can credit themselves. I am not going to make this material view of life the subject of argument or criticism. I am going to call your attention to the fact that we do not really hold it; and that when we allow our- selves to be carried on with the current of popular 46 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES jmlgiiieut so as to pretend that we hold it, we are letting the best side of our own nature be suji- pressed, and our best possibilities of personal growth and public service be stunted and withered. I do not believe that there is a single man in this audience who values life primarily as a means of securing comfort. We value it as a field of ac- tion. We care for the doing of things. Signal achievement in itself appeals to our imagination and interest. We admire Xansen because he suc- ceeded in getting so much nearer the Xorth Pole than anybody ever did before him ; we do not ad- mire him in the least for his weak efforts to justify his expedition on the basis of its scientific results. A man who tries to go to the Xorth Pole is en- gaged in a glorious play, which justifies more risk and more expenditure of life than would be war- ranted for a few miserable entomological speci- mens, however remote from the place where they had been previously found. It is of far less mate- rial use to go to the Xorth Pole than to raise a hundred thousand bushels of wheat; but every man of you, if he had the choice between going to the Xorth Pole and raising a hundred thou- sand bushels of wheat, would take the former. THE SPIRIT OF DEVOTION 47 Turn back over the pages of history to the stories which have most moved men's hearts, and what are they ? They are stories of action, deeds of daring, where the risk habitually outweighed the chance of practical results. Nay, the most in- spiring of them all are often manifestations of hopeless bravery, where the likelihood of success was absolutely nothing. When we read of the soldiers of Gustavus Adolphus's regiment at Lut- zen, who after the loss of their king stood firm in the ranks until the line of dead was as straight and complete as had been the line of the living on dress parade; when we hear of the Cumberland at Hampton Roads, waging the hopeless fight of wood against iron, and keeping the flag afloat at the main-mast head when the vessel and all who remained in her had sunk ; when we remember the tale of the Alamo, in whose courtyard and hos- pital a handful of American frontiersmen fought against the army of Mexico, without hope of vic- tory but without thought of retreat or surrender, till they earned by the very completeness of their annihilation the glory of that monumental in- scription : " Thermopylae had its messenger of de- feat ; the Alamo had none " ; then do we see how 4S BACCALAUREATl': ADDRESSES hollow is our pretence of vnluiui; things hy results when we are brought face to face with the really heroic struggles of life. It is the doing that makes the deed worthy of record, not the material out- come. This is my first point: that we value life as a field of action. The second point that I want to make is that we value those lives highest which are marked by the habit of unselfish action. Doing makes the deed ; unselfish doing makes the man. Even for those who are cast in heroic mould, and start with the habit and the power of accomplishing great things, there is something about selfishness which seems to deaden the power and deface the model, l^apoleon had a character which gave the promise of heroism ; but its climax is at the beginning, not at the end. To the student of the heroic in history, he shines brightest in his Italian campaign. From Rivoli to the Pyramids, from the Pyramids to Austerlitz, from Austerlitz to Moscow, and from Moscow to Waterloo, we find successive stages of a decadence poorly concealed even when widening material prosperity was most splendid. But with a man like Washington or Lincoln, who worked for others and not for him- THE SPIRIT OF DEVOTION 49 self, you will find in each stage of his career a growth of mind and heart which made his follow- ers love him more and which makes history yield him a larger meed of admiration. The successes of Napoleon left him each year smaller. The fail- ures of Washington or Lincoln left them larger. In the verdict of history the question whether a man possessed this unselfishness counts for more than any peculiarities of his intellect or character, or than any arguments as to the rightfulness of the cause he advocated. ISTever were there two men more utterly and radically different in character, in intellect, and in position, than the great Civil War leaders, Grant and Lee. But as we are pass- ing somewhat from the heat of passion and nar- rowness of vision engendered by war, we see that the dominant trait of each of these men was that he counted his cause for everything and himself for nothing. It was this trait which gave them their greatest power as commanders of their re- spective armies, and which distinguished them from many other generals, perhaps equally able, in securing them a common tribute of personal re- spect from the children of friend and foe. Nor is it in war alone that the power of unselfishness 50 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES to make the man eomes conspicuously to the front. In every line of life-work, Avhethcr commercial or political, professional or charitable, we see and feel the distinction between the man who is look- ing out for himself and the man who forgets him- self in looking out for others. We suspect the man of the former type, even when he is doing things which seem desirable. We honor the man of the latter type, even when we regard his methods as mistaken and his aims as chimerical. But really unselfish action in peace or war docs something more than make a man himself great. It helps others to be like him. Where the leader is tainted with selfishness, the followers will be self- ish too. Where the leader works for other men, each of those other men, according to the measure of his power, will be stimulated to go outside of himself and work for a common cause. The fact that Washington could bear his burdens so pa- tiently in dealing with Congress and with commis- sioners was a powerful influence in helping the soldiers of his army to bear their totally different burdens of hunger and cold in the winter at Valley Forge. Unselfish leadership gives an inspiration which people sometimes catch with surprising THE SPIRIT OF DEVOTION 51 quickness, and habitually hold with yet more sur- prising tenacity. There is in the human heart a capacity for hero worship which is the chief thing that makes political progress possible. People will not hazard their comfort for a new theory. They are suspicious of philosophic argument. But once let them see a man who is living for something better than that which they have seen before, and they will follow him to the ends of the earth. The really great leader, we may say with all reverence, is the revelation of God to his followers. If he, with his wide vision and large powers, sub- ordinates himself to an unselfish purpose — be it the alleviation of the sufferings of his fellow men, or the emancipation of a down-trodden race from its conquerors, or the development of a new social order — others are ready to accept his leadership and to regard his sayings and doings as revelations of the divine purpose. When David poured out upon the rocks the water which had been brought through so much peril, it was the token that he was working for the Lord, and not for himself. It was just because his soldiers' blood was destined by him for the Lord's service and not for his own r.J HAl'CALAUREATl': ADDRKSSES tli;it tlicv wciv rciitly to slicd that 1»1r> I^ACCALAUHl'LVrK ADDiniSSlOS and to despise the innn who thinks of the money or offices ratlior than ol" the nse he can make of them. It is tliis way of estimating success which makes a man a gentleman in liis dealings with others, which makes him a jiatriot wlien his coun- try calls for his services, which makes him a Christian in his conception of life and his ideals of daily living. These are the things which count in the long run. If you value the world simply for what you can get out of it, he assured that the world will in turn estimate your value to it by what it can get out of you. A man who sets his ambition in such a narrow frame may have followers in prosperity, but not in adversity. He can secure plenty of sycophants, but no friends. That man, on the other hand, who values the world for what he can put into it; who deals courteously wuth his associates, patriotically with his country, and who, under whatsoever creed or form, has that spirit of devotion to an ideal which is the essential thing in religion — that man makes himself part of a world which is bound to- gether by higher motives than the liope of material success. If you pursue truth, people will be true to you, and you will help to make tlunii truer to THE SPIRIT OF DEVOTION 57 all their ideals. If yon love others, others will love you, and you will help to teach them a wider charity in all their dealings with the world. If you take the honors and emoluments of your leadership, not as a privilege of your own, but as a trust to be consecrated to the Lord, even as David poured out upon the rocks the water that represented the lifeblood of his followers, then may you be sure that each man who was devoted before will be doubly devoted thereafter, and will find, brought home to his heart, the true meaning of success in life, as no material prosperity or intellectual argument could bring it. " The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom: but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but unto them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God." Such it has proved itself for nearly two thousand years. May it be our privilege still to preach this gospel of self-sacrificing action, and still to share in revealing the meaning of this gospel to the generations which are to come. THE i.AKClE VIKW OF LIFE "Except the Lord keep the house, they hihor in vain that build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman wakelh but in vain." Seven years ago, when England was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the accession of her queen, and when every part of the British Em- pire united in offerings of patriotic pride, the chorus of congratulation was broken by a sharp note of warning from that empire's greatest poet : " If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe. Such boastings as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law — Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget — lest we forget." It was not the first time that a poet had said such things to the English people. Milton and Gray and Wordsworth had in their several ages sounded the same note of warning. But Milton and Gray and Wordsworth had all lived in some measure apart from active affairs. The thing that 58 THE LARGE VIEW OF LIFE 59 most surprised men in Kipling's " Recessional " was that it came from one who had spent his life among soldiers, sharing their ideals and ambitions and sentiments. It was the cry of a man of action, who knew whereof he spoke — a cry like that of David to the Hebrews, or of ^schylus to the Athenians — a cry of a man who had seen a nation in its making, and who had proved from contact with the " far-flung battle-line " that the Lord saveth not with sword and spear. Not in Britain alone and not in military affairs alone is this lesson needed. The battle-lines of the nineteenth century have engaged in the con- quests of peace as well as of war. The boasts of the leaders of scientific and industrial progress are no less loud than those of the captains and kings. In our assemblies and our markets, no less than in our armies and our navies, the tumult and the shouting tend to crowd out the remem- brance of things that are more fundamental and more essential. I wish I had the poet's power to find words which would apply to the every- day life that is before us the lesson of Kipling's " Recessional." But I can do no more than put into plain prose some facts of history, past and ()0 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES Iiresciit, wliicli nuiv serve to guide us in sluijiiu^ tuir life's course amid this tumuli, and warn us jigaiust tlic dangers involved in the untliiukiug jiceeptiince of current standards of success, at the cost, it may be, of the very best that we have inherited from our fathers. You have been reminded numy times over of the exceptional privileges and opportunities which the present age offers. In every Forefathers' Day address you have been told how your ancestors toiled and fought that you might enter into the fruit of tlieir labors. At every industrial exhi- bition you have been congratulated on the com- mand which your generation enjoys over the physical forces of Nature; at every public cele- bration you have been congratulated on the op- portunities that lie before the man of ambition to extend his power over wider fields than lay open to his fathers. But there is something else which has been done for you which is more im- portant than all these things put together. Your fathers have built up a morality and a conscience and a faith to which you have fallen heirs. Slowly and laboriously, for generation after gen- eration, they have been substituting law for THE LARGE VIEW OF LIFE 61 license, self-restraint for passion, reverence for superstition, love for hate. Slowly they have built up a religious spirit which makes men de- vote their lives to things outside of themselves and larger than themselves ; a spirit which gives to laws and morals and creeds all their real vitality. In this slow process of evolution the self-willed and perverse have heen gradually elim- inated, while the unselfish and the righteous and the spiritual have found a larger and stronger following as centuries went by. The work of a devoted leader has stimulated his followers to devotion. The inspiration of a prophetic teacher has called forth a response to his prophecies in the hearts of mankind. Movements which seemed small and weak, but which had in them the possi- bility of enlisting religious enthusiasm, have pre- vailed against overwhelming obstacles; and the very violence that sought to destroy them has but raised up new disciples for the cause. This faith, this inspiration, this enthusiastic devotion, are the things which make a nation really great, or a man's life really worth living. If wealth and dominion follow as a result of such faith and enthusiasm, they are good. But 62 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES if wonltli and (loiiiinion are inadc a ])riniary ob- ject, and are trusted as a source of national strength instead of its consequence or evidence, tliey prove a false reliance. And it is an un- fortunate fact that very few nations have achieved wealth or dominion without suffering loss of faith and enthusiasm, and remaining with the empty husk of greatness, at the very moment when they deemed themselves most powerful. For along with the acquisition of power there is apt to come a relaxing of discipline. Along with the achieve- ment of the means of industrial ease there comes a philosophy of life which makes industrial ease the goal and end of human effort. In almost every age of scientific progress and material pros- perity, the old dogmas by which discipline was supported are undermined and the old terrors of the law mitigated by the progress of scientific criticism; until many a j)eople, having lost cer- tain outworks of an ancient faith which were once deemed essential, abandons the whole ground on which that ancient faith rested, takes up a new philosophy of life which seems stronger than the other merely because its weak points have not been so fully examined and tested, and THE LARGE VIEW OF LIFE 63 ere the change is fully realized, finds its real power destroyed and its real glory a thing of the past. There are two philosophies of life which are offered to us in place of the religion of our fathers — one which lays stress on the natural impulses as superior in authority to the dictates of a conventional morality ; the other which looks to en- lightened selfishness as the means by which man- kind is to be delivered from unenlightened re- straints of tradition. I believe that each of these philosophies is erroneous: that the one means a reversion toward savagery, the other a degenera- tion toward social weakness. But so plausible are the arguments with which they are supported and so insidious the tendencies that make for their adoption, that it will be no waste of time to take account of these arguments and tendencies and see what they really signify. There is a school of writers like Zola or D'An- nunzio which lays great stress on what it calls the primal instincts of mankind. These writers think that with all that has been done in the way of civilization, its effect is like that of an arti- ficial veneer; that man remains at bottom an ani- 04 BACa\LAUREATE ADDRESSES null, nioveil liv ;iuiiii;il impulses and passions; that to feel these passions strongly is a sign of strength, ami that to have them under complete control is an indication of weakness. At one point or an- other in our lives we are all likely to have some touch of this spirit of impatience with civiliza- tion. AVe shall none of us — except possibly under the influence of violent physical disease — feel these impulses in their really savage form, which would lead us into orgies of wrath and murder. But we shall find often enough, wdien social laws and usages stand in the way of our convenience or comfort, an impulse to override those laws and usages for our individnal pleasure; and we shall be tempted to avail ourselves of every excuse which modern literature or modern philosophy may give to regard revenge or self-will or intem- perance in its various forms as a token of strength on our own part and a thing superior in authority to the morality taught us by our fathers. These animal passions have their place in life. They may often serve as impulses to civilization; they may sometimes be so wholly repressed that this will constitute an evidence of weakness in- stead of strength. In that profound classification THE LARGE VIEW OF LIFE 65 of human sins originally made by Aristotle, and adopted by Dante as the basis of arrangement of his " Inferno," there is a sharp distinction drawn between those animal vices like lust or anger, which are but the unbridled excess of qualities useful and virtuous in their place, and those deeper forms of evil like cruelty or breach of trust which are wrong in themselves, whether ex- ercised without restraint or under the influence of cool calculation. And Aristotle further recog- nizes that a man may have these animal impulses in inadequate amount, and may thereby fail of the proper measure of virtue — that it is as bad to be stolid as it is to be angry; as bad to be shiftless as it is to be covetous; or, to quote his pregnant phrase, that virtue is a mean between two ex- tremes. But this fact does not one Avhit abate the necessity that these things should be con- trolled by some strong force residing within the man, which shall make him the master of these impulses and not their slave. Otherwise the lust- ful man, as in Dante's hell, will be driven about forever in utter darkness by fierce winds ; the in- temperate will wallow forever in the foul storms; the covetous and the spendthrift alike will to all 6G BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES ctoniitv roll tlioir biirdons baokwaril and forward in ])iirposeless contradiction ; the niiiirv will for- ever tear one another to pieces in the bog that surrounds the inner city of fire. It is of no pur- pose to dignify these passions by the name of primal instinct. Literature is one long story of the vanity of these primal instincts against the moral nature of man. " From ' CEdipus Tyrannus ' to ' The Scarlet Letter ' the primary passions are defeated and overcome by duty, religion, and the moral law. The misery of broken law outlives passion and tramples on its embers. The love of Paolo and Francesca is swallowed up in tlieir sin. It is the like in ' Faust.' Earthly passions cannot avail against the moral powers." But I have delayed too long on a group of temp- tations to disregard moral law and religious senti- ment, which to the majority of men of this age has only occasional or secondary importance. Our chief danger comes from the other quarter — from trusting to the work of reason in places where we are imperfectly prepared for its operation. Most of us are so constituted and trained that the re- laxation of discipline will not leave us at the mercy of blind passion; but it may leave us at THE LARGE VIEW OF LIFE 67 the mercy of an almost equally blind spirit of selfish calculation. The whole course of events in the nineteenth century has been such as to lay men open to this temptation. The growth of liberty during that century has given people more opportunities to do as they pleased. They have been not only allowed but encouraged to pursue their own wel- fare ; and the general results of this course of con- duct have been good for the community. Under these circumstances, there has been a tendency to assume that if each man pursued his own inter- ests in a more or less intelligent fashion things would somehow work themselves out for the bene- fit of the body politic ; and that even if they failed to work themselves out in this way, the individual himself was free of responsibility. This attempt to make human selfishness the fundamental standard of right conduct is as dis- astrous as the attempt to make our unchecked animal instincts the standards of right conduct. Almost every evil — political, social, or commer- cial — which constitutes a serious menace to the permanent prosperity of our country can be traced directly to our tolerant acceptance of selfishness 6S BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES as a basis of morality. Uudcr the resli-aints ])ro- vidod by our laws and traditions and inherited tastes, the evil effects of selfishness may remain for a time nnnoticed, just as the evil effects of appetite or passion may remain unnoticed. But if we allow self-interest to be made the guiding star of our lives, sooner or later there comes a crisis when we face the choice between good and bad, and take the bad. Sooner or later there comes some temptation of pleasure to which we sacrifice our honor; some mess of pottage attrac- tively disguised, for which we sell our birthright. Do not be blind to this truth ; that if you have no better motive than your own personal interest, it means that your soul is for sale if the price be made sufiiciently high. You may disguise this fact from yourselves, but you wall not disguise it from others. The world is full of men and women who, having thus given themselves over to the operation of selfishness, are anxious to be- lieve that there is no motive higher than that by whicli they themselves are bound; that honor is a dream, religion a sham, Christianity a set of empty forms ; that if you can get at the real heart of a man or woman there is nothing at the bottom I THE LARGE VIEW OF LIFE 69 except self-interest — usually concealed and some- times refined, but in one form or another the con- trolling motive. It is for you to prove the falsity of this view — to show in your own lives that the honor of a gentleman is not for sale, the faith of a Christian something more than an empty form of speech; that you care for your parents and your friends and your country, not because you expect to get something out of them in the way of reward, but because you are ready to give to them whatever they need at your hands. If you can accept this for yourselves and believe it of others, and say so plainly, you will do good to your country and your fellow men beyond all power to calculate. You will enroll yourselves in that great church which includes all men of honor, whatever their creed, who have refused once and forever to be the slaves either of passion or of self-interest. Do not be disturbed if your scientific investiga- tion has rendered it impossible for you to sub- scribe to some of the old creeds. Jesus of Naza- reth himself rejected many of the formulas which the churches of his day deemed essential to sal- vation. Wc uiay distrust many traditional articles 70 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES of faitli as iinj^rovable, \\c may if necessary reject some of tliciu as survivals of ancient prejudice, and yet take our stand witli Edmund Burke when be makes his bold avowal: " We are unwilling to east away the coat of ancient prejudice and trust ourselves to the naked reason, because we suspect that in each man the stock of reason is small, and prefer to avail ourselves of the bank and capital of ages." Even if avc can go no farther than this, we have creed enough to justify ourselves for not selling our souls. But I believe that most of us can go a step farther, and can accept enough of the principles of Christianity to take our place in the effective Christian work of the future. Christianity, as taught by its founder, did not deny the important place of human instincts and passions, nor did it seek to prohibit the exercise of human reason. It sought only to turn these impulses and passions to the help of others, and to have this reason exercised for unselfish ends. The belief which most it inculcated was the belief in the nearness of God's power to human affairs. The one ideal on which it insisted was the ideal of devoted self-sacrifice where the call of duty conflicted with the dictates of apparent advantage. I THE LARGE VIEW OF LIFE 71 Whoever so loves his neighbor that he would save him unnecessary pain, even at his own cost, and so loves his duty that he will not barter his con- science for any external advantages to himself, is not far from the kingdom of God — nay, he is indeed a member of that kingdom, in this life and in whatever may come thereafter. "The tumult and the shouting dies; The captains and the kings depart: Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice, An humble and a contrite heart. Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet. Lest we forget — lest we forget!" Gentlemen of the graduating class : The really fundamental thing in a man's life is his choice of a religion. Two religions are to-day strug- gling for the mastery. There is the religion of Mammon, whose dominant purpose is selfishness and whose creed is indifference to moral considera- tions, except so far as they may be regarded as instruments of individual advancement. There is the religion of God, whose purpose is service and whose creed is loyalty to something larger than yourselves. The religion of Mammon ap- peals to those who value the external evidences of success — the pomp and the luxury, the title 7- IkVccai.aurkatI': addhiosses and I lie j^liow. The religion of CJod appeals to lliose who value life for the work that it brings, and measure success by the honest elTort that ji man has made to do his work. It apjKials to those for whom wealth and jiower and professional eminence are not ultimate ends, hnt means to larger service and sacrifice. It ai)})eals to men who will not sell their honor, no matter liow high the price, nor betray their friends, no matter how great the advantage. It appeals to men who have vision large enough and purpose deep enough to hold a straight course in the face of opposition or misrepresentation, and endure for conscience' sake whatever hardship may fall to their lot. These were the ideals of Christ, wliich he held through temptation and suffering. This is the significance of every line in the history of his life and death. Wlioever follows liim in this spirit has the right to call himself a Christian and to claim the promises of the Christian faith — the promise that whosoever will lose his life for Christ's sake and the gospel's, the same shall find it. By many roads do such men come to the feet of God : but thither do we all come at last. KELIGIOUS KULES AND RELIGIOUS IDEALS " Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteous- ness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven." What was the essential characteristic of the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees ? It was this: The scribes and Pharisees made morality, and even religion, a matter of rules and conventions. They looked for nothing higher and cared for nothing better than a system of observ- ances which they had inherited from their fathers. This system was not in itself a bad one. The Pharisees had a more enlightened code of conduct than any of their contemporaries or than most of the peoples who have come after them. This code inculcated in a high degree the virtues of religious observance and of obedience to law. It laid some emphasis on the more fundamental vir- tues of justice and reasonableness. It was based on a philosophy in which God and a future life were essential articles of faith. Doubtless there 73 f 74 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES wvrc among tlio rjiiiks of tlie riiarisees many hyjx)erites, who used the forms of religion and of morality as a cloak for tlieir vices and sins; but there is no reason to believe that the propor- tion of such men was greater than has always ex- isted in any society where righteousness has been sufficiently valued to make it worth while to put counterfeits into circulation. Why, then, does devotion to a good system of rules and observances like that of the Pharisees lead its followers astray? Partly because the practice of relying upon rules and conventions, however good, lessens a man's power of meeting the unforeseen emergen- cies and crises of life. !Next to the boy who comes to college with bad habits, the one who is in most danger is he who has had such superlatively good habits that an infraction of a single one of them breaks down the barrier uj^on which he has re- lied, and leaves him without a system of inner defences. There are two kinds of degeneracy: one which comes from too little reliance upon law, another which comes from too much. The man whom we commonly call a degenerate suffers from the former cause. He has broken so many laws I RELIGIOUS IDEALS 75 that law as a whole ceases to have authority over him, and he becomes powerless to resist temptation from any quarter. But there are and always have been degenerates of the opposite type — men who have kept the laws that they were taught to obey until such laws become the only authority which controls them and the only standard which they recognize, and they are powerless to feel the stimulus of anything better. There is a point beyond which drill ceases to be a help, and be- comes a hindrance ; there is a set of circumstances where the person who has been subjected to too much control is as helpless as the one who has been subjected to too little. Every college man, as he goes out into the world, is exposed to a change of atmosphere not unlike that through which he passed in coming from school to college. If during his college life he has come to identify goodness with the keeping of a complex set of rules and observances, he is in great danger. It is almost inevitable that under the new conditions which he meets he will disobey some of these rules or disregard some of these observances. If he has placed his trust in keeping the letter of the law, the breaking of one rule is 76 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES apt to be followed by the breaking of a great many others. This experience is a typical one. Every man and every race which relies for protection on the text of the law rather than on its spirit is menaced by this risk of complete failure in emer- gencies. But even if no emergencies or crises arise which stretch our rules to the breaking point, there is another and more insidious series of dangers which beset the man whose morality and religion are matters of rules alone. The keeping of definite rules produces self-satisfaction; and self- satisfaction is but one step short of moral stag- nation. Few of us realize how hard it is to es- cape this peril, or how much harm it does to its victims. It is inevitable that a body of men brought up together and working in harmony with one an- other should value their rituals and creeds and codes of law. To a certain extent it is right and wise, as well as inevitable. For all these things represent the summarized experience of the past. A ritual is a set of observances which past genera- tions have gradually accumulated because they found them valuable in promoting a reverent and RELIGIOUS IDEALS 77 religious frame of mind. A creed is a set of jjropositions which past generations have collected because they found them useful in helping people toward a working philosophy of life. A code is a set of laws which past generations have estab- lished because they found them effective in secur- ing that orderly conduct which is the basis of good morals. Any man who recklessly throws aside these means of promoting religion and morality is lacking alike in reverence and in practical wisdom. But it is easy to exalt these things into a place for which they were never intend-, ed ; to make them ends instead of means, goals of human progress instead of steps in human progress. In one of the early battles of the Crimean War a brigade of the English army, which had made an ill-judged attack on the centre of the Russian position, seemed likely to be annihilated or cap- tured ; for it unexpectedly found itself face to face with a force of well-posted artillery for which it was no match. To the surprise of the English commander, however, the Russian guns at the critical moment retired from their position, which was occupied by the English without resistance. 78 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES The reason for this false inoveinent, through which the Russians lost a battle that they might otherwise have won, lay in the general orders of the Russian emperor to his subordinates. He had been a great admirer of the strategy of the Duke of Wellington, and was particularly impressed with the fact that this great commander never lost a gun; consequently he had said to the officers of his army : " Whatever you do, do not lose a gun." They saved their guns; they lost their battle. This is what happens in the practical work of the world, when some one principle of conduct or trait of character is worshipped and followed for its own sake, instead of for the sake of what it will accomplish. The same sort of thing is constantly happening in our spiritual life. A man may take such satis- faction in the observance of a religious form that he ceases to value the religious spirit. He may repeat the words of a creed until he cares more for the words than for the meaning. He may obey a code of laws so implicitly that he refuses to recognize the need of any moral authority out- side of that code. Poor Christian, in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, A RELIGIOUS IDEALS 79 is forever stumbling into this kind of pitfall. The very intensity of his desire to be good makes him overvalue any step, real or apparent, in the direction of goodness, and think that he has practically reached the end when he has only grasped a more or less imperfect means. He has a burden of sin, of vs^hich he would be rid. He hears that Mr. Legality has skill in relieving people of such burdens, and he follows Mr. Legality until a mountain threatens to fall upon his head. At a later stage of his journey he goes to sleep in his satisfaction at being half way up the Hill DiflSculty, and loses the roll which was to give him admission to the Celestial City. Again, he is so puffed up with the knowledge which he has received at the Palace Beautiful that the next stages of his journey are fraught with perils which he himself has created ; and he finds the weapons which were given him in that palace a most uncertain defence against the assaults of Apollyon. ISTot until the end of his career, when he is fit to pass into the kingdom of heaven, has his experience taught him to keep awake on the Enchanted Ground of convention and business usage, and to preserve himself from that sleep so BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES into which many pilgrims, safely past the physical trials ami dangers of the way, fall, never more to awake. Xever more to awake ; for the sleep of conven- tionality is of all slumbers the most fatal. Life is progress — perpetual adaptation to new condi- tions. The self-satisfaction which leads a man to be content with the old is the beginning of death. The apparent excellence of a result ac- tually attained, the mistakes and errors involved in imperfect efforts to advance to better results, must not be allowed to obscure our view of this truth. Xo man, however far and however well he has managed the voyage of life, can afford to rest complacent in what he has achieved. The best of us, said an old sea-captain, has made mis- takes enough to throw him half a point off his course ; and if a man is half a point off his course the light which he fondly believes to be the harbor entrance marks the reef on which he is going to destruction. The Doctor Faustus of mediaeval legend was a man who bargained his soul away to the devil for a brief season of indulgence in riotous living and the practice of black arts of magic. Not so RELIGIOUS IDEALS SI with the modern Faust — the Fanst whom Goethe saw and knew. His fall comes not through magic arts that fail to meet his soul's longings, or sensual pleasures whose last taste is hitterness. His fall is to come whenever, in the gradual unfolding of his life's plans, he shall profess himself satisfied with what he has already attained. " Then let the clock stand still; his time is o'er." It is not his mistakes that will lose his soul. Mistakes are the inevitable incident in all efforts toward some- thing better than has hitherto been reached. It is the renunciation of the effort itself, the lack of accessibility to higher hopes and higher am- bitions, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost that sets the seal of moral death upon the human soul. A man of bad antecedents and surroundings who recognizes that they are bad, has higher possi- bilities than the man who lives under much better rules but sees neither need nor room for improve- ment. For him whose ideals are ahead of his practice, even if that practice is low, there is al- ways hope. For him who has sunk his ideals to the level of his practice, even if that practice is high, there is no hope at all. 82 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES "Two men went up into the temple to pray; the one a Pharisee, and the other a pubUcan. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. And the publican, standing afar off, would not lift up so much as his eyes unto heaven, but smote upon his breast, saying, God be merciful to me a sinner. I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other." Are we going to rest content with being Phari- sees, or are we really trying to be Christians? Let each of us look into his own heart to-day, and find the answer. What is your ideal of success in life? Is it to become a reputable member of good society, and achieve substantial results in the way of fortune, family, and friends, on which you can look with increasing complacency? Or is it to try to make the world better by a struggle which will be full of dangers and mistakes and misunderstandings, and in which to the very end of life you are likely to remain far from the re- alization of your highest hopes ? In the former case you are a Pharisee, no matter how much you may try to disguise the fact. In the latter case you are a Christian, no matter what doubts may RELIGIOUS IDEALS 83 hold you back from venturing to call yourself by that name. If you choose the part of the Pharisee you will probably get something of the success which you desire; but in the very process of getting it you will become constantly narrower and meaner. Your ideals, limited from the first, will tend to become more limited as the years go on. You will get so far apart from the big movements of human thought and human sympathy that you will come to distrust them and to fear them. In all efforts for moral progress you will become an obstructionist instead of a leader. Content with your position in the front ranks of society, you will seek to keep things where they are, dreading a movement for the better almost as much as you would dread a movement for the worse, because any movement will menace the life of sterile satis- faction to which you have become accustomed. If you choose the part of the Christian, your life will be a hard one. You will have to fight those who are opposed to you and sometimes be beaten, which is bad enough. You will be mis- understood by those who should be on your side, which is worse. You will make mistakes of your 84 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES own in jndiiinu: wli{>ru the right really lies, which is worst of all. IJiit through defeats and mistakes and misunderstandings you will all the time be growing into something larger than you were be- fore. You yourself indeed will no more be satisfied with your powers and achievements ten or twenty years hence than you are at the begin- ning; for your ideals of what a man should be and do will have gro^vn as your work grows. But others about you will feel the change and wall be increasingly ready to work w^ith you and under you. To you they will look for leadership and counsel in the movements that are really great — the movements which do not seek to advance one man at the expense of another, but to carry the wdiole world forw^ard to something better than it has know^n in the past You may not, and unless some grave emergency arises that puts the insignia of power into your hands you probably will not, know how much men trust you. The greatness of the Christian is just as unconscious as the small- ness of the Pharisee. The standards and ideals wdiich help him to be great prevent him from rating his own achievements as highly as those about him are glad to do. But far though they RELIGIOUS IDEALS 85 be beyond his reach, they give him the steadiness of purpose which enables him, through life and through death, to face the future undisturbed and confident. There was a man among the apostles who, more than all others, had tested the possibilities of both these ways of living ; and he it is who speaks most emphatically of them all, concerning the wrong- ness of the one and the Tightness of the other. Paul of Tarsus was born and bred a Pharisee, under conditions which gave him every advantage for working out life's problems on that basis if the thing was possible. In his own person he combined the best that three civilizations could give — the morals of the Jews, the j)hilosophy of the Greeks, the law of the Romans. He knew how to use them all ; and he added to them, from boyhood up, a sort of hunger for righteousness, a desire to do as well as he could the work which was laid upon him — a zeal for God, to use his own words, though not according to knowledge. But in the midst of his career as a Pharisee he was suddenly brought to see the meaning of Christ's life and doctrine. He saw that a man could not render his account to God by reckoning up his 86 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES pood deeds as so many credits to himself. Tie saw that he must forget himself and think for otliers. He saw that he must forget the past and look to the future. He abandoned the attempt to find a definite standard to which he could con- form and be satisfied to conform ; and he accepted instead, fully and unreservedly, the obligation to do everything that he could for God and for his fellow men. He entered upon a life where right- eousness was not measured by a man's success or failure in keeping rigid rules, but by his single- minded devotion to an ideal outside of himself which inspired him to larger attempts, and in the long run to larger performances, than any system of rules could have contemplated. That his own achievements as a Christian were great, he could not deny. Even before his death they were be- ginning to stand out large on the pages of history. But they remained so small in proportion to his vision of what he wanted to do that they never filled his mental horizon as they would have filled the horizon of a Pharisee. Their greatness some- times served him as a means of casting ridicule on the boastings of others who tried to make their own lesser achievements a basis on which to erect RELIGIOUS IDEALS 87 monuments to tlieir own righteousness; they never tempted him to erect a monument to himself. More than any other apostle he preached the doctrine of justification by faith — the doctrine that a man is saved not by the things that he has done, however important these may be as evidences of his purpose in life, but by that devotion to things outside of him and beyond him which should dominate his whole life from beginning to end, and consecrate it to the service of God. Gentlemen of the graduating class: To the col- lege man more than to any one else this broad view of Christian duty should appeal. He of all mankind has least occasion for Pharisaic com- placency. The self-made man, who by his own efforts has risen from the bottom of the ladder, may have a certain amount of excuse for dwelling on his own achievements. Such as they are, he can at least claim them for his own. You can make no such claim. The life which you have lived and are going to live has been made possible for you by the efforts of your fathers. What you do represents for the most part not an achieve- ment but an indebtedness — an indebtedness which, wdth God's help, you are going to repay by trans- 88 r.ACCALAUKMATK AI)I)HESS1':S mittiug in Uiru to your sons the j)Ossibilitics of wider life and more inti'lligeut faitli. This debt to the past and this duty to the future are things which we have tried to keep in view during all your education here, Not by the class- room alone and not by the teaching force alone, but by the whole atmosphere of the place and the inspiration of its graduates, dead and living, we have striven to take you outside of yourselves and make your life a part of