_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
THE MAIN POINTS
THE STRANGE WAYS OF GOD
THE SOCIAL MESSAGE OF THE MODERN PULPIT
THE YOUNG MAN’S AFFAIRS
FAITH AND HEALTH
THE GOSPEL OF GOOD HEALTH
THE
CAP AND GOWN
BY
CHARLES REYNOLDS BROWN
[Illustration: Decorative Image]
THE PILGRIM PRESS
NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO
COPYRIGHT, 1910
BY LUTHER H. CARY
THE · PLIMPTON · PRESS
[W · D · O]
NORWOOD · MASS · U · S · A
PREFACE
The larger part of the material in this book was originally used in a
number of addresses given in various colleges and universities reaching
from Yale and Cornell in the East to Stanford and the University of
California in the West. It is here offered to a wider circle in the
hope that these chapters may prove suggestive to college students and
to those who are interested in having them make the best use of the
bewildering array of opportunities awaiting them on the modern campus.
It was one of the shrewdest and kindliest observers of student life,
himself a long-time resident of Cambridge and a genial friend of
Harvard men, who said: “It is a never-failing delight to behold every
autumn the hundreds of newcomers who then throng our streets, boys with
smooth, unworn faces, full of the zest of their own being, taking
the whole world as having been made for them, as indeed it was. Their
visible self-confidence is well founded and has the facts on its side.
The future is theirs to command, not ours; it belongs to them even more
than they think it does, and this is undoubtedly saying a good deal.”
It is this joyous and confident company arrayed or about to be arrayed
in “cap and gown” which the writer of these chapters would fain
address. The academic costume and accent may speedily be replaced by
the less picturesque garb and tone of the work-a-day world, but the
advantage of special training, of accurate knowledge and of the larger
outlook upon life attainable in any well-equipped university will give
to the fortunate possessors of all this a significance for the life of
the nation far beyond that belonging to an equal number of similarly
endowed but untrained men.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. THE FIRST INNING 3
II. ATHLETICS 23
III. THE FRATERNITY QUESTION 41
IV. THE RELIGION OF A COLLEGE MAN 59
V. THE CHOICE OF A LIFE-WORK 75
VI. MORAL VENTURES 93
VII. THE LAW OF RETURNS 107
VIII. THE HIGHEST FORM OF REWARD 127
IX. THE USE OF THE INCOMPLETE 145
X. FIGHTING THE STARS 169
XI. THE POWER OF VISION 183
XII. THE WAR AGAINST WAR 201
I
THE FIRST INNING
The significance of the first year in college can scarcely
be overstated. The first man called to the bat in some great
intercollegiate game may be pardoned for feeling a bit nervous. He
realizes that players and spectators are eagerly waiting for him to
give them the key-note of the contest by the way he acquits himself.
The young man just entering college, if he senses the situation
accurately, is equally alive to the importance of his first hits.
It is a time when freedom and responsibility come in new and larger
measure. College men as a rule are away from home. There is no one to
ask, with the accent of authority, how they spend their evenings, who
their intimates are, what habits they are forming. Studying is not done
under the immediate eye of an instructor as in the grammar-school
days. The young man who heretofore has felt the wholesome restraint
of well-ordered family life, suddenly finds himself a free citizen
in a republic, and this larger measure of liberty involves risk.
The freshman may decide the case against himself before he is ever
permitted to put on his sophomore hat. The way is open for him to go
to the devil, physically, intellectually, socially, morally, if he
chooses. The way is open, the bars are down and as often as not some
young fool is just starting and beckoning his friends to “Come along.”
The bad plays in the first inning are frequently so numerous and so
serious as to mean the loss of the game. It is a time then to summon
into action all the wisdom and conscience which may be brought to bear
upon those early decisions.
There is one choice not strictly of the first year, but so intimately
connected with it that I speak of it here--the decision as to whether
or not one shall go to college. “It will take four of the best years of
my life,” the young man says. “While I am reading books and attending
lectures, playing football, and practising the college yell, other
young men will be learning the ways of the business world; they will be
actually laying the foundations for prosperous careers. Can I afford
the time?” Furthermore, does it justify the expense? On an average it
costs each student somewhere from five hundred to a thousand dollars a
year in all first-class colleges, though the state universities in the
West cut down that figure by remitting tuition fees, and many splendid
young men take the course on much less. Is it worth what it costs?
Every young man who can compass it by any reasonable outlay of energy
and sacrifice had better go to college and stay there until graduation
day. There is a deal of education to be gained outside of books or
college halls. The business life of a great city is a university in
itself with its lectures and recitations, its examinations and other
requirements. Its courses of instruction have a value all their own and
its exacting demands flunk more men ten to one than either Harvard or
Yale, Stanford or California. In this “university of experience” the
college colors are “black and blue,” for the lessons are learned by
hard knocks. But the man who knows his full share of what is in the
books will show himself more competent in finding his way about in that
larger school of experience. “Systematic training counts everywhere,
from a prize fight up to being a bishop or a bank president.”
