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Thursday, JUI1U - Page Two EDITORIAL I ,3 3gr 5. I i RALEIGH CHRISTIAN ADVOCATE Trinity College Commencement One of the leading events of the year "for Methodist folks in North Carolina is the com mencement of Trinity College. This year special interests attaches to it for several reasons. In the first place the great war is giving color to everything that takes place, and it is especially affecting our colleges for young men because so many of them have deserted the campus for training camps, or in other ways related to the war, that 'there is only a remnant of student bodies left for the closing exercises. Trinity College l as always placed a high premium upon patriotism; and, when the country calls as she is calling today, it. would be strange indeed if those who .are filled with her spirit did not read ily respond. This they have done to the extent that the last few weeks of the scholastic year have been very unusual. Regular college exer cises have been very much broken up. The commencement exercises began on Sun day evening, when Dr. W. P. Few delivered the baccalaureate address to the graduating class; that is, to what of it was left there. It was not our privilege to hear it, b.ut a synopsis of it has been furnished us; and it is so timely that we take pleasure in presenting it to our readers. President Few in his baccalaureate address commented vigorously on the moral failure of "efficiency" by which, he declared, the world lias run in a great and awful way upon sudden and sharp disaster. "The splendid achievement of one imperial modern nation had come dangerously near to convincing the whole world that the skill, com petence, and power which comes from a thorough scientific and technical training of all the people are the be-all and end-all of individual and na tional endeavor and aspiration. All men every where now have a sickening sense of the moral weakness and therefore the certain ultimate failure of this so-called efficiency. We must fight the war to a finish; as individ uals and as a people we must make ourselves in every way as fit as it is humanly possible for us to become; and for victory we must lay out the last that is in us. The very life of the Re public is at stake and other of the most precious causes of mankind. But out of it all let us be sure as a college, as a State, and as a nation to learn our lesson the lesson that this world heeds not primarily the force and organization of Roman Caesarism, not the trained competence and power of autocratic Prussianism; but for its cleansing, its fortifying, its salvation, its life, it needs the ultimate truths of the Sermon on the Mount. It will be worth all it costs, even though the price should be such as to stagger humanity for a thousand years. For we had, and the men of all countries had, by some means or other to bo brought at all costs to learn that it is through its faith, through its fidelity to the eter nal verities, that the world can attain its salva tion; not through knowledge which is knowledge of evil and death, not through its power which in a few brief years must give place to the weak ness of a little child. If we in our beloved America are in the long run of years to survive as a great nation of ade quate national ideals, this theory of education, "made in Germany," and come to us by way of Wisconsin, we must use every possible weapon to combat. And at last even in North Carolina we had become confronted with it in its most dangerous because most insidious forms." President Few spoke on "Nature's Art of Mending Nature," using the words of an artist that knew more about nature and art than any other man that ever lived; there "is an art that does mend nature,' change it rather, but the art itself is nature." The speaker applied this "natural treatment" to some of the commonest of human concerns. In the old fundamental business of agriculture, tillers of the soil have at last found out that, success comes from working with nature, from building up the land by rota tion of crops and the use of scientific, that is "natural" principles in the production of every thing that grows on the farm. And practical results have convinced everybody that this meth od of nature is superior to the old reliance upon the artificial stimulus of commercial fertilizers to reclaim exhausted fields. Medicine becomes a scientific profession just in proportion as it gets "back to nature." The change is already very great . between the old blind faith in drugs and the growing dependence of modern treatment of diseases on the natural methods, on diet and exercise, bathing and mas sage; "in other words," as William Osier, un questionably the foremost living American phy sician and the highest authority on drugs in the medical world has lately said, "giving the natu ral forces the fullest scope by easy and thorough nutrition, increased flow of blood, and removal of obstructions to the excretory system, or to cir culation in the tissues." I look to see the physi cian, especially in surgery and preventive medi cine, have increasing importance in human so ciety; but I foresee, if I do not live to see, the extensive use of drugs classed among the lost arts. We are becoming wiser in our thought about education. We no longer look upon it as some sort of miraculous process by which something can be made out of nothing. Education can put nothing into any man; it