the life of ages. You have not come here solely or primarily to learn how to make what the world calls a success. Many of you in the years to come will be reproached with the fact that your power of getting money or office has not been greatly increased during the years that you have silent in this place. So far as this reproach is based upon any actual waste of our time in idleness, we must take it severely to heart. But so far as it is due to the fact that we make public service instead of self- service the measure of success, we may well glory in the reproach. In science the pursuit of truth is more im- portant than the pursuit of gain. In the history of every nation the self-sacrifice of its members RELIGIOUS IDEALS 89 counts for more than their self-aggrandizement. The true worth of a man is to be measured not by the things which he has done for himself, but by the things which he has done for the world around him and after him. Every man who has consecrated his life to an ideal larger than he can hope to compass has the kind of faith which moves the world; whether he calls it faith in God, or faith in duty, or shrinks from calling it by any name at all and goes on living for his fellow men without ever being able to formulate the reason why. Each man finds his highest spiritual devel- opment, not by working out his own salvation alone and for himself, but by losing the thought of self in the thought of others. This is the Chris- tian life ; this is the faith by which men are saved. THE CHOICE OF A FAITH "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house." As we see what the world is doing, in science and in industry, in commerce and in politics, we all wish to have our part in its achievements. We despise the man who is content to stand pas- sive while so much active life is going on about him. We desire that when our own work is over — be it ten years hence, or twenty, or fifty — some tangible result may stand to our credit in the great ledger of history. Men are saved by what they do ; not by what they profess. This is the gi'eat underlying belief of the present age; and it is a belief which finds a response in the heart of every one of us. But it is not enough to get things done; they must be done right. Done to stand instead of to fall; done for something larger and more lasting than our own transient selves. To make our work count in the final result, it must have purpose as 90 THE CHOICE OF A FAITH 91 well as eflSciency. If you never look beyond what you are doing, you never can be sure which way it is going to tell. If you care for nothing but the figures of the day's run, you go wherever the wind carries you — forward one day, and backward the next. To reach a port you must shape your course by the stars. The very splendor of the modern world's achievements makes it liable to forget this neces- sity. It becomes so absorbed in the doing of things that it loses its sense of direction. This is why we say that the present age needs faith. Not because it is worse than previous ages; not because it is less earnest or reverent than previous ages ; but because the very swiftness of to-day's current and the joy of moving with it makes it the more constantly necessary to measure our progress by something fixed and permanent, in order to be sure that we are going forward and not backward. The man of faith is the man who shapes his course by the stars rather than by the current, and who looks at the stars oftenest when the current runs swiftest. Small-minded men re- gard faith as a theory ; large-minded men use it as a practical working power to get things done and \y2 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES done right. What faitli inciiut lo I'aul is shown by Paul's accouut of what it did. Through faith men '* subdued kingdoms, wrouglit righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens." Gentlemen, faith is the one thing in the world which will enable you to do this. It is the thing which will prevent you from being daunted by small failures, or even by failures which for the moment may seem overwhelmingly large ; the thing which will enable you to accom- plish something which not only looks worth doing, but is worth doing. If your country has men of faith among her citizens, she will be saved ; if she has not men of faith, no amount of intellectual progress or material wealth can preserve her. But what, you will say, has all this to do with our text ? How will belief in the Lord Jesus Christ help us to do all this ? Are there not other and plainer ways of making our lives count for right and of saving our country from its enemies than by the acceptance of Christianity and the things for which Christianity stands? THE CHOICE OF A FAITH 93 Other ways there doubtless are. By many roads men come to the feet of God. I do not suppose that one of us here is so narrow-minded as to believe that all good is bounded by the limits of a single creed, or all salvation wrought by means of a single method. As we look back on the heroic deeds of Roman or of Greek, as we behold the de- voted lives of followers of Buddha or of Con- fucius, we see clearly enough that the faith that looks through death is confined to no one church or company. But I cannot agree with the man who goes on to say that these other ways are sim- pler and plainer than the way of Christian be- lief. Not easier has it been, but infinitely harder, to attain saving faith through philosophy than through Christianity. Philosophy works through our intellect; Christianity takes hold upon our affections and ideals. Philosophy asks us to assent to certain principles ; Christianity asks us to take a certain kind of man as our hero. For nineteen persons out of twenty, this is the appeal that counts. Men will debate forever over a principle ; let a real leader come, and they will follow him to the death. You can see instances of this in your college 94 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES life. Yon will rciiu'iiilKT liow, wlicn you came lu're as Freslmicn, tlic careers of some of the upper class men took hold of your imagination. You wanted to follow in their footsteps. It seemed like the highest prize of college life to accomplish the kind of things that they had accomplished. Whatever such men did was a power for good or bad through the whole community. As the years of college life went on, and your own class began to take the lead, each of yon found men whom you were proud to know as friends and whom in your hearts you desired to be like. The influence of these men u]X)n you, for good or for evil, counted for more in your college life than all you learned from books or lectures, from col- lege sports or college politics. You believed in your friends ; you became like them, whether you meant to or not. If they were men of the right stamp your college course has been a success, no matter what disappointments it may have con- tained. If they were men of the wn-ong stamp your college course has failed of its best purpose. And what has been true here will be true in the world afterward. As you enter upon professional life you will form your ideals of success, not from THE CHOICE OF A FAITH 95 what books say but from what you see exemplified in the careers of men, past and present. In law or in medicine, in business or in politics, you will find heroes that you wish to be like. As you grow older, by your choice of heroes will your life's purpose be determined and dominated. In the world, as in college, a strong man of any kind will find friends and followers. Be he prize-fighter or fanatic, politician or millionaire, philosopher or Christian, there will be men who will choose him for a hero and stand or fall by the choice. Nearly nineteen centuries ago there was a typ- ical gathering at the passover at Jerusalem. A large part of the multitude chose as its hero a man who rejDresented physical force in its lawless exercise ; and when the governor cried, " Whom will ye that I release unto you ? " they said, " Barabbas ! " There was another section of the community which stood under the dominion of fanaticism, ready to be moved without reason by a leader that appealed to their emotions; and when Caiaphas, the high-priest, said that it was expedient that one man should die for the people, they cried with a loud voice, " Crucify him ! crucify him ! " There was a smaller but more 90 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES influential section that cared for success as it was embodied in material prosix3rity and political jiower. They believed in Pontius Pilate, the Konian governor. lie represented the really suc- cessful man whom they wished to imitate; and when Pontius Pilate found it convenient to wash his hands of a matter of which he disapproved, they washed their hands of it also. Not by any of these groups, nor by the ideals to which they clung, was the world to be saved. Belief in Bar- abbas and the things Barabbas represented had already been the means of destroying the nation's freedom and reducing it to subjugation. Belief in Caiaphas and the things that Caiaphas repre- sented only a few years later led the people into a desperately mistaken war and into more hope- less subjugation than ever before. Belief in Pilate and the things that Pilate represented, if it helped a man at all, helped him to secure the prosper- ity of his body at the expense of his soul. The thing that did save the world, the thing that did leave its mark on history forever, the thing that represented a growing force and helped the na- tions for all time, came from yet another group, far smaller than the smallest of those I have I THE CHOICE OF A FAITH 97 named — the little group of those that took Jesus of Nazareth as their leader; a king whose king- dom was not of this world ; a man whose ideal of success was in devoted service to others, even though that success led to the cross. Does America to-day believe in the Lord Jesus Christ sufficiently to avoid the fate of the Jews of old, or is it to be given over to the worship of Barabbas and Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate? We say that America is a Christian nation; and I verily believe that there is more of the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth in the daily life and work of the American people than there is in any other of the great nations of the world. I believe that whenever it comes to a great crisis — political, in- dustrial, or moral — there is enough of the spirit of Christ in America to save us. But though we have good ground for hope, we are very far short of having ground for complacent assurance. We have only to look at the facts in the world about us to see how far the American people is from really believing in Jesus as the man they wish to be like and in the things for which Jesus stands as their ideals of success. That part of our people which turns with avidity to sensational accounts 9S BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES f)f r(»l»l)t'rv and arson and nnirder is not far re- moved from the innltitnde that cried, " Not this man, bnt Barabbas ! " That part which looks to ])hitform or press for appeals to its passions, and which seeks a leader who can give voice to the promptings of its own prejndices or emotions, has advanced little beyond the stage of those who clamored for the crucifixion. And that part of our people which, thongh more respectable than the first group and more enlightened than the second, is nevertheless content to make prosperity in business or politics the test of success, and to give all its thoughts to the attainment of tliat prosperity by any means not too grossly incon- sistent with respectability or enlightenment, does not differ greatly from him who washed his hands of the whole matter that was the most momentous in the world's history. Which of these standards is yours ? Whom are you choosing for your hero? I do you the justice to think that none of you will choose Barabbas. Every consideration of habit and interest makes against that choice. You come of law-abiding ancestors ; and they by their good conduct for many generations have guarded you against the THE CHOICE OF A FAITH 99 danger of making an outlaw your object of wor- ship. Nor do I believe that many of you will be found in the group that follows after Caiaphas. You have seen so many sides of life and have dra^vn knowledge from so many sources that you are protected in large measure against the danger of a fanatical devotion to some one passion or prejudice. But there is danger, and very gi-ave danger, that without knowing it you will enroll yourselves among the followers and worshippers of Pontius Pilate. The air is full of influences which lead you in that direction without your knowledge. In these last months the whole American world has been shocked by the revelations of immoral methods in the conduct of business and politics on the part of men who had enjoyed the respect of the community. We have asked ourselves over and over again how it was possible that such men, honorable, high-minded, and self-respecting to all outward appearance, should have accepted wrong customs without protest. But if any of us will look at his own present and prospective tempta- tions, the answer is not far to seek. The moment we choose as our example of professional success 100 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES the man who has iiuulo a fortune or secured an ortiee or achieved a reputation with the world, we tend to put fortune and office and reputation in the foreground, and to regard the question of how we use the fortune or office or reputation as an unimportant incident. When things once get into this shape in our minds, every position of honor or power becomes a position of peril to the soul. The greater the crisis we are called upon to face, the greater the ruin that follows. In the quad- rangle of Leland Stanford University there was a magnificent memorial arch, that stood as a monu- ment to its builder no less than to its designer. He had striven for effect, and he obtained it. One day there came an earthquake that shook the foundations ; and it was found that they were not of solid stone, but chips and rubble. Perhaps this man built no worse than others ; but the very loftiness of the memorial that he had raised served to emphasize the ruin that he had wrought. There is no reason to believe that Pontius Pilate was worse than a hundred other Roman governors ; but it fell to his lot to have his work really tried before the Day of Judgment in the sight of men as well as of God. THE CHOICE OF A FAITH 101 Stand for the doing of things, by all means. Stand for the doing of great things if possible. But never let the greatness of the thing get so far into the foreground as to obscure the purpose for which it exists. And above all things, let the honest intent to serve others have a larger place in your life than the things you are trying to do for yourself. It is for this that Jesus stands. He cared as much for deeds as any one. He spoke straight to the people who were doing the world's work, in his own time and ever afterward. He was a practical man, who took things as he found them and made the best of them — to such an ex- tent that this was made a reproach to him by those whose range of vision was narrower than his. But when his heart's purpose demanded the sacrifice of his life and the imperilment of all appearance of tangible success, he hesitated not a moment. This life and death of Christ show what Paul means by faith. It is not belief in a formula; it is not an abstract idea of the way in which the universe is governed. It is a purpose which dominates a man's life; strong enough to enable him to get things done, but broad enough and far-reaching enough to keep the man larger 102 BACCALAUREATE ADDRESSES lliau his works, his range of vision wider than the territory which he has conquered, his readiness for sacrifice ever growing with the extent of his achievement This is the belief on the Lord Jesus Christ that saves men and nations. As we look hack on the pages of history, the men whose figures rise large and inspiring are not tliose who have amassed fortunes or won battles or conquered empires; but those who, amid the hos- tility of the critics and the indifference of the world about them, have strongest stood for prin- ciple. The battles and the ambitions of a Marl- borough — nay, the very empire of a Louis — pale before the majestic constancy of purpose of Will- iam of Orange. In the gi-eat drama of slavery and secession we draw our largest inspiration, not from the brilliant arguments of the orators nor the brilliant strategy of the generals, but from the patient endurance of two great, heavy-hearted men on opposite sides, unlike in all else but alike in unselfish devotion to principle as they under- stood it — Lee and Lincoln. What man of you, when the choice is placed squarely before him, would not prefer the immortality of William to that of Louis or Marlborough? Who would not THE CHOICE OF A FAITH 103 choose to bear the burdens of a Lee or a Lincoln, rather than to enjoy the honors of the most suc- cessful general or the most brilliant orator ? And who, when he sees Christ standing before the judg- ment-seat of Pilate, would not throw in his lot with the prisoner who, deserted hj his friends and scarce able to keep up his own courage for the ordeal, stands out at that moment as the supreme revelation of God to man, an embodiment of the faith that is to save the world ? Gentlemen of the graduating class : When you see these things clearly, you know where you stand. But it is going to be hard to see things clearly. " The world is too nmch with us." The necessity for making a living keeps our minds so bound down to the details of professional success that we sometimes forget that there is anything except professional success to live for. The neces- sity of conforming our habits and standards to the habits and standards of those about us, in order that we may do efficient work, makes us forget that there is a point where conformity ceases to be a virtue. The greater the measure of success we attain the harder it sometimes becomes to keep our ideas ahead of our achievements. If you 104 BA(TALAUREATE ADDRESSES Mjiiit to liav(> ill yon the stuiT tliat iiinkos licrocs, you imust begin now. As tlic earthquake shock tests the building's foundations, so will the great emergencies of life test the material which we have been putting into our lives from the begin- ning. If we are content to admire the men who have done things, no matter whether for them- selves or for others, we shall be making our life a thing of show rather than of substance ; good, perhaps, in outward appearance, but wanting in those qualities which will meet God's judgment, or will even meet men's judgment if some great crisis gives them an opportunity to know what we really are. But if we care for those who have done things for others instead of for themselves ; if w'e accustom ourselves to regard all tangible success as a means of service rather than as an end in itself; if we delight to think of the men and women who have left the world better for their having lived in it, and make them our real heroes — then are we laying the foundations of a life which, when it is tested, shall stand out heroic, even as did the life of Jesus the Master. Now, while grave temptation is far distant, is the time to make ready. Now, when our character is THE CHOICE OF A FAITH 105 plastic and when our very failures can be made to serve as lessons; now, when the inspiration of college traditions and college friendships is strong in our hearts ; now, when our life-work lies before us to make and mould as we will — now is the time to make choice of the faith which will enable us so to use the things temporal that we lose not the things eternal. TALKS ON OPENING SUNDAYS OF THE COLLEGE YEAR A CimiSTIA^ DEMOCEACY "As touching brotherly love ye need not that I write unto you : for ye yourselves are taught of God to love one another. And indeed ye do it toward all the brethren which are in all Macedonia: but we beseech you, brethren, that ye increase more and more; and that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you; that ye may walk honestly toward them that are without, and that ye may have lack of nothing.'