It is true that many men have won high place in the world’s life
without college training, Benjamin Franklin, Horace Greeley, Abraham
Lincoln, and all the rest,--we know the list by heart. But it did not
please the Lord to make Lincolns and Franklins when he made most of
us. A little extra schooling which those men might get on without, in
our case will not come amiss. Furthermore, those very men with all
their unusual ability did not have to compete with college men to
the extent that you will be compelled to do. College men in ordinary
life were scarce then; now there are three under every log. In law
and medicine, in teaching and the ministry, in the administration of
large business enterprises and in the world of political life, you will
have to meet and try conclusions with men who have received the best
the universities can give. It will be to your interest, therefore,
to add to the stock of ability which the Creator has given you all
the training that high school, college, and university can yield. To
neglect carelessly or decline wilfully such opportunities when they are
offered, becomes a wrong committed against yourself, against all who
are interested in your growth, and against society which is entitled to
the most competent service you can render.
When you have actually set foot upon the campus there comes the choice
of courses. The modern drift toward unlimited electives, especially in
the first two years, is open to serious criticism. The tendency is to
allow each student to study only what he likes, consulting merely his
own interest and preference. Even where young people have reached the
mature age of nineteen or twenty, and are regularly entered freshmen or
sophomores, it is just possible that more wisdom can be found somewhere
as to what is best for their intellectual growth and training, than
is discoverable in their own individual preferences. There is a
disposition on their part to select courses of two kinds, those in
which they are already strong or those which are supposed to be “snaps.”
Moving along the line of least resistance is not the royal road to
anything worth while. Insight, grasp, and self-mastery come rather by
doing hard jobs. Rolling down hill on green grass does not develop
robust, enduring, effective manhood as does climbing Shasta or Whitney
over loose rock and rugged snow-fields. There is no such thing as
“painless education” in the market.
In the judgment of many there is peril in the fact that at one end of
our educational system we have the kindergarten, bowing with almost
idolatrous reverence before the untaught inclinations of the child in
its effort to make the work of education as enjoyable as a game, and
at the other end the university with its wide-open elective system
tending to breed distaste for hard courses or for studies in which the
young people do not already feel a warm interest. We shall not rear
up sturdy character by too much humoring of individual taste, which
is often abnormal in intellectual as in other directions. Mr. Dooley
indicates a weakness in the present method where he says: “To-day the
college president takes the young man into a Turkish room and gives
him a cigarette, and says, ‘Now, my dear boy, what special branch of
larnin’ would ye like to have studied for ye, by one of our compitint
professors?’”
In the selection of courses it is unwise to ignore completely certain
fields because you feel you are weak on that side--you may need
rounding out. The man who sits in the seat of the scornful, displaying
a contemptuous indifference toward fields which lie aside from his
personal preference, may live to find that narrow seat as uncomfortable
as a sharp stick. It is well not to specialize too soon, or too
rigidly. We are compelled to specialize at last in order to forge
ahead, but it is more important to be a man, round, full, rich in
contents, than to be an expert lawyer, physician, or mining engineer.
The early and rigid specialization, sometimes extending even down into
the high school, tends to sacrifice the man to the profession.
There are certain fundamental interests which cannot be left out of
the consideration of any educated man or woman. Take these five
main fields: every student should know something of language, the
instrument of communication. He should for the purposes of comparison
and enlargement know something of two or three languages. His knowledge
should extend beyond the mere ability to read and write and spell--it
ought to include some acquaintance with the best literature of each
language, the widest acquaintance naturally with the best that has been
thought and said in his own tongue.
He should know something of history. There is too much of it for any
one man to master it all, but he should have some genuine understanding
of the chief sources of history, and of the main courses and movements
of thought and life in the world. He should enlarge his own brief and
local experience by some participation in age-long, national, and
international experience.
He should know something of science. The general method of science is
the same, whether observed in chemistry, zoology, botany, or elsewhere.
One may never be a specialist in any single science, yet he may know
the scientific habit of mind and appreciate the fundamental positions
of science sufficiently to make him a more effective worker in his own
chosen field, which may, indeed, lie quite over the divide from any
directly scientific pursuit.
He should know something of the organized life of men through the study
of sociology, economics, and civics. He should have some understanding
of institutional life in its various industrial, political, and
ecclesiastical expressions.
He should feel in some measure the power of that group of studies which
have to do with mental and moral processes considered apart from the
world of outward phenomena, psychology, ethics, philosophy, religion.
He needs to relate his individual activity to the larger life of the
whole by some genuine grasp of fundamentals in his thinking.
