to establish habits of promptness, accuracy, and thoroughness. Nothing whatever can take the place of these things, or make up for their absence. The essential thing in a college course will have been missed if the student fail to knit into the mental and moral fibre of his life something of the method, the endurance, and the resourcefulness that the army, the navy, the railroad systems, and the great business corporations demand of their men. In the world men have to bear their tests in the open. In the emergencies of life no allowances are made; we must make a passing grade unaided and on the spot. Dean West of Princeton exhorts college faculties that they "will need to be resolute in teaching young men that there is no real education without welldirected effort; that it is not doing what a man likes or dislikes to do, but the constant exercise in doing what he ought to do, in matters of intellect as well as of conduct, whether he happens to like it or not, that turns the frank, careless, immature, lovable school-boy into the strong, welltrained man, capable of directing wisely himself and others."

IV

FRESHMAN DIFFICULTIES AND DANGERS

It is a hard strain that the Freshman must bear during the first few weeks of the college year; yet this is the crucial time in his career. There are those who are unfit for college life, either because of stupidity, or indifference, or bad character. Such ought never to have come to college. The weeding out of such students is a process painful to all concerned. Through no fault of his own, a student may have come with poor preparation. He may be handi

capped because he has to make his own way; or, possibly, he comes too confident of his ability or too dependent upon the social prestige that is back of him. He has broken home ties; he is in new and strange surroundings; he is for the first time in his life free to come and go as he pleases

master of his own purse, released from the supervision of either parent or teacher. All this gives him a sense of pride and elation; but he runs serious dangers. For this is just the period of life when one is almost as much a stranger to one's self as to one's surroundings. The transition from boyhood to manhood involves tremendous changes, both mental and physical. One is no longer quite a boy, yet he is not altogether a man. There is, therefore, more or less confusion within, more or less lack of coördination, and, possibly, a not altogether happy blending of diffidence and self-assertiveness. The youth is not entirely sure of himself; yet, for the world, he would not have anybody suspect it. It is a time, too, when the senses make the most urgent demands for present gratification, and when curiosity most strongly impels him to see and to know the world to touch, to taste, and to handle. And, as likely as not, he has imbibed the foolish and terrible doctrine that in order to know the world he must wallow in it. So a boy's curiosity, his appetite, and his immature conception of what it means to be a man seduce him into follies that neither time nor eternity can undo.

Is it any wonder that friendly instructors are anxious about their Freshmen? They well know the difficulties and dangers that a Freshman must face as soon as he enters college. We have known scores of youth who, just at this juncture, have chosen to tread the "primrose path of dalliance." Some professors are hard-hearted enough to stand

coldly aside and "let Freshie try out." "College," they say, "is a place for mistakes. Some will sink and some will swim. It is a case of the survival of the fittest, and let the devil take the hindmost." It is not to be denied that, in the last resort, every fellow must look out for himself and take what comes. Every student is given his liberty; and it is right that it should be so. The wisest educators believe that liberty is essential to sound and full development. But do not think "that to be a man is to test the things that any gentleman avoids." You have liberty to fall as well as to rise. You are free to choose the bad as well as the good. It stands within your choice to bind golden laurels of scholarship upon your brow, or to go straight to the devil. Bismarck is credited with saying that in the German universities "one-third of the students work themselves to death, one-third drink themselves to death, and the other third govern Europe."

V

DEVOTION TO BOYHOOD IDEALS

Men of the world are always sorry when they see a young fellow under the stress of temptation, afraid to stand up for his ideals. The ideals that we held in our boyhood are the best that we shall ever have in this world. They are worth fighting for, and the truest and bravest men in this world are the men who have carried the visions of their boyhood and their youth unsullied through the fierce battle-field of young manhood and middle life; or have stood ready gladly to die for them on some storm-swept summit at noon or evening-tide. Of course, a Freshman's horizon will expand, and he will come to see things in different perspective, and

no doubt many of his ideas are crude, and his ways provincial. There is bound to come enlargement and enlightenment and readjustment. That is exactly what the college life is for. He will, of course, not be a clam or a prig. He will, as a matter of course, usually go with the crowd, for the college crowd is usually going in the right direction. It is thus that he will lose his egotism, selfishness, and self-consciousness, and it is thus that he will get the rough edges knocked off his personality, and the wrinkles ironed out of his provincial training. So he should by all means go in heartily with his fellows whenever he can do so without sacrifice of moral principle and manhood. But let him not be afraid to assert himself when honor is at stake, or an ideal is involved. There is a vital quality of religion that no man is above; and very low, indeed, is the man in whom the religious consciousness is dead. Hold stoutly to vital religion. The views of a college man with respect to nonessentials of theology and outward forms and habits of worship are likely to undergo a great change; but it will grow constantly plainer to him that the soul can find no substitute for religion. And most likely, as the years pass in college he will discover that, while his religious life has grown less dogmatic, less assertive, and more reticent, it has at the same time grown deeper and more assured, more tolerant, and natural, and helpful. Every student will need what aid he can get from the Sabbath, from the enlightened religious services that a college town always enjoys, from the meetings of the Christian Associations of the college, from companionship and conversation with earnest and devout men among the upper classes and the faculty, and from the reading of religious books — as, for example, the poetry of Whittier and Tennyson, the sermons

of Robertson, Beecher, and Phillips Brooks, and the essays of Drummond, Robert Speer, Dr. Grenfell, Washington Gladden, President Hyde of Bowdoin, and President King of Oberlin. These are only a few of the many sane, manly, and modern religious writings that are available in every college library.

VI

THE GOOD DRUDGE HABIT

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The habits that a Freshman forms are likely to go with him all through life to help him or to hinder him. Already he is an organized bundle of habits, for better or for worse; and in many respects he will never change his ways. But he may readily do so; for he is at an age when habits are extremely easy to take on or to lay off. His sense-impressions are so vivid and his nerve-tissue so plastic that he can remake himself into what he will, as easily as a workman can mold putty into this shape or that. Most of his personal habits are fixed and will never be reshaped. If he gives scrupulous attention to the care of his person now matters of the toilet and affairs of dress—he will be tidy and orderly and cleanly when he is threescore and ten. If he is indifferent to these things now, he will be still more indifferent to them when he grows old. And so with table and drawing-room manners, with habits of articulation, pronunciation, spelling, and handwriting; the youth who has been correctly trained in all these things may let his will go on a vacation or set it to work at some higher employment, for the good drudge Habit will demand no holiday, but will stay right by his task. It is not too late for the college student to remedy any defects of dress or behavior that he