in the teachings of our university. Naturally we cannot expect our students generally to attain to the high offices of public trust in our country, but we do expect every man who bears the Princeton mark and who is true to the Princeton traditions to serve his day and generation with fidelity and to bear upon his soul the burden of humanity.

This institution was not founded in the spirit of civil liberty alone, but in the spirit of religious liberty as well; in that Christian faith and hope which is our most treasured tradition. Our fathers learned the lesson of the Great Teacher that the law of life is a law of liberty - a liberty which finds expression, however, in a law of service and a law of sacrifice. Our hope and our prayer is that their sons who bear their names and who are of their breed and blood may keep faith with the past while moving forward to possess the new lands of promise and of plenty.

NEW WINE AND OLD BOTTLES1

BY WILBUR W. THOBURN

WHAT is our greatest danger? Perhaps it is the danger of failing to live true. I do not mean hypocrisy that is acting a lie but the failure to put into action what we are. Here is a common saying, "This is my ideal; I confess I do not live up to it." And this often means, "I do not try." If I were talking to students of zoology I would say that the presence of any power or organ means that it is being used; its disappearance means that it is being neglected. All the symmetrical forms and all the grotesque and one-sided forms are the products of this law. And we are under this law. Its action is rapid in the immaterial world. The removal of undesirable things, and the making permanent of good things, are never to be regretted; but by failing to live our ideals we lose the best part of ourselves.

We hear much in this place about the dangers that threaten the young in the university. Parents and friends anxiously watch the changes that come, and fear the end. College life means metamorphosis, and each stage is fraught with danger. Those who anxiously watch the process wonder how it is possible to get an image of a man from the grotesque forms that sometimes masquerade as youth. Of course, the man comes, in most cases. College life is not a failure,

1Originally delivered to the students of Leland Stanford Junior University, and reproduced here by special permission of Mrs. Harriet W. Thoburn.

though it is far from the success it might be. The intellectual and spiritual birth-rate exceeds the death-rate. Few fail utterly; few succeed in any great degree; but the balance is on the side of success.

When a young man enters college most of his standards are external. Few of those who come here have lived long enough to accumulate much experience. The training of early years gives a trend which none of us are strong enough to overcome completely, even when we recognize its desirability. Our opinions, our beliefs, our bias in social and political and intellectual questions, are derived from our parents far more completely than our forms and features. It is perhaps the knowledge of this fact that adds to the solicitude of parents when they send their children away from home. They know what the student does not find out until later - - that this training has never been tested by the one whom it most concerns, that the standards are external, and that opinions are not yet convictions.

Now, it is here, during this period of intellectual living, that the change comes in our attitude toward our standards of living. Heretofore we have lived as others directed or influenced. We are here to acquire the power of directing ourselves. Impulse and feeling and emotion must here acquire some rational basis. Up to this time they have been the spontaneous fruits of our living. Heretofore we have acted because we felt like it; now we must know why

we act.

This analytical process destroys much of our power of doing. By the time we have studied our steam to find what it is, it has become cold water. By the time we have thought much about the emotional and impulsive religious life which we have led, the emotion is all gone, or it may be that it is

displaced by another. Cold water that has once been steam is insipid and somewhat disgusting. And so a religious life that has cooled down from emotionalism into rationalism often gives its owner a feeling akin to nausea. Some of the hardest words I have ever heard spoken against religion have come from those who at one time were enthusiastically religious. Some new wine has been poured into old bottles and turned sour.

Our beliefs grow up with us. They are not entirely, not even largely, a matter of the intellect. They are part of our breeding and of our living. Many of our reasons for things are inherited from our parents. We do not always understand how they are constructed. Like a child who has received a watch, we play with it and break it, but cannot mend it. Many people think children ought not to play with watches. They are for older people. In the same way

many people think that children should not play with reason, or meddle with the carefully constructed thought-systems of their fathers. They want them to take these systems, use them, call them their own, but dread the analyzing spirit that may try to find how the thing is made, and so spoil it. Many fathers and mothers say to me, "If my boy will only hold on to the fundamentals." They are afraid that the business of the university is to overthrow fundamentals. As if fundamentals could be overthrown! What they mean by fundamentals is their own conception of the truth, the basis of their own belief. They want their boys to wear their clothes not the same style only, but the identical clothes with all the creases and wrinkles and patches in place. Now, the wrinkles and creases represent experience and testing, and the patches are the scars - honorable scars of victory. And I have no patience with the sopho

moric spirit which vaunts its reason and throws into the rag-bag everything that the fathers believed. We would not be here today if our fathers had not believed very close to the truth. However far afield we may go in our young and callow days, the larger part of us will be found revamping the old beliefs of our fathers and mothers when we go to work in the world. I have taught long enough to know that this is true. But the time comes when the child becomes the man, when he must know how his watch is made, even if it costs him several watches. The time comes when he finds himself asking, "Why do I believe this? Why do I practice this?" And because he cannot at once find a reason that will satisfy, many of the things he has believed all his life in common with his father will be laid on the shelf until the experiences of life lay a foundation for them again. Then they will be taken down. He will cease to do many of the things he has customarily done, because he finds that they are not the natural fruit of his life. It seems like hypocrisy to do them, even for the sake of father and mother. I have letters and figures from some hundreds of students that show me that eighty-five per cent of them take up their old practices again when their real living seeks expression. But there is nothing unnatural or very alarming to me in the suspension of religious activity, which is common among young men and women at the university. It is one of the penalties we pay for our isolation. Student life is not real life. It is a dangerous period; — all climacteric periods are dangerous. But they seem to be part of the plan of God's world. This suspension is only temporary. It is largely due to the confusion of change and readjustment; to the transfer of allegiance from authority to self. The change rarely comes without confusion, but it must come,