No single student can be at his best in all these or can even make any
two of them his major interest, but a certain elementary knowledge of
all these fields, thorough as far as it goes, is a better foundation
for a genuine education than the most elaborate training in any one
specialty.
When one builds a pyramid it must come to a point somewhere. It can
only be built, with the conditions as we find them, at a certain angle,
for material will not lie on a slope too steep. How high it may be,
therefore, when the apex is reached will depend upon the breadth of the
base. In your education, you are building character and personality,
which is much more important than any special ability for money-making,
and the apex of that personality will be high in proportion as you
avoid the narrow base which results from too much specializing in
the earlier years. Let the foundation which precedes your special or
professional training be as broad as it lies within your power to make
it.
If you specialize rigidly in the early years, you may a little later
change your purpose in life and find yourself handicapped by the former
narrow outlook. The college is a place where many a fellow finds
himself for the first time, and the fellow he finds is oftentimes
another and perhaps a better man than the one he had planned for in the
earlier years. He may take his college course expecting to be a lawyer,
but that spiritual impulse, which lands many a man in the ministry,
may be at work beneath the surface, none the less potent for being
one of those unseen things which are eternal. If in his college days
he entirely ignores Greek or turns his back on philosophy and ethics
as having little practical worth, he will find himself at a great
disadvantage if he finally faces about toward the pulpit. As Cromwell
said to the theologians who were so cock-sure in their opinions,
“Beloved brethren, I beseech you by the mercies of God believe it
possible that you may be mistaken.” You may be mistaken as to the work
you will do in life. It is unwise therefore to discount that possible
future by narrowing down too soon to some specialty which may prove to
be off the turnpike when you make final selection of your life-work.
The selection of habits in a modern university is left almost entirely
to the judgment of the individual student. The college rules grow
fewer year by year. Personal supervision becomes impossible where the
enrolment reaches into the thousands. Parents are sometimes unaware of
the measure of liberty accorded. College presidents entertain each
other with experiences which come to them in the way of letters from
anxious mammas. One president tells us of a letter received from a fond
mother whose son had just entered--“I shall expect you to send me a
long letter each week telling me how my darling boy is doing.” Another
reports a letter from a father--“Please send me each week a full report
of my son’s absences, of his failures in recitation, and your own
impression as to the progress he is making.” The very humor of these
suggestions indicates to what measure the freedom of the student has
been extended. It would be somewhat difficult for President Lowell or
President Hadley, for President Jordan or President Wheeler to see to
it that the boys and girls eat the proper amounts of wholesome food and
put on their rubbers when it rains.
University life is not a personally conducted tour with the trains
and hotels, the points of interest and suggestions as to clothing,
all printed in the schedule. It is a case of going abroad upon the
continent of learning, relying upon your own letter of credit to draw
supplies from the banks of opportunity open to you, with the necessity
upon you of learning to speak the language and order your trip for
yourself in a way to gain the utmost possible good. The sheltered life
policy, suitable for little boys, must come to an end some time and
the young man be compelled to face the good or bad results of his own
choices. The beginning of the college course is no doubt an appropriate
time to inaugurate this new régime.
You will enter college without any definite college habits. This will
be at once an advantage and a peril. Habits are sometimes heavy,
troublesome chains; they are sometimes the best friends in sight. In
driving over a mountain road on a dark night when one cannot see even
his team, the deep ruts are a comfort and a safeguard--as the driver
hears the wagon chuckling along in the ruts he knows that he is not
on the point of going over the grade. Certain useful habits, which
come from doing certain things in certain ways over and over again,
are beneficial in that they take sufficient care of those lines of
action and leave the man’s will and attention free to deal with other
problems.
The habits you select and exhibit during the first year will
almost inevitably determine your standing with the faculty and
with the students. When you enter you are what cattlemen call a
“maverick”--there is no brand on you. Your associates will wait to
see where you belong. By your own choices you will brand yourself as
studious or trifling, as thorough or a dabbler, as honest or a cheat,
as clean and sound in your moral life or as shady. The habits of the
first year will brand you and in the award of college honors at the
hands of the faculty or of the students, and in the operation of
university influences upon your career after you graduate, the brand
you wear will be well-nigh determinative. Look at it carefully, then,
before you apply it to yourself, for its mark will stay.
You cannot afford to shilly-shally. The man who spends his time in high
school or college mainly for his own amusement is a sham and a sneak.
He is there at considerable cost to somebody--parents, tax-payers,
professors who are doing educational work out of love for it when they
might be doing something much more remunerative--and when he merely
puts up a bluff at studying he stamps himself as a sneak.
