FOREWORD
These short sermons by the Chaplain to Episcopalian Students in Cambridge are collected here for their interest to Christians of all ages and as a reminder of the important religious work being carried on in colleges. It is a truism that the years of college are crucial for students; it is then that their interests become clear and the direction of their life's work takes shape. But for Christians, education involves more than the training of the mind and the acquisition of knowledge; it involves, like every other phase of life, enlistment of the will and dedication of the spirit. Awareness of this fact has given rise increasingly in recent years to questions concerning the proper place of religious teaching in the secular modern college and university. Without entering on that question here, one may be quite certain that a chief force in the religious life of students will always be associations for devotion and discussion such as those conducted by Mr. Kellogg under the auspices of the Bishop Rhinelander Memorial for Student Work. During his nearly ten years of service he has influenced by precept and example literally thousands of students. These sermons thus carry a double meaning. In addition to their own high value as Christian interpretations, they are tokens of a necessary work to be done.
John H. Finley, Jr.
Eliot House
Harvard University
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."
So the Bible opens, so the world began. The historian, Arnold Toynbee, has shown us how many beginnings there have been since that time, how kingdoms rise and fall, one civilization succeeding another as new life and inspiration take the place of death and complacency. There never will be an end of beginnings or of ends so long as the world endures.
A study of this historical cycle shows that mankind has never lost its hope for a deus ex machina, a God who will save men at the last moment from the effects of their own bad beginnings. It makes a good story to tell how the Gods from Olympus intervened on the behalf of their favorites on the plains of Troy but it is disastrous when men mistake this day-dream for reality. Yet at the end of each age there is to be seen a frantic scrambling for divine favor, a scurrying to the churches when the Goths threatened the Roman Empire, for example, or a bull market for indulgences as the Renaissance replaced medieval society.
Men are forever trying to substitute faith in a last resort God for faith in the "beginning God".
But seldom if ever has the substitution been successful. Once an avalanche of events has been loosed by the criminality or carelessness of men, God will not intervene until the tumult and the shouting have died down, and his still small voice can once more be heard.
No one can mistake the fact that we are at the beginning of a new era now, an era in which events will happen more quickly and more drastically than in any period in history. And these events may be either for good or for evil depending upon whether we decide now to follow the "beginning God" rather than to postpone our faith until fear impels a grasping for a God of last resort, a deus ex machina which does not exist.
To follow the true God, however, the God who is in the beginning, means a sharp change in policy; it means junking our old habits of procrastination and reliance upon self while the going is good, for then is the time that inexorable events pile up to avalanche proportions. It means starting right now to refer our decisions to him for advice with confidence in his universal judgment and never-ceasing care.
A great opportunity is open to us, for I do not doubt that the first really successful age will take place when God is invited to enter the human scene at the very outset and thereby to form the pattern for the years that follow. It is a crucial opportunity, for the neighborliness and love that proceed from him are no longer optional courses but are the very conditions of survival.
Why not therefore make up our minds now that we will do everything in our power this year, this month, today, to introduce the God of the beginning to the problems of the now?