The people of any state have the right—they have paid for it in honest money—to look to the university not only for mental insight and efficiency, but for moral energy and spiritual passion. If the university is worthy to bear that high name it ought to be a place where moral idealism can breathe and grow as upon its native heath. This is thoroughly understood by all those who know the full meaning of “higher education.”
If any of you have come up to this place of privilege merely with the idea of being trained so that you can more successfully compete with your fellows in feathering your own nests, making them thick and warm and soft as untrained men might be unable to do, you would better go home. If your associates knew that fact they would be ashamed of you. The members of the faculty, as soon as they discover that spirit in you, are ashamed of you. The people of the state would be ashamed of you did they know that you were here using the privileges they have provided in that mood. You are here to be made ready and competent to take more steadily and more largely the risks which public service involves.
Hundreds of people, many of them good and respectable people too, confess themselves unable to stand up against the spirit of self-indulgence, the worship of luxury, the fierce pursuit of things material which are today dwarfing the souls of men in countless homes. All the more honor to those university men and women who stand out and bear witness to their firm confidence in the beauty of simplicity, in the value of sincerity of soul, in the vital importance of directing the ultimate aspirations to things spiritual!
Hundreds of men in commercial and political life are hanging out the flag of distress. “We are caught in a system,” they say. “We cannot help ourselves. We must play the game in the same ruthless way our competitors are playing it.” All the more honor to those men who are ready to face defeat if need be, that they may stand clearly for unflinching integrity, for genuine consideration for the higher interests involved in industry, and for all those sacred ideals which ought to shine in the secular sky every day in the week as well as through the stained glass windows on the first day.
In the face of the insistent demand for moral leadership it would be a downright shame if the university men should be found skulking in the rear, choosing the lower because it is the easier and in their weak attempts at moral advance following the line of least resistance. The persistent refusal of the call to high and responsible service becomes in these exacting days the act of a scoundrel. It is for every college man to stand ready to make the moral venture of fidelity to the highest in sight and to share in the honor of the ultimate victory.
VII
THE LAW OF RETURNS
It was a well-seasoned parson who once remarked that he made it a point never to speak in public without taking a text. It mattered not whether it was an after-dinner speech, a Fourth of July oration or a sermon, he always took a text, that he might be sure, as he said, to “give the people something worth remembering.”
In imitation of his pious example I will take a text. You will find my text in the book of Numbers, the first chapter and the second verse. It reads like this—“Two and two make four.” That particular statement does not happen to be in the Bible, but it is as true as anything which is found there, and it will serve as a basis for what I wish to say regarding the law of returns.
Two and two make four. Never by any sort of bad luck or ill chance only three and a half; never by any amount of pulling or stretching or coaxing four and a half, but always and everywhere just four and no more! It is a definite, absolute statement of fact. It always has been so and it always will be so. No one can imagine a world where two and two will not make four.
If a man deposits two dollars in the bank today and two tomorrow, he can draw out four the third day. In forty years from that time he can still draw out exactly four dollars and whatever interest upon his original deposit the bank may allow. Life is like that. With what measure we mete, it is measured back to us again. We get out of life what we put in, by a law as definite and as unyielding as the statement about two and two. There are no Santa Clauses lurking in the shadow—each individual takes out of the big stocking what has been previously put in, not by magic, but by solid and verifiable effort.