! I PROPOSE to speak this morning of the char- acteristics of a Christian democracy. Every form of government has its own peculiar clangers and temptations. Democracy is no ex- ception, either in the large wbrld of national politics, in the smaller arena of municipal govern- ment, or in the yet more restricted framework of university organization. I desire to set forth some of the special evils which thus beset de- mocracy; showing whence they arise, how they are exemplified in college life, and what is their bearing on our future as a nation. Do not misunderstand me. This is no pes- simistic indictment of the democratic system, 109 110 TALKS TO STUDENTS which I believe to represent the best form of gov- erninent for the citizen and the best spirit in which to train the stndent. It is characteristic of America ; it is dominant here at Yale. Not one word would I say which might lead you to under- rate the special opportunities for character devel- opment which your college life will give at a time when these opportunities should be utilized to the utmost for yourselves and for your country. Not one word would I say which might seem to cast doubt on the vitality of our American constitu- tion, at an hour when one of those crimes which are incident to every form of government causes some men to despair of the efficiency of our own. But to insure the right use of these privileges, it is necessary to be on our guard against the WTong uses. Let us try to-day to place our- selves thus on guard — to examine some of the dangers with which these opportunities are at- tended. The right and wrong uses of democracy are closely connected with one another. The spirit of community which characterizes American col- lege life has its possibilities of evil as well as of good. It may, if misdirected, lead us to A CHRISTIAN DEMOCRACY HI neglect higher standards of judgment and higher possibilities of development, whether furnished by the world's sober thought or by the dictates of our own consciences. When a man breathes an atmosphere which carries him outside of himself, the very inspiration which makes him lose sight of his own selfish interests often leads him to forget that there are other places in God's uni- verse besides the one whose air he breathes, and other standards larger and more permanent than the momentary judgment of those who are about him. To these standards a man must hold him- self true, and must rely on his own force of char- acter in so doing. There is no danger that the Yale man will wrap himself in that spirit of selfishness which would say, with Cain : " Am I my brother's keeper ? " The danger is rather that he may forget that he is his own keeper, respon- sible not to the college sentiment alone, but to the world and to the Lord thereof; that in a false spirit of independence which denies to Caesar the things which are Csesar's, he may withhold from God the things which are God's. Aristotle has said that no small part of our vices are but the excess of virtues. Dante has 112 TALKS TO STUDENTS taken nj) this idea, and has in immortal words symbolized the end of those who allow affection to degenerate into lust, prudence into avarice, generosity into prodigality, impulsiveness into violence, or healthful appetite into gluttonous ex- cess. What is strikingly true of our physical de- sires and our feelings as individuals is, 1 think, equally true — though less easily recognized — of those social sentiments which are the foundation of modern democracy in the college and in the world at large. The exaltation of college purposes and judgments at the expense of the individual, which in its place is most salutary, may, if carried beyond its place, become a menace and an evil. The very fact that college sentiment at Yale is on the whole so sound and healthful on the more fundamental questions of general morality may tempt you to lose sight of its deficiencies and its errors. For, like all things human, it has its imperfections, and very serious ones. It is often narrow; it is occasionally blind. It frequently runs so far counter to the judgments of the world as to lead to violations of propriety. It is some- times allowed to stifle the voice of the individual conscience, and tolerate moral wrong. By viola- A CHRISTIAN DEMOCRACY 113 tions of propriety, however unconscious, we do harm to the reputation of the college, and form habits which will interfere with our best success in after life. By violations of morality, even though they be equally unconscious, we do a yet more irrejiarable injury in blunting our finer in- stincts and undermining the strength which we are sure to need if we would preserve our Chris- tian honor unsullied. Do you ask for instances of what I mean ? Take the sports and enjoyments which form so large a part of our life. That a man cares so much for his college as to forget himself is a glorious thing; that he cares so much as to ignore all outside standards is often a dangerous one. We may become so absorbed in college amuse- ment that we carry it to a point where it dis- turbs the public peace ; we may sometimes, I am sorry to say, allow it to become an offence against public decency. Forgetfulness may be the reason which in either case explains our conduct; we shall be much mistaken if we think that it can excuse it. The world and the church alike insist on having men who will not thus forget them- selves. Ill TALKS TO STUDENTS Or a man may become so interested in the athletic successes of his college that he lets his lovalty find vent in loud talk, at the expense of courtesy to friends of other colleges ; or in bet- ting — which is, in the majority of instances, simply a form of loud talk, -vvhicli makes less physical noise though more moral disturbance, and is, therefore, preferred by those whose ears are better trained than their consciences. From this it is but a step to the half -conscious toleration of unfair methods of play — at least so far as one's rivals are supposed to be guilty of them. When a body of spectators tries to make itself a factor in the winning of games, we have a marked in- stance of this unfairness. There is a wide dis- tance between that spontaneous cheering which is an inspiration to good play, and the applause, more or less concertedly organized, which is con- ceived with the purpose of influencing the result. The player who depends upon such applause for inspiration bears a strong resemblance in his moral fibre to the man who depends upon whiskey as a stimulus to work. The spectator who indulges therein casts discredit on his college in the eyes of the world, and undermines his own sense of A CHRISTIAN DEMOCRACY 115 fair play in a way which renders worse than nugatory some of the best uses of athletic sport as a whole. Again, a man may become so loyal to his class- mates and associates that he accepts without ques- tion, in dealing with other classes or with the members of the faculty, principles of conduct which were characteristic of a state of society which we have now outgrown. Physical fights between classes have ceased; but bodies of men in one class do not always assume the full obli- gations of gentlemanly courtesy in dealing with members of another class. The old antagonism between students and faculty is no longer acute; but methods of deceit and easy tolerance of un- truth, which were the outcome of that hostility, have survived into the present age, and tempt many a man to sacrifice his honor for the sake of getting a degree a few months earlier — a paltry mess of pottage, indeed, for which to sell one's birthright — while the men who hold true stand- ards on this matter are passed by as quixotic, and forced to work in that moral isolation which is of all burdens the hardest. This is not peculiar to Yale, nor to the modern 116 TALKS TO STUDENTS college coiiiiminitv. It is easy to read between the lines tliat tlie ehuroli at Thessalonica had mauy points of resemblance, in the spirit that animated it, to Yale University as it exists at present. It had the virtues connected with the democratic spirit — brotherly love, faith, power — that gave its members such reputation through- out Greece and Macedonia that they became an example to all men. But side by side with these virtues, which Paul commends to the fullest de- gree, they had their temptations and vices, which are not unknown to the democratic communities of the present day. They found it no easy matter to be quiet. They were so occupied with other people's business that they were not always ready to do their own. There was far better assurance that they would deal generously with those of their own communion than honestly toward them that were without. What was true of the church at Thessalonica was true on a larger scale of the Jews in the time of Christ. They were full of loyalty to one another and to the glorious tradi- tions of their past. In spite of worldly circum- stance, they never lost faith in the messages which God had delivered to them. But this very loyalty A CHRISTIAN DEMOCRACY 117 and public spirit led them to disregard outside standards and outside possibilities. They were so bound up in traditions that they slavishly kept within their letter instead of gaining growth in their spirit. The newer and wider inspiration which should have helped them they rejected with scorn. As a consequence, the very intensity of their faith degenerated into blind confidence and became their ruin instead of their salvation. In rejecting the breadth of sympathy and knowledge which Jesus offered, they brought inevitable de- struction on their heads. The same combination of strength and of weak- ness, of power and of danger, is seen in the life of the American people at the present day. In- tensely patriotic, confident in ourselves and in our future, proud of our traditions, strong in the ac- ceptance of those obligations which we recognize as binding, we are not without the defects which go with these good qualities. Our confidence often takes the form of noisy self-assertion. We have scant respect for standards of propriety of con- duct which are based on an experience wider than our own. We are short-sighted in our conception of what constitutes true success ; and, outside of a 118 TALKS TO STUDENTS somewhat narrow range of recognized obligations, we are unscrupulous about \\w inctliods which we tolerate in its pursuit. Those who emphasize the need of a wider study of the lessons of his- tory, or a profounder moral purpose, are either stigmatized as hypocrites or ridiculed as vision- aries. What is to be the outcome ? Are our insti- tutions to become, in the words of Bulwor, the victims of the very prosperity which they have created ? I do not for one moment believe it ; and yet the danger is serious enough to make it fool- hardy to shut our eyes in its face. America needs, as she never needed them before, men who are fully imbued with the love for all that is best in her history; men who have the real pride which will not despair of the republic even in a time like this, when the murder of her chief magistrate leads weaker men to doubt the vitality and per- manence of her institutions; men who cherish these institutions less blindly, but more truly, be- cause they at the same time reverence the good manifested in other places and times, and possess the sturdy independence which will bring the pub- lic sentiment of the country up to their own best A CHRISTIAN DEMOCRACY 119 conceptions. The strength of democracy must be vivified with the spirit of Christianity. It has been well said that a university is not a school but an atmosphere. Yale's atmosphere is by tradition democratic and Christian. Let us take care that these two qualities become bound into more and more vital connection. We are preparing ourselves to be responsible members of a free commonwealth. Let us train ourselves for the responsibilities which attach to freedom — the " glorious liberty of Christ," without which de- mocracy has been a transient form and freedom a means of self-destruction. Thus shall we make our college and our country better for our having lived in them. PUBLIC APPKOVAL AS A MORAL FORCE "lie that receiveth a prophet in the name of a prophet shall receive a prophet's reward; and he that receiveth a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man's reward." Theee are two distinct ways in which we can set out to do good : one direct, and the other in- direct. We may do good directly by our right actions and clear thoughts. We may do good indirectly by our approval of such actions and thoughts in others. The direct doing of good has been inculcated by every religious leader. The Confucian, tlio Pliarisee, the Stoic, have all set before them a high standard of individual right- eousness. It has been reserved for Christ and the Christian church to lay proper stress on the in- direct good which a man can accomplish, not by his deeds as an individual, but by the spirit in which he meets the members of the community about him. 120 FORCE OF PUBLIC APPROVAL 121 I do not know that we should go to the length of saying that this is the most important part of the good which we can do in this life, but I am quite certain that it is the part which most needs emphasis at the present' day. It is the part of a man's work and influence which he is least likely to rate at its full value. The direct results of his thinking and action he is prone to over-estimate ; and as he looks back upon them in years past he is often disappointed to find that they have amounted to so little. The indirect effect which his approval has had upon other men is some- thing which he fails to appreciate at the time. But it may afterward come home to him with startling force when some incident shows him how acts of sympathy or friendship which he has perhaps wholly forgotten, helped to give direc- tion and purpose to the lives of others ; or how his thoughtless acquiescence in practices and stand- ards which he in his heart knew to be wrong, has helped to fix upon others habits which a life's hard experience has been unable to eradicate. The importance of public approval as a moral force is seen in every form of society and in every stage of the world's history. The lines of 122 TALKS TO STUDENTS achievement which \\'\n this approval bring out the best talents of those wlio ])ursiic them. In communities which regard military glory as tlie highest distinction great soldiers are developed. In communities which value oratory and like to listen to debate the gift of persuasive speech is cultivated in tlie highest degree. Tn communities which deem money-making the best measure of a man's success and efficiency, business talent is stimulated to the utmost, and some other talents equally valuable to the race are correspondingly neglected. For the accomplishment of our friends' best work our sympathy and enthusiasm are an essential basis. The hero is apt to leave his mis- sion imperfectly fulfilled unless he can find a re- sponse to his heroic deeds in the hearts of his followers. The audience has as much to do with the success of the play as the actor; and in order to have good plays the audience must have a healthy preference for what is sound rather than for what is diseased. It was the large body of intelligent theatre-goers in the Athens of Sopho- cles or the London of Shakespeare which brought out in such ample measure those qualities of dra- matic construction and movement which authors FORCE OF PUBLIC APPROVAL 123 who have addressed a less responsible public have in vain tried to imitate. What is true of the vrorld at large is conspicu- ously true of a place like Yale, where the spirit of community life and common interest has been most strongly marked. The influences which affect you most during your life here are not to be found in the particular books that you study, nor even the particular men whom you meet. They are the result of the general spirit of the place, which you breathe in just as insensibly as you breathe the air about you, but which may make you intel- lectually and morally strong or intellectually and morally weak, according as this atmosphere car- ries ozone or miasma. And this atmosphere is for the most part what you yourselves make it. For, though college traditions have a weight which you recognize, and though the body of alumni of the college throughout the country exercises a guiding and restraining force upon the judgments of the undergraduate, the fact re- mains that the .primary responsibility for college sentiment rests with the students. If your stand- ards are helpful, your ambition^^ high? your recog- nition keen for what is good in intellect and 124 TALKS TO STUDENTS morals and religion, then will the atmosphere be a s(niml and a Christian one. Upon each of you restvS the responsibility for taking his share in this work of moral elevation and stimulus. And you may feel sure that nothing which you can do, now or hereafter, is likely to have a more lasting influence upon your own character and that of your fellow men. If I were allowed to give but one set of sug- gestions for our life and work here, I think I should say this : Let us keep our eyes always open for what is noble and for what is inspiring. When we see any man who is doing good work in any of these ways let us give him approval and sym- pathy and encouragement. We may find it hard to do right ourselves; let us not on that account withhold our tribute of appreciation from those who have succeeded in their efforts. Nay, let us be all the more unreserved in our approval because we know^ how hard a thing they have done. We may and probably shall find it impossible to be prophets ourselves, to see clearer than others have seen; but let us for that reason all the more ear- nestly strive to recognize the spirit of prophecy where we find it. FORCE OF PUBLIC APPROVAL 125 I am not suggesting that you should express an approval which you do not really feel. Any such conventional expression of approbation is a sham. If you say you like a thing when you do not really like it, any man will detect the false ring in your voice and manner. Any such forced approval is cant. The fact that a man's motives in proffering this approval may he good does not make it of any real service. Nor do I urge that you should strain a point unduly in order to bring the men of character and inspiration into clubs and socie- ties where they would not otherwise naturally belong. If your society is so constituted that it wants that kind of man and can enjoy his pres- ence, so much the better for the society and for him. It means that that organization has a future of distinction, and that every member is helped by belonging to it. But if the society does not want this man and takes him simply as an act of conventional righteousness — to acquire merit, as Kipling's East Indian would say — then it does relatively little good either to the man or the society, and does some positive harm by making the outward and visible symbol of recognition take the place in the public mind of the real recogni- 126 TALKS TO STUDENTS tion "which is the only thing that a man cares for. The prophet's reward or tlie righteous man's re- ward, which is promised by the text, is not the reward of the society leader, or of the general, or of the business man. It is the reward of real appreciation. What the prophet needs is hearers for his message ; what the righteous man needs is men who will cooperate in his work. If the society system is dominated by men of this char- acter, so much the better for the societies. But the social honor must of necessity come as an in- cident or consequence of such recognition, and not as a substitute for it. Give your approval to what is right and inspiring when you feel that approval. Thus will you provide the real help and the real crown that the best men care for. Thus will you make a public sentiment which shall be independent of external signs and sym- bols, and give to the talents of the best men a field which is necessary for their fullest exercise. The opportunity which is before you to-day is an exceptional one. The college community is still small enough for each man's influence to count as a factor in shaping the general judg- ment ; and yet it has become large enough to give FORCE OF PUBLIC APPROVAL 127 that college judgment and college sentiment a great influence on the future of the country. You are not in danger of having the effect of your in- dividual standards lost, as they might be lost in a city like New York or London; nor are you, on the other hand, in danger of having your sphere of influence restricted, as it might be if your life lay within the limits of an isolated village. You are in a community where thought is free enough to give you the largest liberty in expressing your ideas, and yet where social standards and social ideals are strong enough to make those ideas of yours a binding force upon your fellow men. The standard proposed by the text is a practical and constructive one, which it is not beyond human power to realize. It represents a gospel of hope rather than of discouragement ; not the cold teach- ing of a critical philosophy, but an essentially Christian standard, which helps us to rise above our failures. Any conception of duty which falls short of this is likely to end in weariness. You are all probably beginning the year with good resolutions and with high aims; but unless your fate is very different from the common lot of your fellow men, comparatively few of these resolutions 128 TALKS TO STUDENTS will be consistently oarvicMl out, and fewer still of these aims will find conii)k'te or nnniixed re- alization. If you measure your success in the intellectual or moral life by what you have ac- tually accomplished in these respects, you will be discouraged. The only man wdio succeeds in keeping in large measure all his good resolutions is the man of somewhat w'ooden temperament, who has few imforeseen impulses and few living temptations to deviate from rules. If your stand- ards are no higher than those of the scribe or the Pharisee, the Stoic or the Confucian, you will be tempted to regard him as most righteous who has broken the fewest positive laws ; and if your tem- perament is an impulsive one, you will be tempted to rate your own possibilities unduly and dis- couragingly low. But this judgment falls short of the Christian standard and the Christian way of looking at things. ISTot by keeping the letter of a law made for us by some one else, but by helping to form part of a living spirit and a living church, do we find the full measure of Christian activity. The cup of water given in Christ's name, the words and acts of encourage- ment to others, all the more valuable because they FORCE OF PUBLIC APPROVAL 129 were not intended as moral lessons, are things whose jDositive and permanent influence defies any attempt to measure it. Laws may be broken in spite of our best efforts; good resolutions may serve only as monuments of our inability to keep them; but the daily deeds of helping good men because they are good, or of shrinking from bad things because they are bad, have a perma- nent and ever-widening effect, and leave some- thing to a man's credit which will last for- ever. It is these little acts of Christianity that make the world a good place to live in; it is these little acts that count for most in making a man ready to be received in heaven. When the Son of Man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, men shall be ad- judged righteous and counted worthy to sit on the king's right hand, not because of their conformity to rules of law or of their conscious works of philanthropy, but because they have ministered unto the Lord when naked and hungry and sick and in prison. " And when the righteous shall say. Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee ; or thirsty, and gave thee drink ? when saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in ? or naked. 