BEREA COLLEGE.
Prof. W. E. C. Wright.
The seventeenth year of Berea College closed on June 30th with most satisfactory marks of the sustained usefulness and increasing importance of the school.
The Commencement festival really began with the joint exhibition of the Ladies’ Literary and Phi Delta Societies on Friday evening, before a large audience, in the chapel. The pupils of the lower schools gave their interesting exhibitions in the same place on Saturday evening. President Fairchild’s baccalaureate discourse on Sunday morning was a vigorous and comprehensive rehearsal of the religious and moral ideas of consecration to God and love toward all men, which this college has ever sought to impress on its students; his text, Phil. iv., 9, “Those things, which ye have both learned and received and heard and seen in me, do.” No Christian man could have heard it without feeling how supremely important for the educational regeneration of the South is such a spirit of religious earnestness.
On Tuesday evening the Literary Societies were addressed on the subject of “Progress,” by Col. Swope, who is the Internal Revenue Collector for this district, and a native of Kentucky.
On Wednesday came the final exercises, which gathered a great multitude from mountain and from plain. The season has been very rainy, but this was the most perfect of June days—its unclouded sun tempered by a cool breeze from the south. Soon after sunrise vehicles of every description, and saddle-horses carrying one, two or three passengers, began to pour in toward the Tabernacle, most visitors bringing luncheon for a noon-time picnic in the oak grove.
Besides the three graduates—one from the classical, and two from the scientific course—fourteen other students from the higher classes presented orations or essays. All were listened to by the great audience with interest, and some with enthusiasm. In the afternoon nearly as many gathered again to hear a most suggestive and interesting address from Rev. R. T. Hall, of Mount Vernon, Ohio, on “The Abuse of Liberty.” Short addresses followed from Rev. Mr. Simmons of the (colored Baptist) Bible Institute of Louisville, and Rev. Mr. Barnett, a Methodist minister from College Hill.
It suggests the interest of our neighbors in the work of Berea that the Kentucky Register, published at the county seat and a representative paper of the Kentucky aristocracy, gave nearly a column the next day to a strongly commendatory notice of the exercises. A gentleman of a well-known old Kentucky family passing this way toward the mountains turned aside to see what the Commencement was like, and spent the day in such unexpected approval of what he saw and heard that he declared at night that he might be set down hereafter as for Berea every time. This is the more noticeable as the appearance of blacks and whites in about equal numbers and with entirely equal respect on the same platform must at first have given a great shock to his Southern prejudices.
A Northern visitor, remarking on the perfect pronunciation of the speakers, said, “A blind man could not tell to which race the several speakers belong.” The “color blindness” which still keeps the students of Berea about equally divided between the two races is one of the most important elements in its work for reducing the illiteracy of Kentucky (28 per cent. of the voters and almost as much of it white as black), and settling the problems the nation has inherited from slavery.