The Baccalaureates

...A recognition that the spirit of the age will be found hostile to all the spiritual implications of university teaching is still the outstanding feature of one baccalaureate address after another...

...It is when we turn from the evils recognized to the remedies proposed that we perceive how lightly the definitely religious solution is allowed to rest upon all these problems and with what tact it must be applied lest offense ensue...

...Angell's Yale address Is, of all those to which extended space has been accorded, the most frank in its call for faith, and that the faith of Christ, as the panacea for contemporary ills...

...All the flowers and music with which the valedictory is crowned are but so much myrrh and hyssop heaped upon the poignant wound of a regret...

...A "dreadful, dull apathy" manifested toward national and international affairs is part of the text of President Sill's sermon at Bowdoin, and President James L. McConaughey, of Wesleyan, in referring to the recent outbreak of student suicide, traces it directly to "the gross materialistic philosophy of life too prevalent today...

...The occasional enthusiast may be left to the post-graduate course the world reserves for him...

...For the great mass of men engaged in manual and mechanical labor," says Harvard's humane executive, "there seems a tendency to revert to the old conception associated with the story of Adam's expulsion from the Garden of Eden, namely, that his sin forced upon him the curse of work, obliging him to earn bread only by the sweat of his face...

...Hibben tells the graduating class at Princeton, "is that it lacks reality and that there is no natural place for religion amid the real experiences of life...

...President Lowell can see a cure for the restlessness and pessimism of drudgery regarded as a treadmill only In some transcendental "vision of a further end...

...There is, about graduation, something of the finality and solemnity of death...

...We enjoy our work because we feel that it is worth doing, and It is worth doing because in some form It will endure...

...It has a moral value that outlasts the hour when It is done and the man who does it...

...The day that any young man or woman turns a reluctant back upon the elm-shaded campus, the classic groves and playing-fields of alma mater, to face an indifferent world that will put its own harsh values upon the treasure he has been helped to accumulate, is a day of reckoning quite as much as a day of rejoicing...

...How to bequeath this aura of religious sentiment to the problems that beset life in the world outside the campus is, we can well believe, the major task that confronts our college presidents when they ponder the words which outgoing seniors are to carry away as the final pronouncement of an authority that has rested on their youthful heads for four years...

...Yet even here, the acceptance of the two main Christian tenets, love of God and of one's neighbor, Is viewed first of all as a mental liberation: "To accept the two great principles of Christ's teaching is to free oneself forthwith from all the mean and miserable jealousy arising from a narrow and selfseeking individualism...

...Mather A. Abbott, of Lawrenceville School, summed up a few months ago as "You cannot prove the other world and you cannot prove God, and the modern generation won't accept anything you cannot prove," will turn only a distracted ear toward the homilies uttered for his benefit on the day he assumes the toga virilis...

...Doubtless the occasion of a baccalaureate sermon presents its difficulties as well as Its opportunities...

...No thinking men or women can ever have attended such exercises, especially in one of our older universities, where the drama is played out against the background of an ivied past, without being deeply impressed with the pathos that attends the passing of one generation, and the stepping of another into the pleasant places where its life for four years has been wrought out and played out...

...The desires of these admiring parents and relatives may be various...

...It is the world, and the world as a going concern, that is the topic of our mentors as they gaze upon the faces whose places tomorrow will know them no more...

...It is delivered, not only before youth whom the world has not yet tested, but before alumni who have tested the world pretty thoroughly, and whose achievement...

...But the discovery may also be made that beyond a certain point ethics, even ethics adorned with the Christian ideology, becomes a poor guide, and that those terrible brothers, dogma and discipline, who make only a poor showing In baccalaureate addresses, were the saviours predestined...

...The chief criticism of religion which has come to my attention from many sources," Dr...

...Even President Lowell, whose address upon the moral values of work is one of the most sunny and encouraging given this year, is forced, as his gaze passes over the privileged youth he is dismissing and falls upon the vast multitude of the ungraduated beyond them, to register a certain ebb of optimism in the classes to whose hard lives the vision of an end that transcends material means is most vitally necessary...

...With some warrant," say Dr...

...Hibben, it Is by racial consciousness and the historical sense that the objections of those who "find no natural place for religion" are to be best met...

...And President Lowell makes It quite clear that those who must work by the sweat of their brain rather than their brow are by no means exempt from this growing despondency...

...But it is pretty sure that the throwing of any serious doubt upon the essential value of activities to which the new bachelor will devote himself does not figure among them...

...Angell in his speech at Yale, "our age is alleged to be glaringly irreligious, although it is stark indifference rather than aggressive opposition to religion which is its most striking characteristic in many of our social strata...

...UPON many accounts collegiate commencements should be inspiring occasions that produce from the distinguished men who are college heads burning and pregnant phrases, expressions of thought that have, as it were, been turned over and over for months in the crucible of a scholastic mind, awaiting only the supreme opportunity for their voicing...

...None blinks the fact that it will have to fight for its life...

...That they contain a balanced ration of warning and encouragement was necessitated by the very nature of the occasion...

...For Dr...

...The addresses delivered this year by the heads of our major colleges during commencement week to departing seniors do not assay a very large deposit of new or original thought...

...For these ideas "are a part of a race inheritance which represent the past nineteen centuries of human progress which have been under the direct Influence of the Christian religion...

...We cannot lightly set aside our past," the president of Princeton protests, "and refuse to reckon with it, while we accept from it unconsciously the ideas which establish for us all the standards of character and of conduct...

...But to seek in them any sharp challenge of the values against which prophets less dedicated to suavity are raising their voices, anything approaching an arraignment drawn from the disquieting facts observable in political and social life in nearly every civilized country, would be a vain hope...

...In between the two must be many whose imagination and conscience have been stirred during four years of unimpeded reading and discussion, and who realize that sooner or later the roads leading to God or Mammon will confront them and exact a choice...

...How far the general directions to which they listened on the last day of their academic course will be an assistance then depends on many things, among them personal character and that mysterious entity, a vocation...

...The materialist, who was a materialist before setting foot on yard or campus, and whose position Dr...

...It I9 no disrespect to say, may rest somewhat remotely upon the following of the evangelical counsels...

...This is by no means to imply that religion, and all that religion connotes, fail to find an honored place in the valedictory addresses with which the inside pages of our great newspapers have been filled within the past two weeks...

...Upon all our universities, great and small, an inheritance continues to rest, however weakened and attenuated, of the days when learning took refuge from violence and lawlessness within the cloister...

...for the fact remains that a great many people regard labor as an unfortunate evil...

...So much is vouched for by the character of the speakers...

...They are all dignified utterances, couched in lofty phrasing and concerned with the higher aims of life...

...The baccalaureate address should be the viaticum for this departure, For many reasons, it seldom is...

...There is no use in arguing that labor is not a curse by showing that civilization has advanced where work has been necessary to maintain life...