V.

THE AMERICAN COLLEGE AS A MORAL

FORCE.

BY REV. B. L. WHITMAN, D. d., President OF COLBY UNIVERSITY.

One of the questions that press ever anew for answer is that concerning the effect of college training upon life. Undoubted increase of power comes from such training, but is it not won at too great cost? And even when specific elements of power are satisfactorily determined is there not danger to the life as a whole? In what attitude toward truth and duty does it leave the soul?

We shall find help toward an answer if we consider:

I. Some misconceptions and false ideas of college work.

It would be wonderful if college conditions were always rightly understood either by workers or onlookers. As a matter of fact they are with surprising frequency misunderstood by both workers and onlookers. Misconceptions and false ideas abound. We may note a few:

1. A supposed lack of safeguards in college.

What

In many homes the process of entering college stands for initiation into a set of mysteries. ungodly rites must be performed can only be guessed.

Tugs at paternal and maternal heart-strings make tragedy. Visions of body, soul, and spirit rent in conflict and possibly undone make the hours of parting and Godspeed an hour also of bitterness and

tears.

It is the unknown that terrifies. A little first-hand experience dispels these illusions. The other members of the college to which the young man goes are, or were once, very much the same kind of young men from very much the same kind of home as this young man from this home. Neither one year nor four years can transform the average youth into a beast of prey. The college is no menagerie. The world, the flesh, and the devil appeal to the man in college very much as they do to the man out of college. It is the unusual that is emphasized. Injury and delinquency are not the order of college life. Ninety-nine students do their work and not a word is said about it. One fails, and all the world must know it. Men practice sports a thousand hours and that is the in the thousand and first hour, some luckless wight falls over himself and breaks his nose, and a special dispatch must be sent to the Daily Newsgatherer. There is danger in college work and college play as there is danger in all work and play. But there are safeguards in college life as there are not in most conditions of life away from college. Competent oversight reduces danger to a minimum. Provision is made for the physical, the intellectual, and the spiritual life. When a body comes out of college worse than it went in-length and breadth and depth of physical being included-there is always a reason for it

end of it. But

in the body itself. Mental disease is as uncommon to students as it is abnormal. Cases of breakdown from genuine overwork are very rare. For every such case in college, in any community fairly comparable two corresponding cases will be found of mental wreck wrought by excessive effort in interpreting Shakespeare or misinterpreting Browning. The spiritual strain of college is greatly overestimated. Men go to the bad in college every year. But what village does not have its record of spiritual failure? The man of passion or ambition runs risk anywhere. The conditions of his undoing lie within himself. He, himself, is his own peril. But he will find help in college if he can find it anywhere. Every college has its associations for religious work and fellowships that aim directly at spiritual uplift.

Mere safeguards cannot save. The man who is ordained by his own helplessness or heedlessness or vice to destruction, will find all roads leading him astray and all objects instruments of evil. Books and teachers and companions only help him to destroy himself. But for a right heart and an honest hope, no course is wiser than that of the student and no life safer than that within college walls.

2. A notion of attainment at little cost.

No illusion is more common than that something

can be got for nothing.

fined to places of trade.

Bargain counters are not con

The world over, men think

it gain when they can beat down the price. This illusion blinds many in regard to college. The mere rubbing of heads against library shelves is supposed to give wisdom. A diploma guarantees everything short

of infallibility. The magic of college annihilates the difference between one year and wonderful attraction in a short cut.

many. There is

A year or two in

preparatory school, a year or two in college, six weeks in a summer institute of medicine, theology, or law, and with a laugh at the old-fogyism that would spend ten years in place of three, the callow product announces himself ready to heal all ills of soul or body. Once in a while one such finds his way to the world's need. For the most part, however, they find after a little that much as the world enjoys being tricked and played upon, we are still in a dispensation of equivalents and that two and two do not make five. The pressure may be shifted, but somebody has to pay the price. If a quack makes a good living it is because ninety-nine honest men have made medicine a science instead of a guess, law a system of justice instead of jobbery, theology a holy calling instead of a means of gain. They carry their own burden and his as well. The price is paid.

The principle applies emphatically to college. Education is not gained through physical contact. It is a matter of growth through effort, of inspiration through fellowship, of power through enlarged vision and hope. Two years are better than one; and three are better than two; but neither two years nor three can take the place of four. There is no short cut to wisdom any more than there is to holiness.

3. A wrong conception of liberty.

Too much by himself and by others the student has been regarded as standing apart from the duties which other members of the community must accept. Len

iency of judgment waits upon performance and nonperformance, as if life within college walls were exempt from the obligations which bind other men. Students not infrequently impose inconvenience, if not downright injury, upon one another in the name of college spirit. Class and society relations are regarded as justifying conduct to the last degree invasive of personal rights. Exhibitions of puerility are lightly condoned as simple loyalty to tradition.

This idea of college liberty is a gravely mistaken ideal. The world over, liberty lightly runs into license. College life has not been free from this tendency. This is not strange. Neither is it creditable. In college, if anywhere, we have a right to look for keen sense of justice, large conception of law, ready appreciation of the courtesies of life. The main influences of college are toward them.

4. The development of the book-worm.

The misconception that makes college a training place for athletes differently applied makes the intellectual parasite. There is something beautiful in devotion to books. It suggests literary taste, capacity for intellectual fellowship, life above the physical plane. This is well. But there are species of the order ptinidae which show devotion to books. They go to great length in their devotion. They live and move and have their being in books. They devour all. We do not love the genus ptinidae. It finds the book merely a means to personal gratification. This is not well. Significantly enough from the nature of the genus ptinidae we draw a description of the larger devourers of books. We call them, too, bookworms.