130 TALKS TO STUDENTS and clothed thee? or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? Tlio king shall answer and saj unto them, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my hrethren, ve have done it unto me." EESPONSIBILITY TO OURSELVES AND TO OTHERS "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me." A MAN who wishes to do his duty in the world has two tasks before him. He must work out his own life's problems, and he must help those about him to work out theirs. To attain the former end he must keep his heart pure, his moral stand- ards untainted, and his independence of judg- ment unclouded. To attain the latter, he must enter into the feelings of those about him, must understand their ambitions and their temptations, must care for them and the things for which they care. He must make their life a part of his life in order to be able to lift them up to a higher level. ^Neither of these results is any too easy to attain by itself; but the combination of the two is infinitely harder than either alone. For the personal qualities which help a man to do one of these halves of his life-work are apt to stand in 131 132 TALKS TO STUDENTS Lis wav when it comes to the other half. The mail of clear iiitellect and Avell-balanced judgment finds it comparatively easy to maintain indepen- dence of thought and purity of life ; but these same intellectual qualities make it more difficult for him to enter into the trials and sufferings of his fellow men. He sometimes finds it hard to feel sym- pathy; he almost always finds it hard to express it; and, lacking this power of sympathy, he lacks the ability to influence those about him. His purity is like the purity of white marble : spotless, but not vivifying. On the other hand, the man who is by nature sympathetic, quick to feel every trial and every aspiration of those about him, gains thereby an enormous power over their lives. But he is by the same token subject in the high- est degree to every temptation which besets his friends; and even if he keeps his own life pure, he finds it hard to insist upon general standards of purity higher than those which prevail in the community about him. He makes so much allow- ance for others' weakness that he dares not de- mand of others, or even of himself, those efforts which are needed to convert that weakness into strength. I RESPONSIBILITY TO OTHERS 133 Many a religious reformer, seeing these tempta- tions and possibilities of contamination which beset a man living a life of activity among his fellows, has tried to withdraw his disciples from contact with the people. Hermits have thought to find salvation by living in caves or on pillars. Monks have retired into cloisters, where they might be secluded from the tumults and tempta- tions of the world outside. Many Buddhists, and not a few Christians, have felt so strongly the contamination incident to an active life that they have regarded withdrawal from physical exist- ence as constituting the goal of religious devotion. But this was not the teaching of Jesus of Naza- reth ; nor does it represent the true Christian conception of life. The idea of obtaining salva- tion for one's self by withdrawing from con- tact with one's fellow men is distinctly unchris- tian. It may make it easier to keep a man's standards rigid if he is placed in a position where he is under no temptation to deviate from them. It may render it less difficult to pray if a man lives in a cloister, where there is nothing else to do except to pray. But this sheltered and pro- tected life is not worthy of the citizens of a Chris- 134 TALKS TO STUDENTS tian commonwealth; nor is this withdrawnl from temptation equivalent, in the sight of man or of God, to a square meeting and resistance of temp- tation in the performance of a man's whole duty. There is, I think, little danger that many of you will go to this extreme. The spirit of asceticism — of withdrawal from the world in order that a man may live his own life — is not widely prevalent at the present day. Far more prevalent is the opposite error — the error of easy tolerance, which leads a man to think that because he is a member of a community with interests and activities of its own, he is justified in accept- ing the standards set by that community in mat- ters of intellect and morals. " When in Rome do as the Romans do," has become a proverb. Many a man who goes into his profession with high ideals falls away from them after a time, and be- comes convinced that if he sets himself up to be better than his fellows he simply spoils his own chances of success, without the hope of accomplish- ing any real good. When such a man enters politics he is content to use his influence in behalf of keeping fair men in office, and having work as honestly done as the general system allows. RESPONSIBILITY TO OTHERS 135 without countenancing any efforts to reform the system or improve the principles of the nation. When he enters business he is content to abide by the general rules of money-making which his associates have set, without striving to maintain his own ethical standards and elevate the stand- ards of those about him. And even when he comes face to face with a moral question, he is apt to take the general judgment of the community as a sufficient warrant for tolerating, if not for actually approving, practices which fall short of the highest standard of honor and of unselfish- ness. Of course there is some excuse to be made for this way of looking at things. A man cannot attempt to ignore all the judgments of the com- munity and run counter to all its prejudices. If he does this indiscriminately and without reason, he destroys his own influence and accomplishes nothing. But this does not mean that he must accept all its judgments and fall in with all its prejudices. If he does this, he makes his position as a member of the community an excuse for not doing his duty by that community. The Chris- tian idea is that a man should be in the world, 136 TALKS TO STUDENTS living its life nnd sviniialliizinu' willi it, but keep- ing his own judgiiu'iit unhiiuUMl and his own heart unsullied. Christ sought no artificial badge of distinction from his fellows. lie wore no robe of camel's hair. lie did not go into the wilderness to preach ; but he preached in the fisliing-boat and the nuirket-place and the temple, and wherever men's active lives led them. He did not spend his days trying to achieve impossibilities; but when the question came between a kingdom of the world, which seemed within his grasp, and a kingdom of heaven, w^hicli involved humiliation and death, he failed not to make choice of the latter. He did not set himself apart from pub- licans and sinners, as did the Pharisees of his own day, or the Puritans of a more modern time; but he kept his standards higher than those of any Pharisee, and his life purer than that of any Puritan. By his life and by his death he gave what the world had not yet seen — a religion which had its highest ideal, not in lifting a man up apart from his fellows, but in bringing the Spirit of God into the midst of the daily life of men. I have chosen this theme for the opening Sun- day of the term because every man who comes to RESPONSIBILITY TO OTHERS 137 college finds himself face to face with this same })roblem of combining high individual standards with wide sympathy and influence among his fel- lows. Indeed, I think that one of the most im- portant phases of education which a good college gives is its effect in teaching a man that he can neither live for himself without working for the community, nor do his duty to the community without living an independent life of his own. There are some men who, during the last years of their education, stay at home and study by themselves. There are others who go into for- eign countries, where they are more or less iso- lated in the midst of the foreign surroundings about them. And there are others still who, coming to American colleges, shut themselves up within themselves, living with their books in the pursuit of literature or science or professional theory, without forming any essential part of the community to which they belong. These men find it relatively easy to keep their own intellectual standards unsullied by contact with their fellow men ; for they really have no such contact. The man who stays at home is in the very nature of things protected from it. The man who goes 13cS TALKS TO STUDENTS abroad or \]\c man who lives tlio life of a hermit erects an nrtiiieial barrier whicli protects him. For certain narrow pur^wses these barriers and protections may prove useful. They may enable the student to get greater intellectual concentra- tion and greater immunity from certain specific temptations than he could possibly have without them. But to the development of a well-rounded character for a man who is going to serve his country and do his share in the world's work, they form a hindrance rather than a help. This arti- ficially protected virtue is a dangerous thing. The man who has been specially shielded from temptations in his educational life is likely to succumb to them when he meets them in after years. The man who has been taught to think everything of his work and nothing of the men about him is likely to over-estimate the im- portance of his own ideas, and under-estimate the importance of rendering them serviceable to others. Better far that the student should waste some effort and make some mistakes in the years when he has a superabundance of energy and when errors are not irreparable than that he should content himself with the education which RESPONSIBILITY TO OTHERS 139 fits a man for subjection rather than for freedom, for the cloister rather than the world. The whole spirit of this place demands that you live for others — that you form part of a community which counts individual work for relatively little unless the whole college benefits thereby, and which discourages to an extreme de- gree those habits which mark the recluse or the self-centred man. Indeed, I suspect that we go too far in this direction. A very keen observer, who has seen much of the conditions of life at dif- ferent colleges, says : " Harvard encourages a man to live his own life, but it sometimes leads him to ignore the fact that he is part of a community, with all the duties which community life brings and the inspiration which it gives. Yale encourages a man to feel himself in the fullest sense a member of a community, but it sometimes fails to give him the stimulus to work out his individual life for him- self and make standards which he holds as his own, independent of what others may do." I sus- pect that there is truth in this comparison. Each place represents a type of character and ideal — ■ the Harvard ideal of individual development on the one hand, the Yale ideal of public service on IK) TALKS TO STUDENTS the other. Each tlicory is good in itself; eiieh, Avhen earried to an extreme, is liable to those de- fects which arc closely connected with its merits. The man who thinks mnch of his responsibility to himself may think too little of his responsibil- ity to others; the man who thinks much of his responsibility to others may think too little of his responsibility to himself. If there be this inherent danger in our Yale atmosphere, there is all the more reason why we should put ourselves on guard against it. The more we are impelled to sink our life in that of others, the more earnestly we should strive not to lose our moral standards or our intellectual independence. This is a serious task. If we live day by day among friends who prefer preeminence in amuse- ment to preeminence in vigorous work, it is not easy for us to remember that the latter is the thing which is going to count in the long run. If we meet hour after hour those who tolerate some deviation from the best principles of decorum, or honor, or truthfulness, it is hard for us to impose upon our- selves the standard of conduct which really marks the gentleman. Democratic communities have al- ways been in danger of taking the views of the RESPONSIBILITY TO OTHERS 141 majority as a sufficiently good test of what was right, Yale is an intensely democratic commu- nity, and therefore peculiarly liable to this mis- take. I do not mean that these deviations from morality in our community are gross, or these per- versions of intellectual standards extreme. I believe, on the contrary, that the general system of morals is good, the general tone of work vigorous, the general scale of values reasonably near the truth. But the conditions are not so good as to relieve us from the responsibility of making them a great deal better. If we would educate ourselves for the positions of leadership in the life that is before us, we must learn to take the lead here — not simply to accept public opinion, but to do our part in moulding public opinion. The stronger a man is the more heavily does this responsibility lie upon his shoulders. Every- thing that he does is imitated by a hundred others. The standard which he thus sets is carried down through college generations which are to come. Let us work unreservedly to make good use of these opportunities. It was Christ's prayer that his followers should not be taken out of the world, but should be kept from evil. Let us all, what- 142 TALKS TO STUDENTS ever our Held of activity and whatever our form of belief, unite in this common end of living fully the life of those about us, while maintaining for ourselves the moral standards which we believe to be right. Whatever we do, let us impose upon ourselves and encourage in others the spirit of responsibility, of self-restraint, of truthfulness, and of courtesy. If we are working with our books, we shall then do work which will better pre- pare us for a life of service to others. If we are engaged in social activities, we shall be helping society to be ordered in a spirit of manly courtesy and appreciation. If we are preparing for our professions, we shall contribute to the elevation of professional standards. And if we are striving to give shape to our religious character and con- victions, we shall develop a religion which, what- ever its details of creed or observance, will yet be in the largest sense a following of Christ and a service of God. MORAL LESSONS OF COLLEGE LIFE "Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine; continue in them: for in doing this thou shalt both save thyself, and them that hear thee." We are often told that college is a place where men are subject to peculiar temptations. In one sense, I suppose this is true ; in another and more important sense, I am confident that it is untrue. The differences between the moral life of the col- lege and the moral life of the world are super- ficial ; the resemblance and connection between the two are fundamental. The special temptations of college life are substantially the same kinds of temptation that we shall have to face afterward; the special opportunities of college life are oppor- tunities for seeing what the world is really going to want and making ourselves fitted to meet that want. As I look over the record of the different classes when they come back to their successive re- unions, I am impressed with the fact that by far the greater part of their members have fulfilled 143 Mt TALKS TO STUDENTS till' jtroiiiisc of their collouc (l:i_vs, for evil or for H'ood. T\[v mail who in his culli'iie life was bril- liant but weak still suffers from the fatal ef- fects of his weakness in nndermining the results of bis brilliancy. The man who served liim- self still serves himself. The man who served others continues to serve others. The man who had standards of his own, to wbich he held througli evil report and good report, still continues to maintain those standards amid the vicissitudes of after life. As was the foundation, so is tbe building. As was the judgment of class- mates concerning a man's promise, so is the verdict of the world concerning his performance. Of course there are some exceptions to this rule. There are men who were young in college, physically or mentally, who after graduation have grown into a fuller measure of power and respon- sibility. And there are men who were old in college, physically or mentally, who in their under- gi'aduate days seemed stronger than their younger associates but have not kept pace with them in their subsequent growth. But these exceptions are not numerous. As a general rule a man's col- lege life foreshadows with ominous sureness the LESSONS OF COLLEGE LIFE 145 eliaracter that is in store for liim hereafter; and the temptations that are commonly regarded as peculiar to his college days are essentially the same as those which he meets all through his active work in any free community. One of these temptations is that of idleness. Some men come to college without any intention of hard or serious work. Others, whose intentions are good enough at the beginning, allow themselves to be distracted by the enjoyments and dissipa- tions of the place, until at the end of a somewhat purposeless year they find nothing definite to show in the way of progress. They excuse themselves by saying that college life gives a chance for en- joyment which they may never have again, and that when they go out into the real business of after life they will settle down to work. And sometimes it happens that such men really do settle down — that the sobering influence of the necessity of making a living causes them, when they enter the shop or ofiice or professional school, to work with a steadiness and continuity of which their college life gave no promise. In that case they may have lost nothing except four good years of activity. But it far more frequently happens i46 TALKS TO STUDENTS that the man who was an idler or a trillcr in college continnes to be an uWvr and a tritler after- ward. The man who lias yielded to the tempta- tions of laziness at twenty will continne to find those temptations strong at thirty. The same lack of fixity of purpose which was his bane in college will continne to be his besetting sin in after life. Far from being the only place where men are exposed to this danger, I believe that college is a place where men have special means of guarding themselves against it. To almost every man col- lege offers the opportunity of learning to work regularly at a number of routine duties whether he likes them or not, and of concentrating his special efforts on some variety of hard w^ork — scholastic, literary, athletic, or social — where it will be his own fault if he has not sufficient in- terest in himself and companionship among his fellows to hold him up to a really high standard of achievement. Of course there are some men who are so constituted that they cannot meet the round of routine duties without breaking down, and some to whom no one of the many activities of college life appeals strongly enough to serve as a stimulus. But these men are the exceptions. LESSONS OF COLLEGE LIFE 147 The average college man has health enough, and brains enough, and interest enough, to make life a training in the regidar doing of many things that he cares little about and in the intensely ac- tive doing of some things that he cares much about. He who has learned this lesson has laid founda- tions on which he can build up a strong life instead of a weak one. A second among the so-called peculiar tempta- tions of college life is that of irresponsibility. Where a number of men live together and know each other well, the temptation is strong upon every man to do as the crowd does — to pursue ear- nestly whatever the others pursue and to neglect whatever the others neglect. There is no need of going into particulars. I am sure we can all of us remember countenancing acts of indignity or disorder or inconsiderate disregard of the rights of others which we should have been ashamed even to think of doing alone, but whereof we were quite ready to let the crowd take the responsibility. That we shall continue to do precisely the same things in after life is very improbable. A change of standpoint will make us see the real character of certain acts of disorder or cruelty or meanness 148 TALKS TO STUDENTS to wliic'li in the cxcitoiiK'nt of college life we were more or less blind. Vmt we nmst not delude our- selves with the supposition that this change of standpoint will mean a change of character. We may stop doing the same things ; we are likely to go on to do other things of the same kind. The man whose tale-bearing has made mischief in college will make quarrels in after life. The man who has been content to go with the crowd in society politics, against his better judgiiient, will go with the crowd in party politics until he be- comes the willing tool of the most corrupt ma- chine. The man who thoughtlessly breaks the rules of decency and public order to-day runs a perilous risk of getting into the habit of breaking the ten commandments a few years hence. If your morality is no better than that of the men about you, be sure that your after life will have no more safeguards than your college life. Far from being subject to special dangers, you are to-day in possession of special advantages. The community in which you live is small enough and homogeneous enough for you to make your individuality felt, if you care to take the trouble to do it ; not necessarily by loud-voiced protest, in LESSONS OF COLLEGE LIFE 149 season and out of season, against practices which joiir conscience condemns ; but chiefly by living a careful life yourself and reenforcing the lessons of that life by a word here and there, whether in public or in private, spoken where there is a chance of its amounting to something. I have no respect for any one who says that he has to do as the crowd does ; and least of all do I respect such a man when he is in a college that gives him so large a chance to make the crowd do as he does. By the habit of quiet action and responsibility for his OAvn conduct, a man in college can achieve inde- pendence of character and lay the foundation of moral leadership. There is one particular form of irresponsibility to which our college community is specially liable — for which the student frequently excuses him- self, and is sometimes excused by friends who should know better. I refer to a certain laxity in our standards of honor. There is no small sec- tion of our college community which will condone unfair work in intercollegiate contests when the umpire is not looking, or unfair means of passing examinations by which the vigilance of the au- thorities can be eluded. There are all kinds of 150 TALKS TO STUDENTS current excuses for this. It is said tliat the prac- tice is so common that the individual is hardly to blame for following it. If a man is detected and disgraced, he complains of the unfairness when he is singled out for penalty while half a dozen others who have done the same thing have passed without detection. But the man who takes this low view of his obligations is preparing himself for an equally low view of his obligations in after life. The man who finds in the laxity of his fellows an excuse for cheating at football will find many years hence a similar excuse for cheating in business. The man w^ho uses unfair methods for getting an examination mark which he did not earn, because other people are using similar meth- ods, will find exactly the same unfairness in the ways by which his competitors earn money in later life ; and if he is content to accept their standards he will go to lengths which will land him in jail if he is found out. Do not be deceived for one moment. The possibility of undetected fraud, the applause given to the expert in cheat- ing, the frequent successes and infrequent dis- coveries, are not in any wise peculiar to college life. The man who makes anv excuse for deceit LESSONS OF COLLEGE LIFE 151 pass current with his conscience here is depriving himself of all protection against temptation after- ward. The only one who has the right to call himself a gentleman and a Christian is the man who, in spite of all difficulties and temptations, builds up a standard of honor which he holds for himself, whether others hold it or not. Do you say that this is hard doctrine ? It is, at any rate, true doctrine, and Christian doc- trine. " Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me." In relieving man from the burdens which the law placed upon him, the gospel demanded that he should impose upon himself wider duties and obligations toward his fellow men, and take the responsibility of seeing for himself that he fulfilled those duties. Even if we sometimes fail to keep up to this high standard, we must never lower our purposes. Even if we make mistakes and yield to temptations, and fall di scour agingly short of our ideals, we must never let those ideals go nor relax our efforts to keep up to them. The whole Christian doctrine of forgiveness demands as the first condition of pardon that a man should recognize the difference between the wrong thing 152 TALKS TO STUDENTS (liat lio lias (lone mid I lie i-i^lil tliin<; wliicli lie purposes to do. The law was content to set the standard so low that cvcryhody might be expected to keep np to it The gospel sets the standard infinitely higher — so high that no ontside author- ity can enforce compliance to its demands, and so high that we ourselves often make costly errors in our efforts to reach it. But if we will use our religion aright, we can