In behalf of the University of Cincinnati, I bid you welcome. I
confess that I can agree with the statement made in your declaration
of the nature and purpose of the Menorah Societies, that modern
civilization is chiefly a product of three ancient cultures, or to be
more exact, I should prefer to say two, since the Roman is but a
continuation of the Greek, and we cannot understand ourselves without
understanding and having direct reference to the character and work of
both the Greek and the Hebrew minds.
Two principal elements have entered into the spiritual life of the
modern world. The past and the present are one and inseparable, and
you cannot destroy the former without doing positive damage to the
latter. The roots of our civilization lie in the soil of antiquity,
and you cannot destroy and disentangle the fibers of the growing tree
of civilization from the far-off centuries that are gone, without
injuring the whole organism. "If we were to wipe out all the records
of the past, what a series of inexplicable riddles would our own
history present, and if we were to blot out entirely every reference
to ancient writers, or were to blow away all the perfume that has been
shaken down from the vestments of those writers, how blurred and how
scentless would the fairest and most fragrant pages of our own great
poets and historians appear!"
What we need to-day, what our country needs more than anything else,
is thorough, really liberally educated men, and not merely men who are
supposed by the general public to be educated, simply because they
have passed through a college, because in some quarters the business
of education has, alas, fallen into the hands of men who are not
themselves liberally educated; and so as an ardent advocate of the
humanities, with hope that the Intercollegiate Menorah Association
will contribute to the laying of greater stress upon the value of the
study of the humanities in our college curriculum, I bid you
God-speed, and again extend to you the cordial greetings of the
University of Cincinnati.