BUSINESS MANAGERS
| CHARLES EVANDER SCHLEY | HORACE JEREMIAH VOORHIS |
Leader
Here at Yale we are inclined to take things rather too much for granted. We talk glibly of our traditions as something everlasting, and forget that most of them originated in the vague limbo of eighteen-ninety. We unconsciously consider the College of to-day to be the same as our fathers knew, and so it is astonishing to find in the musty pages of an old Lit. an account of “the more splendid entrances of Durfee, a building which is certainly ornamental and whose rooms are spacious and elegant”.
For, in general, we have accepted our surroundings as a permanent matter of fact, and have not stopped to analyze just why they are as they are. Most of us hardly know the reason for our being here at all. In our four years we are continually passing through a series of changes—παντα ρει—everything is in a state of flux. Our ideas and ideals, our opinions and our minds are ever changing, developing, broadening. The Senior is the Freshman only in that he is the unifying body in which during the four-year span these many shifting thoughts have been welded together, and the instant has in truth been made eternity. For the Freshman is too engrossed with the business of becoming acclimatized, heeling some publication or other activity, and making friends to have much time for anything else. Towards the close of the spring term he looks forward to Sophomore year with a certain relish. Then is when he will do all that reading and extra study, that plain living and high thinking, which he has planned. But, curiously enough, Sophomore year brings with it new and unforeseen petty distractions which devour the time at an incredible rate, and leave no more room for contemplation than the year previous.
And so with the last half of the cycle: the two final years swing by confusedly and bring us to the precipice of graduation, a charm or two on our watch chain, a smattering of knowledge which we may or may not find comforting, nothing more.
Our development has been somewhat of a hand to mouth affair. We have learned certain unrelated facts about this and that, and have sketchily attempted to piece them together. But ordinarily they have not fitted, because we have not devoted enough sheer intellectual effort to the analysis of our own ideas. We have not the slightest conception of what we believe. We may have learned to think with reasonable clarity, and our ideals may be rather high, but we have built up no scheme of life, nothing by which to live. Any philosophy or creed which we may possess is, at best, vague, inchoate, and fragmentary.
This, as I have said, is because we have never searched our souls with the cold, relentless light of reason in an attempt to understand every fiber of our make-up, we have taken things for granted, we have known only our exteriors, we have not known ourselves.
And living thus almost entirely on the surface, we have inevitably grown to think of a philosophy of life as hardly an essential. “What need have I for all this truck about religion?”, we ask frankly, for we have not yet been brought face to face with the Truth that in order to realize our highest possibilities we must be utterly dominated by an ideal. We wish to move the world, but we have not yet been impressed with the necessity of having a place to stand. We have not been convinced that we must believe in something.
The whole question has seemed to be something ethereal, something far removed from our own natural lives. Consequently we have been inclined to think of religion as little else but repression and that its followers knew nothing either of happiness or of life. They seemed to belong to a world apart—to a world that was drab and unreal.