make our very failures serve as a lesson for the future and as a means of progress in moral understanding. I am not encouraging you to excuse or condone these failures. The whole habit of making ex- cuses is the relic of a time of moral slavery, when the first object of any man wdio had done wrong was to try to prove to somebody else that he had not done wrong. If a man is his own master, the thing for him to do is to find out exactly what he has done, in order to avoid making the same mis- take again. In the curiously candid account of his own military achievements which Frederick the Great has left us he says, in substance, sum- ming up one of his earlier campaigns : " The king during these weeks committed almost every fault to which a general is liable. The conduct of his LESSONS OF COLLEGE LIFE 153 adversary shines out by contrast, and deserves the careful attention of all students of military art. The king himself has many times told me " — so runs the quaintly impersonal language of the nar- rative — " that if ever during his later campaigns it has fallen to his lot to achieve any considerable success, it was largely due to the seriousness with which he pondered the lessons derived from a comparison of his own conduct and that of his ad- versary in this campaign." It was because Fred- erick was able to learn lessons of this kind that he, as life went on, became a greater and greater gen- eral, and established his kingdom as the leading power in Europe. It was because of the failure to do this that Napoleon, more richly endowed by nature with military genius, nevertheless ended his career in misfortune and ignominy. In every department of life this honest com- parison of what we have actually done with what we might have done is the condition of progress. It is the means of raising our performance to the level of our ideals, instead of lowering our ideals' to the level of our performance. " If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful 154 TALKS TO STUDENTS and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." If n man would go forward instead of backward, would do better to- morrow than he did yesterday, ho must frankly recognize his o'uti weak or misguided conduct for what it really is, and see how uuich it falls short of the standard set by the heroes and saints and martyrs and by Christ himself. Face the facts of your life as it has been, open your mind by the reading of poetry and history and the Holy Scripture to the best possibilities of life as it ought to be, and you will have it in your power to " rise on stepping stones of your dead selves to higher things." The man who is thus truth- ful with himself may find his whole career, in college and in the world afterward, a hard one. He may find his failures discouraging, the differ- ence between what he means to do and what he does hopelessly wide. But let him be assured that each year and each month and each week wit- nesses a growth in power far beyond what he him- self suspects ; and that when the test comes by which his work is to be judged, whether in this life or in the life hereafter, he shall stand forth among the chosen of God. FIXITY OF PURPOSE "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. "But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. " For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord. "A double minded man is unstable in all his ways." I AM trying to show what it means to have a purpose in life — a real purpose, which lifts a man outside of himself and gives him the power to do his best. In a general way, every one of us has some such honorable purpose; an ambition to do something worth while, to render service to his fellow men, to leave the world better for his having lived in it. If there is any man here who has no such ambition at all, he has come to the wrong place. This institution was founded to train men not for private gain but for public service; and through two full centuries of its history this characteristic has remained unaltered. But it is not enough to 155 l')(i TALKS TO STUDENTS have this aiiihition vague and imdcfined. It iiiii.st hr made definite and active. It is not enough to aspire to do good in our better moments. The asj)iration must be so fixed and so intelligent as to help us in times of ditficulty and temptation. There are two kinds of temptation which per- petually operate to prevent our purposes from being realized: the temptations of idle pleasure and the temptations of selfishness. Idle pleasures may cause a man to lose sight of his purpose until it is dissipated and brought to nothing. Selfish- ness may so pervert that purpose as to make it lead a man w-rong instead of right. To one or the other of these dangers all of us are subject. The rich man, who can command the opportunity for }:)leasure, is more exposed to the temptations of idleness. The poor man, who has his way to make in the world, is more exposed to the temptations of selfishness. But every one of us, rich or poor, has need to ask the Lord for wisdom if he w^ould keep true to the standard which in his better mo- ments he recognizes as the right one. In a place like this the temptations of pleasure are more constantly present than the temptations of selfishness. Most of us have come here Avitli FIXITY OF PURPOSE 157 the desire and intent to have much present enjoy- ment out of college life as students, and to pre- pare ourselves for future enjoyment as gi'aduates. This desire is not inconsistent with the highest purpose of public service. A Puritan of the old school would have said that it was; but we have learned better. We have learned that unswerving devotion to duty is consistent with large and varied enjoyment of the pleasures of life. Christ him- self showed us that unselfishness does not involve asceticism. The fulfilment of a high mission to the world does not stand in the way of full enjoy- ment of the pleasures and friendships which life brings. This possibility of combining pleasure with ser- vice, enjoyment with devotion, does not, however, make life's problems easier. It makes them harder. The Hindoo who shunned temptation by renouncing society and all its enjoyments had a simpler task before him than the Christian who, doing his work among his fellow men, must dis- tinguish between the right enjoyments which he can share and the wrong ones whicli he must avoid. For this distinction is a subtle one. We cannot make a set of laws telling what is right for every- loS TALKS TO STUDENTS body or what is \vroiig- for everybody. Things are right or wrong for a man according as they affect his power of doing God's work. 'J'hat which lielps one man may hinder another. That which is nec- essary for one man may be fatal to another. But this thing at least stands out clear: the men who leave their mark upon the world are the men who, Avlien it comes to a real conflict between purpose and pleasure, care more for the former than for the latter. Vir tenax propositi — a man wlio holds to the course which he sets before him — that was the Roman idea of a true man, and by virtue of that idea the Romans conquered the world. The Greek might do more kinds of things, acquire skill in more kinds of arts, develop more kinds of knowl- edge; but in tlie long run the varied talents and arts and knowledge of the Greek counted for less than the fixity of purpose of the Roman. If we have something in our hearts that we really care for, year in and year out, all kinds of experience of life through which we may pass become as means to that end. If, on the other hand, we have no such dominant aim, we are at the mercy of our appetites and temptations. Pleasures which to the man of strong purpose are a necessary J FIXITY OF PURPOSE 159 and useful recreation — a means of creating anew the power to do good work — become to the man of weak purpose, first a distraction, which calls away his attention from the need of doing anything more permanent, and then a dissipation, which scatters to the winds the initial power he had until he finds that he no longer possesses it. A man with a purpose is a man; a man without a purpose is an animal, and a very poor kind of animal at that. For, though he has more varied capacities for enjoyment and activity than any other animal, he lacks the animal's inherited in- stinct, which makes it seek enjoyment in the things which it needs and shun the things that would do harm. The varied sensibilities and powers which, properly directed, make man little lower than the angels, in the absence of such direction expose him to evil and destruction. Only by the guid- ance of fixed purpose can he live a man's life and do a man's work. But while the possession of such a purpose will stamp him as a man, something more is needed to make him a good man. A selfish purpose like ambition may protect a man from the tempta- tions of idle pleasure just as effectively as an un- 1C)0 TALIvS TO STUDENTS selfish purpose like devotion to public service; but it may at the same time result in a man's so misusing his life that from the standpoint of God and his fellow men it is worse than wasted. IIow can we guard against this ? How can we have the wisdom to see which are right purposes and which are wrong ones ? How can we make our philos- ophy of life a Christian instead of a pagan one ? If a man's purposes and ideals are such that he is seeking to attain them for himself at the ex- pense of his fellow men, they are pagan ideals, and the man who pursues them is likely to grow bad as he grows older. If his ideals are such that each step toward their realization means the ad- vancement of those about him, his purposes are Christian; and amid all the difficulties and dis- couragements attending their realization he is sure to grow good as he grows older. Are our ideals able to meet this test ? Let us look at its appli- cation in various fields. What is the pagan ideal of sport? To win whether you play fairly or not. What is the Christian ideal ? To play the game fairly for all that it is worth, and win on those terms or not at all. If we hold the former ideal every game FIXITY OF PURPOSE 161 which we play is a training for fraudulent busi- ness, bad politics, and an unchristian civilization. If we play with the latter purpose in view, every game ista training for that public service in church and state for which Yale College was founded. What is the ideal in intellectual work ? Is it to achieve a certain degree of distinction here and hereafter, without regard to the means by which that distinction has been obtained ? Or is it to prepare for that true knowledge of nature and man which can be used for efficient service ? In the former case our learning is pagan; in the latter it is Christian. In the former case our collegiate training is morally unsound ; in the latter case it is the most valuable education which a man can possibly have. The old question repeats itself in a thousand different ways: Are we trying to get as much out of life as we can, or are we trying to put as much into life as we can? It is the man who is dominated by the purpose to put tilings into life who takes the lead in the service of God. But how can we get this unselfish purpose ? or rather, how can we maintain and strengthen the unselfish purpose with which we start ? First, by seeing things about us as they really 162 TALKS TO STUDENTS are. Amid the activities of college life we are tempted to look at our actions through a false me- dium aud call tlieui by wrong names. We say that a man is having a good time at college, when he is doing things which he would be ashamed to do at home because he would have to call them by their right names. We say that he is simply comply- ing with college customs in study or in sport, when he does things which would be known elsewhere by tlie plain title of cheating. The man who really keeps his eyes open to see things in their true light is safe from half the perils which would other- wise beset him. Second, by getting a true understanding of the real value of different parts of life, as distin- guished from the temporary or factitious value that the world places upon them. For this under- standing of values a college course offers special advantages. A man who is in the midst of active business almost necessarily lays undue stress upon the possession of money. A man who is active in politics lays undue stress upon getting office. A man who is successful in any profession is tempted to make the standards of that profession liis highest guide. At college, however, we have FIXITY OF PURPOSE 163 the opportunity for seeing things in a somewhat clearer liglit. Our study of science should teach us the value of truth independent of the pecuniary or professional use that is to be made of it. Our study of history should teach us that it is char- acter rather than money or office which moves the world. Our study of literature should inspire us with ideals of devotion and service and give us standards which look beyond the visible results of the day's work. Third, by finding among the manifold interests of college life something for which a man cares so much that he will voluntarily encounter the difficulties and hardships which are necessary' for its attainment. The life of our American col- leges to-day is so manifold and complex that any man can find some such thing — scholastic or ath- letic, literary or social — which appeals to his spe- cial taste and aptitude. The good which he gains by devotion to these ends is not measured or lim- ited by the degree of success which attends him. The man who fails, if he can but keep from the discouragement of failure, sometimes learns more useful lessons than the man who succeeds ; for the man who fails, and rises above his failure, is free 164 TALKS TO STUDENTS from what is perhaps the most dangerous temp- tation of American business life at the present ilay — tlie clanger of measuring the value of a l)urpose h\ the immediate and tangible results achieved. Fourth and last, to come back to the words of our text, by asking of God the wisdom that He alone can give. The man who has the Christian habit of prayer has a help for keeping his pur- poses right and unwavering worth more than all outside aids. " More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of," says the poet. I am not pleading for any particular theory of prayer or any particular form of prayer; but for the habit of trying to get into reverent commun- ion with God by such forms or absence of forms as may suit each man's needs and powers. And just as he who habitually dwells upon the minor pleasures of the w'orld will find their influence and dominion over him growing stronger, so the man who learns to pray to God, however weak his vision of God may be, will find God's hold upon his life growing stronger, and will become, in the deepest and truest sense, a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ THE CHKISTIAN IDEAL "The kingdom of God cometh not with observation." For centuries the Jews had dreamed of a king- dom of God, and looked for a leader under whom that dream should be realized. As they cast their eyes back on the splendors of David, or out on the wider glories of the Roman commonwealth, they never failed to pray for the coming Messiah who should bring to the race of David an empire greater than that of Rome. It was this hope that sus- tained them in their afflictions; it was this hojje that brought them back from their dispersions. In this new kingdom of God power was to go not to the unscrupulous but to the righteous ; not to him who led the army but to him who kept the law. One of the first things, and the very hardest thing, that Jesus had to teach his disciples was that this historic and splendid dream could never be realized. The kingdom which he promised was not like the kingdoms of this world. The 165 166 TALKS TO STUDENTS greatest iiKUi in tluit kiiiiidoin \v;is not the man who held the highest office or could point to \\n\ most splendid achievement, hut the one who liad the cleanest heart and the most unshaken pur- pose. Even the best of Christ's disciples were slow in comprehending this. It was far easier for them to relinquish their homes than to relin- quish their dreams. It was easier for them to endure hunger and cold and persecution than to give up the expectation of getting a tangible re- ward for their endurance, and being able to rule over their less worthy fellow men. When Peter thought that he saw God's kingdom on the point of being attained, he was ready to fight against a hundred. A few hours later, when the vision of worldly power had passed away from his eyes, he was ready to deny the very Master whom he had left all to follow. When should the king- dom of heaven come ? Who should be its prime ministers ? What signs should be watched to mark its advent ? These questions, and others like them, showed how slow were the disciples in understand- ing the message of their Master or the character of the service on which they had entered. Even to-day the disciples of Jesus have only THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 167 partly learned this lesson. We continue to make, not precisely the same mistakes as the apostles, but the same kind of mistakes, about the real mean- ing and purpose of the Christian life. We do not insist, like the disciples in Judea, upon seeing an organized kingdom ; but we do insist on seeing our efforts for good wrought out in definite shape. We do not, like the sons of Zebedee, lay claim to offices and honors as a reward of goodness ; but we do nearly the same thing when we are ambitious that our goodness shall have some sort of record to which we can point with pride. We do not, like Peter, fight for Jesus at one moment and deny him the next; but we do exactly the same thing when we let ourselves be so discouraged by failure that we ask the sad question, " Is it worth while trying to be good ? " We want to have tangible results from our goodness. We over- value the kind of goodness that produces them ; we undervalue the kind that fails to produce them. We are impatient to see results where the best results are often precisely the ones we cannot see. We are ready to make sacrifices, but we want to have something to show for them — not necessarily in the way of personal profit or worldly advance- 168 TALKS TO STUDENTS Tiionf, but in the \v;iv of concrete and definite progress on Avhich our minds can dwen with satis- faction. To a certain extent tliis is a healthy instinct. Every man likes to see tlie results of his labor, the things that mark his own power of achievement. He feels a pride, and an honest pride, in the ma- chines that he has invented or the money that he has made or the prizes that he has won. But when this pride in the things which we have done leads us to underestimate the things which we have not done, it ceases to be good and becomes perilously bad. It is a good thing to make money; but it may become a bad thing if it leads us to neglect certain other elements in life which are more valu- able. It is a good thing to play to win ; but it may become a bad thing if it leads us to forget that there are other standards besides the score. It is a good thing to get high marks; it may become a bad thing if it leads us to forget that there arc standards of scholarship and of intellectual attain- ment outside of the marking book. So in every department of life. Honest pride in what a man has actually done may lead him to undervalue the things he has not done, and may warp his indi- THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 169 vidual standards until lie loses all sense of pro- portion between his own work and that of others. Of all the dangers to which a reasonably good man is subject, I honestly believe that the great- est is the danger of losing the sense of moral pro- portion ; of overvaluing achievement as compared with purpose ; of overestimating the small amount of visible work which each of us has done, or failed to do, compared with the vast amount of invisible work that still remains to be done. There is no success so great as to be worth much if it leads a man to stop working; and no failure so great as to be irreparable unless it leads a man to stop trying. For the achievements which we can see and feel and measure are not the great ones. The child can see the growth of the house that he builds with his blocks. He cannot see the growth of the seed which he has planted in the ground; and in his impatience because he cannot see it he often digs up the seed and kills the plant. The life of the plant, which evades our observation, is a far greater thing than the mere mechanical put- ting together of blocks of wood ; and it is just be- cause it is a far greater tiling that it evades our 170 TALKS TO STUDENTS obscrvjition. " The tliinj:;s wliicli arc seen are tem- poral ; tlu' tliin{:;s which arc not seen arc eternal." There is a work! of practical everyday meaning in this text. If you are looking only at concrete results which can be measured day by day, you arc seeing the small side of life and shutting your eyes to the large side. You are contenting your- self with a low standard of success and are re- jecting the higher standards. You are limiting your vision of the kingdom of God just as nar- rowly as the Jews of old limited their vision, though in a different way. You are so narrowing your conception of what is good that you never can attain to the best. During the early years of the Civil War there were on the Northern side a number of generals whose interest in the struggle was chiefly profes- sional. They had been trained to lead their coun- try's armies, and they intended to lead them with skill and fidelity ; but in the vital issues over which Xorth and South were fighting they had no special concern. Officers of this type wished to do their duty creditably. But their eye was on the report which would record their deeds and the army lists in which they would receive promotion, rather than THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 171 on the deep issues of the struggle. One after an- other these men dropped out, and gave place to others whose military skill was sometimes less, but who were in the field to fight, not merely to get the credit of fighting. Grant and Sherman, Sheridan and Thomas and Hancock, differing in all other ways, had this in common: that they were not trying to win individual battles, but to advance a cause which they had at heart. This was why Grant succeeded where more brilliant men had failed. It was because the brilliant men were trying to do tangible things that should stand to their credit, while the slow and modest man set his hand to the general work and his face toward the general result, and was content to let the question of temporary success and personal ad- vancement take care of itself. You can see this same experience repeated in other fields. It has come to be a proverb that no man ever became president who had made this the goal of his politi- cal effort. Henry Clay in the first half of the nineteenth century and James G. Blaine in the last half both made great names for themselves. They built up large followings of devoted adherents. They spared no pains to do whatever might honor- 1/- TALKS TO STUDENTS