can only draw out and develop capacities with which the child is born. But it is not an adequate, and not a safe, education unless it does seek to develop all the capacities and all the powers of our human nature. And herein lies the vast ascendency of education provided by Christianity over all sys tems of secular education. We come more and more to know that perfec tion in art is not attained through elaborate artificially, but through approximation to nature. "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin; and yet I say . unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." There lies the secret of all the art in the world. The liles of the field live an unhindered and an unfallen and so a perfect life. Dr. Samuel Johnson, engulfed in the artificialities of the eighteenth century, set out the limitations of himself and of his age, when he said once that "a man who is tired of London is tired of life." This is in strange con trast with Wordsworth's famous theory so often and so exquisitely embodied in his poetry of the plastic influences of nature (like Job's "sweet in fluences of the Pleiades") in molding us into beauty and truth. In the greatest and most intimately human of all the arts in literature the curse of eery age has been bondage to rules, except when individ uals have been strong enough to break the shackles of literary traditions and give them selves into the hands of great creating nature. The first great English poet began in the second half of the fourteenth century to break the long night of mediaeval tediousness with songs or morning freshness. Me was "natural;" that Is, he was himself, lie had originating genius, and he created a school of followers who walking with blind imitation in his footsteps, thought to hit the stride of a master, but they fell into a halting tread of slaves. Homer became for time an empty name because there were few with the spiritual vision to comprehend his art Shakespeare was called the great barbarian bv later critic who drew his hard and fast literary standards from a far past. "The word of the Lord was rare in those days, there was no open vision." There was no one to "keep hi eye 0n the object," to see the thing as it is, and there fore no one to draw the thing as it is for the God of things as they are. Good taste does ont come out of hidden, mys terious sources that are inaccessible to the ma jority. It is not the result of elaborate coaching and artificial training and the following of high- 1 . . M n i r-f V- i. MA IV 1 In X i m 4-1.. ... 1 . i.y wiuugiii icguiauuus, n is uib pruuuei of moral forces. Good taste is the conscience of the mind And men and women who are right on the inside can rely on an intuition that will carry them unerringly to sound judgments in questions of taste. Good manners private and public manners are not acquired from books of etiquette; they are, as Sir Philip Sydney said they were, "High- erected thoughts, seated in a heart of courtesy." A gentleman at heart is a gentleman indeed, and can never betray himself in however unaccus tomed circumstances he may at times be placed. Good manners are close akin to good morals, and by that bridge I pass to the very heart of the subject we are now thinking about. I need hardly to say that I am not thinking of "natural ism" in religion; I am not even a convert to "Natural Law in the Spiritual World," which Drummond has made so popular. Still the anal ogy I have been following can, I think, be safely carried into the highest moralities and into reli gion itself. The New Testament seems to me to contemplate that every man who is born into the kingdom of God should live an unhampered life. "If ye continue in my Word, then are ye my dis ciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." We may thus become "free," and feel the universe our home. That is the blessedness of child life, and of all life that is cleansed, rectified, renovated. Jesus commanded His followers in imitation to "behold the fowls of the air"; they are at home in their world. They live by a true instinct that is due to perfect adjustment of themselves their inner natures, their moral self-hood, so to speak to their outward circumstances. They have noth ing to fear but outward catastrophe. Hut it is not so with man. He fights an invisible foe. He need an inner adjustment. From some hidden source of evil, great moral cross currents have struck into human life. We cannot rest in per fect adjustment to our environment, but we must find our peace in God who is our home. "See ye first the kingdom of God and His righteous ness, and all these things shall be added unto you." We live then by a sort of moral instinct that carries us to our tasks with something of the same sureness of the natural instinct that compels he bird to build its nest and to sing song. Then morality is the nature of things Rightly in tune with the Infinite, man's life. If-"' the bird's, should be liberated and care free. This sort of liberation from care and concen tration of soul in great purposes can lono "l a man to live his life to the full. "Unaffrighted by the silence round them, Undisturbed by the sights they see; On their own tasks all their powers pouring. These attain the mighty life you see." Mrs
North Carolina Christian Advocate (Greensboro, N.C.)
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June 7, 1917, edition 1
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