iiltlv 1)(^ (lone to fnrtlior tluMr cliiiiicos of jioliticiil julvanctMucnt. But wlien tlic time came for nom- i nation or election the office went to men of in- ferior brilliancy or ability who stood for some inir]X)sc or some principle ; men who had not been piling np credits to their own account but had put what they did into the general account of the country as a whole. The same principle holds true in our college life. Highly as we value the doing of things here in this community, the men who take satis- faction in reckoning up the things that they have done are not the successful ones. The suc- cessful man here, as everywhere else, is the one who is unconscious of his personal position; who is least elated by what he has achieved, least de- pressed by what he has failed to achieve; wlio through apparent success or apparent failure presses on in the direction toward which his pur- pose l(»ads him. It is not by the doing of specific things for others, but by really caring for other people in your mind and in your heart and then living out the life that is in you, that you make yourself a vital and necessary part of the college community. THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL 173 You do more than this. You can make yourself in a large sense independent of success or failure. If a man has set his whole heart on the attain- ment of some specific end — office or power or rank or wealth — he is ever in a position of peril. If he succeeds, his success may set a limit to his am- bitions and make him incapable of larger growth ; if he fails, his failure may discourage him forever from further effort. But if he has a higher and larger purpose in life, and has faith in a king- dom of God which is not of this world, then neither can earthly success satiate him nor earthly failure unnerve him. The men who have really done work that lasts have been in a large sense men of faith; men who did not let the visible things of the present get out of proportion to the possi- bilities of the unseen future. To them and to them alone was it given to endure to the end. Half a century ago there was an English scholar whose life bore all the external marks of failure. Arthur Hugh Clough went out from Rugby full of the high enthusiasms and ambitions which Ar- nold had developed; but he saw the various enter- prises of his life balked by his ill health, and the messages of his poetry received but scant notice 174 TALKS TO STUDENTS from ;in iudifferout world. On his death hed, Avhoii he was ahnost too weak to put peucil to paper, he wrote a last brief poem which his friends found after he was gone. That poem, written in the very shadow of death, is a message of hope to every man who wants to believe in the coming of God's kingdom as Christ nnderstood it, and who is ready to fight God's battle hardest when the visible signs of success are least. Say not, "The stniggle naught availeth, The labor and tlie wounds are vain; The enemy faints not, nor failetli, And as things have been they remain." If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars; It may be through yon smoke concealed Your comrades chase oven now the flyers, And but for you possess the field. For while the tired waves vainly breaking Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back, through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main. And not by eastern windows only When daylight comes, comes in the light; In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly! But westward look! the land is bright. MESSAGES OF THE COLLEGE TO THE CHURCH THE DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLIC SPIEIT "A man's life consisteth not in the almndance of the things that he possesseth." In the ordinary meaning which is given to this text, we are led to emphasize the unimportance of mere worldly possessions as compared with the vastly greater importance of the spiritual life. But there is another meaning, and I believe a truer one — a meaning where the emphasis is laid not on the word " things," but on the word " pos- sesseth ; " a meaning in which exception is taken to selfish ideals of life, however lofty, as compared with those wider ideals of the man who works pri- marily for others. The difference between these two types of men is forcibly illustrated in the college world. There are among our students two sharply distinguished groups: the men who go to college for what they can get out of it, and the men who go to college for what they can put into it. Of course there 177 178 THE COLLEGE AND THE CHURCH are wide variations of character witliiu each of these groups. Those wlio are trying to get what they can out of college life fall into various meth- ods of self-seeking. One man pursues pleasure for the sake of personal enjoyment ; another pursues athletics for the honor which it will bring him as an individual ; a third takes up the social or- ganization as a means of personal advancement; a fourth studies for rank in his class, and for the honor and advantage which that rank will bring; a fifth shuts himself out from the world in order to live a life w^hich he conceives to be one of self- improvement. Yet diverse as are the outward aims of all these men, they are characterized by one common error — the error of selfishness. The evils of this may be more obvious in the lower forms of its manifestation than in the higher ones. We see the fatuous folly of the man who takes his enjoyment in eating and drinking and worse kinds of self-indulgence. We can condemn the short- sightedness of the man who plays for a record or who studies for marks. But the higher forms of selfishness, though less obviously suicidal than the lower ones, are for that reason perhaps all the more dangerous. So many a man seems to gain DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLIC SPIRIT 179 social leadership by its unscrupulous pursuit, or to lay the foundations for success in professional life by a system of self-development at the ex- pense of others, that we sometimes lose sight of the effect which this process has in undermining character and public spirit. " Virtue," says a French writer, " is more dangerous than vice, be- cause its excesses are not subject to the restraints of conscience." The habit of self-improvement furnishes a good example of this danger. Just be- cause the individual actions to which it leads may be commendable, its devotee loses sight of the evil educational eifect of doing these things in a wrong spirit. There is another reason why the higher forms of selfishness, as manifested in the college life, are worse in their effects than the lower forms. The man whose temptations lead him to a life of pleasure is, as a rule, one whose possibilities of service to the community are limited. As he goes out into after life he finds his power for good and evil alike restricted by that mass of conventions with which civilization has guarded the doings of the ordinary man. But the man whose temptations to selfishness concern things of the spirit is one ISO THE COLLEGE AND THE CHURCH who in iiiwr life has wider i)t>ssibilities; and who if he has started himself iu the wrong direction may lead society astray by the wrong exercise of those trusts which no law can control, and con- cerning which public sentiment has not as yet learned to frame its judgment and exercise its penalties. It is perhaps the greatest merit of the typical American college that it exercises a powerful influence against selfishness, whether pliysieal or intellectual, and in favor of the development of a community life. It does not do homage to the man who is aiming to make a record for him- self, whether in athletics or in studies. The ma- jority of those who attend our universities are ready to enter into the spirit of the place, and they demand that their fellows shall do the same thing. Man is a political animal; and the boys entering into a group of this kind at an impressionable age become part of a close community whose public sentiment and code of ethics take powerful hold w\)cm them. This code may be good or it may be bad. Usually, amid the imperfect materials of human character with which we have to work, it is a mixture of the two. And yet it has this DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLIC SPIRIT 181 result : that the boy, at a most impressionable age, forms a conception of a public conscience and a code of honor which carries him outside of him- self ; a code which leads him, not by physical com- pulsion but by the influence of public sentiment, to do things in which consideration of personal convenience and personal advancement are purely secondary. The college is, in short, a living instance of the possibility of developing men out of the lower and into the higher ideals of life. It takes them out of a sphere where the dominant motive is self- interest, and into one which is inspired by loyalty and regulated by the sentiment and conscience of the community. But what of the world outside of the college — of that larger community, with its manifold com- mercial and political activities, for which the col- lege life is but a preparation ? Here, too, we find the same division of types. There are some who pursue their success selfishly, whether it be in gaining pleasure or position, money or office. Side by side with them there are others who pursue these objects unselfishly ; who find their pleasure in the pleasure of their fellow men; wlio gain 1S2 Till'] COLLKCl': AND THE ClIUKCll social positiou as an iiicitk'nt in the iiiiprovoment of society; whose business success is obtained by organizing the work of the community in such a way as to do good to hundreds and thousands of others; whose political life is occupied with the exercise of public trusts, where persona/ ambition is at most a secondary and incidental element. Men are always divided more or less clearly into these two types : those who recognize that life is a trust, and those who fail so to recognize it. It happens, however, that with conditions as they exist at the present day, the distinction between the two types is more sharply marked than usual. In some ages men have been so bound by rules and traditions that he who wished to be selfish was restricted by law in his attempts to encroach upon those about him ; while he who was ready to be unselfish had but scant opportunity for the exer- cise of his power of serving his fellow men. On the other hand, there are ages of liberty, when old conventions are broken down and new methods are in process of introduction. At such times there is an opportunity for the self-centred man to misuse a freedom which the community has not learned to regulate; and there is corresponding DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLIC SPIRIT 183 opportunity for the public-spirited man to employ that same freedom in giving the world new en- joyments which were impossible in an earlier age, and new ideals which will serve to regulate its conduct for generations to come. It is in such a time as this that we are now living. The developments of modern science have given new means of enjoyment. The breaking up and re-forming of social ties has given new op- portunities of influence in society. The growth of industrial combination on a large scale has freed our commercial leaders from the restraints of competition, thereby allowing them an almost unmeasured power for good or evil. The birth of imperialistic ideas has extended the sphere of action of our politicians and statesmen from those domestic problems where they were subject to well- defined restraints of constitutional law, into a field of international dealings where precedents are undefined, and where, in default of such prece- dents, the peoples with whom we come in contact have inadequate opportunities of self-protection. This has been called an age of trusts. The phrase is applicable in a sense much profounder than that in which it is generally used. Our large 1S4 THE rOTJ.ECF AND THE CHURCH industrial monopolies have indeed ceased to be cor- porate trusts in tlio legal sense. Xo longer is the voting power of the stock of the independent com- panies placed in the hands of a common body of trustees. The legislation of Congress has been sufficient to put a stop to this particular form of organization. But it has in no wise checked the tendency to combine ; and our large combinations are become fields for the exercise of a public trust even more than they ever were before. The day is past when the automatic action of self-interest was sufficient to regulate prices, or when a few principles of commercial law, straightforwardly applied, could secure the exercise of justice in matters of trade. The growth of large industries and of large fortunes allows their managers to do good or evil without adequate restraint from law, because all law which is intended to stop the evil stops the good even more surely. This inadequacy of legal control, and the necessity which goes with it for unselfish action on the part of those in charge, are what constitute the very essence of a trust, private or public. The same inadequacy of legal control and the same necessity for unselfish action are felt in DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLIC SPIRIT 185 oi:r new problems of foreign policy. We cannot, in oiir legislative halls at Washington, attempt strictly to regulate the conduct of those who are charged with representing us in the Philippine Islands. Our ignorance of the conditions in those islands makes all such regulation likely to be in- effective or suicidal. Of necessity we leave our representatives in distant countries a freedom which permits of abuse, unless we can have some control, outside of law and beyond it, which shall make them accept their several offices as trusts instead of means of gain — using every such office not so much for what they can get out of it for themselves as for what they can put into it for those entrusted to their charge. But can we hope for the development of a sen- timent of honor and of such a public spirit suffi- ciently strong to take the place of law ? To this question we need not hesitate to give an affirma- tive answer. We are indeed patriotically bound to give this answer. The man who shrinks from the problem because he does not believe that it can be solved is a disbeliever in tlie future of American democracy. If our citizens as a body should confess themselves incompetent to accept 1S6 THE COLLEGE AND THE CIIlTRrH public trusts because they had not tlic necessary basis of unselfishness, we should be safe in pre- dicting the coming of an empire at Washington in twenty-five years. If the people had not the basis of character sufiicient for dealing with the aifairs entrusted to their charge, the power would be taken out of their hands and would fall into those of individual leaders. But all the evidence goes to show that Ameri- cans have this necessary basis of moral character. Our standard of personal morality is on the whole probably higher than that of any other nation. Xowhere else do we find the same degree of con- sideration for the weak. Nowhere else do we see the same sympathy between man and man. No- where else is the spirit of personal courtesy so widespread. If we can thus subordinate our in- dividual convenience to the needs of others, there is no reason why we cannot do the same thing in our corporate and our public capacities as soon as the necessity is brought home to us. The evil is not one of character; it is one of understand- ing. We are not suffering from bad morals, but from defective ethics. We have been taught to regard business and politics as games to be played DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLIC SPIRIT 187 by a certain set of rules, and with no obligations higher than those rules. This may have done very well in the old times, when business was so small that competition set a limit to arbitrary conduct, and when political activity was kept within such a narrow sphere that the restraints of constitu- tional law and of representative government were sufficient checks upon abuse of power. To-day, our new conditions make these restraints inadequate. They require that we shall voluntarily assume ob- ligations of self-restraint and self-sacrifice which go beyond the letter of constitutional provisions. They demand of our leaders that readiness to sub- ordinate individual convenience to public good which is the fundamental characteristic of a gen- tleman. That we shall learn these lessons may be in- ferred from the experience of England in handling her colonial empire and in dealing with the peoples that are subject to it. There was a time when England's administration in India was worse than ours is likely to be in any country that comes under our charge ; a time when men of standing and character, like Hastings or even like Clive, allowed themselves to be led far astray. 18S THE COLLEGE AND THIO CHURCH But these days are long gone by. Whatever may be the defects of English colonial rulers, it never- theless remains true that they take np their work in a spirit of devotion to those who are entrusted to their charge; and that public sentiment, at liomc and abroad, is such as to stimulate good conduct and prevent abuse far more effectively than could be done by any system of legisla- tion, however well devised. What England has learned in the last century America can unques- tionably learn in the opening years of the coming one. We have seen how our colleges give their men a training in just this sort of public spirit which is so necessary to our welfare as a nation. What the colleges do in early life I believe that the church can help to do in later life. This is an age Avhen our churches are looking earnestly for a mission. In this field they have one directly before them. We are in the midst of diflBculties that cannot be checked by law — difficulties that grow greater as the years go on. Individual ef- forts at reform seem helpless and hopeless. We need a sound public opinion to meet them. We must have large bodies of men who will fully DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLIC SPIRIT 189 accept the principle that we are members one of another, and insist upon applying it to the problems of practical life. The socialist tries to preach this principle already ; but his reliance on governmental machinery for its enforcement shows that he has little understanding of what it really means. It is the duty of the Christian church to take up this idea, and apply it from the right end — making it an obligation which each individual will impose upon himself rather than a burden which he tries to impose upon others. Let us not content ourselves with preaching sermons on personal morality which are based on principles that the bulk of good men now accept, whether in the Christian church or out of it. Let us not even content ourselves with going into the work of so- cial settlements and other things intended to give a little more light to those who walk in darkness. These are all good in their way, but they only touch the very fringe of the social problem. To meet that problem in its entirety, our churches must find a way of uniting the people in a senti- ment of devotion to ideals outside of themselves. This cannot bo done by mere words. It cannot be done by specific remedies for individual evils. 11)0 THE COLLEGE AND THE CHURCH It can be done only by awakening a public con- science. For this work we need men who are inspired by high ideals of duty and who at the same time understand the conditions nnder which duty is done in the modern world. For leaders who are able to do this^ and for a church that is ready to work under such leaders, there is room in America to-day as there never was before. When once this lesson of public trust shall have been learned, we shall have reunited church and state, not by those material bonds which proved so destructive to them both, but by a spiritual bond which may come nearer than ever before toward realizing the Chris- tian ideal of the church universal. EDUCATION AND RELIGION "If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them." Theee are two extreme views concerning the effects of education upon public morality. One is held by the advocates of secular schools ; the other is held by the advocates of church schools. This sharp division of opinion is not peculiar to America. It is felt in every country where mod- ern education and modern thought prevail. It takes one form in England, another form in France, and another in Germany; but the under- lying issue is the same in all. The advocate of secular schools believes that good teaching will itself make good citizens. He holds that a large part of our vice is the result of ignorance; and that if you remove the ig- norance you will do away with the vice. He thinks that a large part of our errors and our crimes are due to people's failure to recognize the con- sequences of their acts ; and that if you can inform them of those consequences you can check the 191 102 THE COLLEGE AND THE CHURCH tendency to crime in its beginnings, lie believes poverty and shiftlessness to be so largely due to want of knowledge that if you provide the knowl- edge you will do away with nearly all of the shift- lessness and much of the poverty. Up to a certain point all this is true. There is a vast quantity of shiftlessness and vice due to ignorance ; a large quantity of error and crime which would be prevented if the source of error could be rendered harmless at the outset. But though you can thus remove some of the moral evils under which we suffer, you cannot by so simple a means remove them all, nor even the major part of them. The root of lawlessness lies deeper than mere ignorance of consequences. The chief source of crime is moral perverseness rather than mental deficiency. If you improve a man's intellectual capacity without correspondingly edu- cating his moral nature, you are likely to change the direction in which his criminal or vicious in- stincts seek their outlet, rather than to destroy those instincts themselves. When you teach a man to write you make him less liable to commit lar- ceny, but you make him much more liable to commit forgery. When you teach a man political EDUCATION AND RELIGION 193 economy and law you lessen the temptations to acts of violence ; not to acts of fraud. Few of us who have looked into the statistics of education and crime are optimistic enough to claim that they are encouraging. The improvement due to the removal of illiteracy amounts to something; but it does not amount to so much as we should like to see, or as was promised by the early advo- cates of our public school system. The opponents of that system often point to these statistical results with ill-concealed satisfac- tion. They say that such consequences are just what you might expect from any scheme of purely secular education. They would have the training of the intellect supplemented by a special system of religious training, which should teach the pupil to use his knowledge for the service of God and the benefit of his fellow men. If they had to choose between the two, they would regard the religious training as more important than the in- tellectual, and would prefer schools where the knowledge of the teachers was defective or in- accurate but the religious principles good, to those where the knowledge of the staff was better but its orthodoxy less sound. They look with grave 194 THE COLLEGE AND THE CHURCH apprehension upon the spectacle of free citizens trained in the knowledge of many things which may prove of use to them individually, but not trained in those ideas of religion and morality which have been rightly regarded as essential to the safety of civilized communities. I confess that I share some of the apprehensions of these advocates of church schools; but I am very far from agreeing with them as to the proper remedy. I do not believe that improvement is to be sought by substituting religious instruction for secular instruction, or by superadding one to the other as though the tw^o were separate. I do not believe that you can prepare a man for citizenship by teaching a godless knowledge in one part of the school time and a set of religious principles in an- other part ; any more than you can prepare a man for heaven by letting him cheat six days of the week and having him listen to the most orthodox doctrines on the seventh. I believe that botli in school life and in after life the moral training and the secular training must be so interwoven that each becomes a part of the other. Tn any good system of education the child learns three or four distinct sets of lessons. EDUCATION AND RELIGION 195 He learns a great many facts and principles which he did not know before he went to school. This learning of facts and principles seems to most people who look at the matter siiperficially to be pretty much the whole of education. It is really only a very small part of it. He learns certain habits of accuracy. Indeed, looking at some of the schools of the present day, I am almost inclined to modify this statement and say " habits of accuracy or inaccuracy " ; for in the effort to put more knowledge into the child and make the process agreeable, the teacher is prone to sacrifice that thoroughness and precision which were made the too exclusive object in the classical training of an earlier generation. Along with these habits of accuracy I should place those habits of order and regularity which are not learned out of books at all, but from the quiet working of school rules and school discipline. The pupil in a thoroughly good school also learns lessons of public spirit and self-devotion. He can receive these lessons from poetry and his- tory, if properly taught; whether it be the poetry and history of the Americans or of the Eng- lish, of the Greeks or of the Hebrews. He can 196 THE COLLEGE AND THE CHURCH receive these lessons from tlie emulation of school life, not only within the classroom bnt on the playground. The good of modern athletic sports is not wholly or mainly a physical one. Ath- letics, when rightly managed, give most fruit- ful training in self-subordination and loyalty. And, quite apart from either study or athletics, the child can learn these same lessons through his admiration of the older boys and of the masters who are doing their work well. All the moral precepts which were taught by those headmasters who had the greatest influence upon the character of their pupils have been of little consequence as compared with the personality of those teachers themselves. As we read the books of Thomas Arnold or Mark Hopkins we wonder at the power which these men exercised over generations of English or American boys. It is because we know only the books and not the men. Their doctrines, put into black and white, were nothing; their per- sonality was everything. I am convinced that a large proportion of our misunderstandings about our school system arise from our overestimate of the importance of the first of these three elements, and a cor- EDUCATION AND RELIGION 197 responding nnderestimate of the second and third. That we should make these wrong esti- mates is not surprising. The enormous widen- ing of modern knowledge^ the recent interest in science and scientific discovery, the development of new means for the pursuit of material wealth, have all combined to cause a strong reac- tion against the narrowness of the old classical curriculum. We have been substituting history for literature, experimental science for deductive rea- soning. We have tended to subordinate theoretical training to technological ends, often very unintelli- gently pursued ; and to value our teaching by the immediate practical utility of the subjects studied. To a certain extent this reaction was justified. But I believe that it has gone much too far, and has made us lose sight of the really excellent elements which the old education contained and which the modern education may be in danger of sacrificing. Knowledge is a good thing, and the more we can get of it the better; but if we obtain a large in- crease of knowledge at even a moderate sacrifice of the habits of accuracy and regularity, we have made our pupils less efficient instead of more so. Intelligence is a most excellent thing to help a 198 THE COLLEGE AND THE CHURCH man in the conduct of his own affairs; but if we strive to increase that intelligence at the sacrifice of those things which make for idealism and pub- lic spirit we make a man a worse citizen instead of a better one, and run the risk that in the short-sighted pursuit of his own interest he may be led to ruin himself as well as his fellows. A few years ago this danger seemed to be a very serious one. In the college, electives w^ere multiplied without discrimination. In the high school, scientific and commercial courses were established on lines which were often quite un- wise. Exaggerated importance was given to shop work. Manual training was sometimes used in a way which made it not so much a training as a diversion. The introduction of kindergarten methods in the early stages of school life was guided by enthusiasm rather than by critical judg- ment. Fortunately, we have come to a point where signs of a strong reaction are manifest. The in- competence of the children trained in some of our kindergartens is leading educators of every stage to see that the acquisition of agreeable facts is a very poor substitute for the habit of pertinacity in dealing with disagreeable ones. The experience EDUCATION AND RELIGION 199 of scientific experts proves that a laboratory loses most of its value when it degenerates into a shop where interest in the making of an object takes the place of care in the testing of a principle. Our college graduates of recent years find that in- discriminate election of studies has meant intel- lectual dissipation. In short, we have learned that the sugar-plums of education do not furnish a strengthening intellectual diet. Under these cir- cumstances we find a tendency to go back to the standards of earlier years. I do not mean that we shall ever go all the way back to the dry bones of learning which constituted so large a part of the education of our fathers; but that we shall see, and are in fact already beginning to see, how the discipline which went with that old education made stronger men and women than we are likely to get under teachers and school boards who, in their pursuit of the pleasures of the new education, forget the necessities of discipline. If we can really get into our minds the fact that in any system of education, whether classical or scientific, accuracy and idealism are far more important than mere knowledge, we shall do away with the force of the objection that our teaching 200 THE COLLECJE AND THE CHURCH has no effect in character buikling. For the forma- tion of liabits of accuracy and the development of ideals are themselves the very essence of character building. The effect of this training tells in the most unexpected ways. I have known a great many socialists, but I never knew a single one who was really careful in liis arithmetic. I have known a great many shiftless and half vicious boys who furnished unpromising material for any edu- cational system ; but my experience has been that even in these cases regularity and cleanliness were more potent moral forces than any amount of mere knowledge could become. I have seen boys and men who were selfish in all their impulses, who nevertheless responded to the teaching of ideals in the school or college as they responded to nothing else. But if you can teach in this manner and in this spirit, the antithesis between education and religion disappears. Spelling and arithmetic, poetry and history, games and friendships, become lessons in conduct and helps to the formation of character. Under such a conception, sound re- ligious teaching is the outgrowth of good secular teaching. The use of the Bible in the schools EDUCATION AND RELIGION 201 justifies itself because it does in fact give those lessons in conduct and character which we regard as fundamentally important. Wherever we have tried to make Bible reading a thing apart from the rest of the school work, which we used because we thought that the Bible was verbally inspired, we found difficulty in defending our course against those taxpayers who denied that the Bible had any such special authority, and against those others who believed that there was a church authority at least coordinate with the Bible. But when we make our religious and moral aim as broad as our whole field of instruction, and use the Bible as we use any other book of poetry or his- tory, then we can justify our practice in the face of all the world and can look forward with confidence to the results. To sum the whole matter up : The supposed an- tithesis between secular training and religious training arises from a misconception of what is involved in good training of any kind. People see the difference between bad secular education and bad religious education ; and they assume that there must be a corresponding difference between good secular education and good religious educa- 202 THE COLLEGE AW) THE CHURCH tion. This is by no means the case. ^\nicn a mas- ter of a public school is occupied only with teach- ing facts and principles, and when a master of a religious institution is occupied only with teaching dogmas and observances, they necessarily work at cross-purposes ; but the mere learning of facts and principles is not the vitally important part of secular education, nor is the learning of doctrines and observances the vitally important part of religious education. The formation of habits of discipline and the development of ideals of un- selfishness is the essentially important thing in a good education of either kind. When we have grasped this truth we shall see that there is in the field of education the same harmony between the true needs of the world and the true needs of the church which exists in every other depart- ment of human life. THE PUBLIC CONSCIENCE "None of us liveth to himself." This is an age of individual freedom. We al- low each man to make his own choices and his own mistakes. We claim this liberty for ourselves; we tolerate its exercise on the part of others. This is true not only in the practical affairs of life; it is true also in our philosophy and in our religion. The men of to-day claim a right to do their thinking for themselves, and allow this right to others in a way to which former ages have furnished no parallel. In old times most people took their standards of morals and religion ready- made. They accepted the creed of their church because it was the creed of their church. They followed the precepts of the Bible because they found them written in the Bible. They adapted their own habits of thought to the standards of right and wrong which prevailed in the com- munity. If they wished to make any change in these standards or interpretations they tried to 203 204 THE COLLEGE AND THE CHURCH insist that others should make the same change at the same time. Sometimes they succeeded; more often they failed. But they would no more have thought of assuming the right to make their own philosophy of life and let their neighbors con- tinue to hold a different one, than they would have dreamed of assuming the right to adopt one rule of civil or criminal law for their own conduct while other people remained bound by other rules of law. To-day all this has changed. To-day, for the first time perhaps in the w^orld's history, w^e have real liberty of thought in practice as well as in theory. We leave each man to work out his own salvation with a freedom which, even at the beginning of the last century, would have been regarded as perilous to the individual and de- structive to the community. What has been the consequence of thus allow- ing and encouraging each man to treat his con- science as a thing apart and his own salvation as a problem to be worked out more or less in- dependently of those about him ? Like every other extension of individual liberty, this system has produced a mixture of good and evil. So far as it has taught people that they must THE PUBLIC CONSCIENCE 205 work if they would be saved — that no ready-made standards of conduct could excuse them from the responsibility of making a choice, and no phi- losophy of life which they had accepted from others could excuse them from thinking out life's problems for themselves — its results have been good. But so far as it has caused them to do that thinking and that work for themselves alone and not for those about them, its results have been bad. If the principle that each man should work out his own salvation means that he is not to throw that responsibility upon others, it is good. If it means that he is not going to take any of that responsibility for others, it is bad. Freedom is a good thing; tolerance is a good thing; but when freedom and tolerance are carried so far that a man withdraws within himself with the outworn excuse, " Am I my brother's keeper ? " his own efforts at personal salvation, however well meant, are likely to come to naught. But in fact, no man can thus withdraw within himself. We are affected by the judgments of those about us, whether we will or no; and many of those who most loudly protest that they are liv- ing their life for themselves are really just as 206 THE COLLEGE AND THE CHURCH much affected as any one else. " If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand I am not of the body, is it therefore not of the body ? " Amid the daily contact of our social life habits of thought, standards of value, subtle influences in the estimate of right and wrong, pass from man to man just as quietly and unconsciously as the blood passes from one part of the body to an- other, bearing seeds of life or death to the whole body, as the case may be. By this subtle contact a sort of public conscience is created; a habit of valuing things, not for their effect upon the in- dividual, but for their relation to certain stand- ards of the community, commercial or political, moral or religious. The history of any people, so far as it is worth writing, is a history of this public conscience, and a record of the gradual development of these standards. The heroes of each different people and of each successive age are a sort of embodiment of these standards in flesh and blood. The careers of the men whom a people accepts for its leaders and delights to honor illustrate the motives which are swaying the morals of that people from top to bottom. The creeds of a nation show what it pretends to think ; THE PUBLIC CONSCIENCE 207 its heroes show what it really does think. Accord- ing as these ideals of heroism are high or low, base or noble, so will be the whole national career. The nation that receives a prophet because he is a prophet shall receive a prophet's reward, and the one that receives a righteous man because he is a righteous man shall receive a righteous man's reward. For the very fact that the prophets and righteous men are really held in honor shows that the conscience of that nation is truer and sounder than that of the people which cares only for the more commonplace and superficial forms of success. The existence of such a conscience may be less prominently obtruded upon men's notice under a system of religious freedom than under an or- ganized state church. The agencies which give utterance to its dictates and the means by which its commands are supported may be less tangible in one case than in another. But such a conscience exists wherever society exists at all. Call it imi- tation, call it fashion, call it what you will; it is this habit of conformity which renders society and government possible. We cannot really hold to a line of thought without striving to impose it on others. We cannot really live among those 20S THE COLLEGE AND THE CHURCH and with those who have different lines of thought from onrs without being influenced by their rea- soning. Either we must change them or they must change us. Especially dominant is the power of these pub- lic standards in what we commonly call the larger affairs of society — in influencing the conduct of business or politics, as distinct from that of friendship or of family life. A man may perhaps keep his habits of kindness or cruelty, of affection or churlisliness, more or less independent of the practice of his neighbors; but in conmaercial or political questions no such attitude of moral non- interference is possible. The man who toler- ates corruption becomes himself corrupt in heart, if not in action. The man who really seeks to maintain a higher standard must become, some- times even in spite of himself, the means of im- posing that higher standard upon others. This fight for commercial and political honor is no de- fensive warfare, in which we can be content to possess our individual souls, like so many for- tresses in a hostile countrv. Such a warfare can end only in the exhaustion of the defenders. It must be a war of offence — one where we main- THE PUBLIC CONSCIENCE 209 tain and improve our own standards by bringing np those abont ns. The work is a hard one. The difBculty of keep- ing our standards of business and of politics pure to-day is, I think, greater than it has been in any previous generation. The task of convincing people in a democracy that liberty brings duties as well as rights is harder than the correspond- ing task under an aristocracy. A privileged class has received so many special favors that you can appeal to the common spirit of justice among its members to show them that they should accept self-imposed obligations and duties in return for these favors. But when you make that appeal to a man who has taken his chance with every other man in the rough struggle of life, and who has had less than his share of power and priv- ilege, you have no such basis upon which to work. Again, if an aristocracy is selfish, this means obvious perversion of the resources and enjoy- ments of the people for the sake of a small minority ; and you can show thinking members of that minority that such perversion is unjust. But where we have free competition in business and universal suffrage in politics, it is very much 210 THE COLLEGE AND THE CHURCH harder to prove the unfairness or injustice of any result that may come from the practice of selfish- ness under these conditions. There is a tendency at the present day among those who have bene- fited by the outcome of business competition to believe that this is part of the moral order of the universe ; and there is a tendency among those who have secured the suffrages of a majority of the people to believe that the vox populi is in this instance the vox Dei. But any sane man, what- ever his attitude toward social questions, must see that there are a great many cases where these assumptions prove erroneous. He must see that there are instances where business struggle re- sults in the survival of the unfit instead of the survival of the fit; instances where those who ob- tain temporary control of political power use it for purposes just as arbitrary and tyrannical as if they had never been compelled to appeal to their fellow citizens for the form of an election. Our industrial machinery and our political machinery are both excellent in their way ; but no industrial or political machinery, however good, can take the place of public spirit and self-devotion. And THE PUBLIC CONSCIENCE 211 when the existence of such machinery is made an excuse for letting public spirit and devotion go unused, it constitutes a menace instead of a safe- guard to the future of the body politic. Here is the great vital need for the church. Not to make the American people law-abiding and in- telligent — that it is already; not even to make it kindly and courteous and industrious — these vir- tues we have, if not in ideal measure, at any rate sufficiently for many of the practical purposes of life; but to fight with all its heart and with all its soul that dangerous spirit of selfish isolation which encourages a man to take whatever the law allows and most approves the man who has taken most. To-day, as well as two thousand years ago, we have our Pharisees and our scribes, who rest content with the law and what it brings. To-day also, as two thousand years ago, we have our false prophets, who seek to remedy the errors of one kingdom of the world by another kingdom of the world, whose powers shall simply be transferred from the hands of the conservatives to those of the radicals. It sometimes seems as though all efforts at reform were reducing themselves to an endless 212 TH1<: COLLEGE AND THE CHURCH struggle between those who, having more money than votes, are anxious to have the rights of pro|> erty maintained by the courts, and those who, having more votes than money, are anxious to have those rights impaired by the legislature or transferred to the hands of elected magistrates. From no such blind struggle can any true reform come. There must be a sense, both on the part of the business man and of the politician, on the part of those who have and on the part of those who desire to have, that power is a trust and not a privilege; that life is to be valued not for what it enables us to get out of the people, but for what it enables us to give to the people in the way of service. This was Christ's message nineteen centuries ago. This has been the message of every true prophet from that day to this. This is and must be the message of the church wherever the church is a power among men. Would to God that we could see the man or the church that should bring the sense of this mes- sage home to the people to-day ! We are as those who cry in the wilderness, " Prepare ye the way of the Lord ! " The dawn for which we have THE PUBLIC CONSCIENCE 213 looked has not yet broken; the truth which shall move this twentieth-century world has not yet been put into words. But there is light enough for the work of preparation; truth enough to serve the needs of him who, till the sun shall rise, is con- tent to shape his course by the stars. THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY This book is DUE on the last date stamped below 194* WtB6 REC'D M APR 2 s 1982, REC'O LOAJUI .0 otc 131985 Form L-0 20m -1,' 41 (1152) 3 H LB 2325 Hllb llllllllllllllllllii 3 1158 01092 A UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACII 77 639