The men who undertake to get through their examinations by a kind of
death-bed repentance become cheap men. In the moral world a man is
judged not by the few holy emotions he can scramble together in the
last fifteen minutes of earthly existence; he is judged by the whole
trend and drift of his life, by the deeds done in the body, by the
entire accumulation and net result of his living as deposited in the
character formed. This is sound theology in any branch of the Christian
Church and the principle involved is also sound in pedagogy. The real
test of the student’s work is not to be found in what he did last night
or in what he can show upon occasion as the result of a hasty cramming,
but in what he has been doing through all the days and nights preceding
the examination and in that net result which stands revealed in his
mental grasp and effectiveness. Whether he becomes a man who will
stand the hard tests the world puts upon every one who undertakes to
do important work, will depend largely upon the habits he forms in the
first year. He may take low ideals and live down to them; or he may
set high ideals and then direct his energy and shape the methods of his
life unceasingly to the hard task of living up to them.
There will also come the choice of intimates. You will have
acquaintances many--the more the better. You will have, I hope, a large
circle of friends and you will discover that college friendships are
the most lasting and perhaps the most rewarding of any you form. But of
lives so close as to give shape and color and odor to your life, there
will not be many; and for that reason the intimates are to be chosen
with the greater care.
You can know all sorts and conditions of men. You can be on good terms
with many whose prevailing attitudes toward life do not meet your wish.
You cannot afford to be on intimate terms with a man lacking in those
fundamental qualities of every-day rectitude which are legal tender the
world over. The man you admit to your heart and life as an intimate
ought to be “hall marked” as they say in England; he ought to have
the word “sterling” stamped upon him, indicating that in the great
melting-pot of human experience he will meet the test and show full
face value.
It will be good to have a few close friends who are not students. There
are townspeople whose main interest is in the larger life outside the
university whose friendship you need. There is some member of the
faculty whom you ought to know well. In many colleges every student has
a “personal adviser” in the faculty. It is a foolish mistake to look
upon the professors as your enemies or as being indifferent to you,
lacking in any genuine interest in your problems. They covet a closer
touch with their students than the young men in their mistaken reserve
are ready to accord them. The closer friendship of some one, wise,
mature, sympathetic man in the faculty will be an influence wholesome
and abiding, making always for your best development. The mere fact
that some weak man may undertake to “cultivate” a professor in the
spirit of the sycophant need not deter strong men from the enjoyment of
such friendships in straightforward, manly fashion.
Let me congratulate you that you are in college! It is a jolly thing
to be alive at all, these days, and to be alive and young and at
school--why, the whole world is yours! The world is yours potentially,
and wise, right decisions during that first year will aid mightily in
making a generous measure of it actually yours. You may, if you will,
score a good number of runs off your own batting by the way you play
the game in the first inning.
II
ATHLETICS
All the human beings we know anything about have the cheerful habit of
living in bodies; there is a physical basis underlying and conditioning
all earthly activity. Physical vitality, therefore, has a direct
bearing on possible achievement. A rousing stomach ready to take what
you give it and rejoice over it; lungs large, sound, and unspoiled by
inhaling what was never meant for them; heart action reliable because
never tampered with by drugs or hurtful indulgences; nerves prompt and
accurate as telegraph instruments, but ready to sleep when put to bed
because never abused; muscles which take up hard work and laugh over
it as those who find great spoil--all these are useful items in that
physical excellence to be gained and guarded as a priceless heritage.
In all intellectual work where men undertake to think, write, or
speak there is a demand for red blood, which is better ten times over
than the blue blood of any fancied aristocracy! And in moral life, if
you are to put down evil under your feet and be vigorously, joyously,
winsomely good, a sound physique for your moral nature to ride in all
weathers will be a perpetual advantage.
In making young men physically competent, high school and college
athletics, provided they are not tacked on from the outside as a frill
or held as a mere aside to which the students carelessly turn in hours
of leisure, may possess high value. They can be made a genuine, vital
expression of the life of the school and be related in some wise way to
the larger purpose of education. Rightly ordered they aid mightily in
keeping the tools sharp, in developing a full stock of vital force, in
giving the poise, self-mastery, endurance needed for the work of life.
The boy who learns to play with zest will be better able to do the work
of a man with his own full sense of joy in it.
David Starr Jordan has said many times that “the football field is a
more wholesome place for a young man than the ballroom,” and those who
know the facts endorse his claim. The young fellow gets hurt now and
then in football, but taking into consideration the part of him which
suffers and the after effects of it, we commonly find that the injury
is less damaging than are the hurts received in indoor, fashionable
dissipation. Athletics bring men out under God’s open sky, into the
fresh air, and under the stimulus of healthy rivalries. They train men
to see clearly, to hear accurately the first time, to decide quickly,
to move instantly, and to stand together in a genuinely social spirit.
These qualities have high place in the combination of talents which
makes for success; they have high place as well in the formation of
sound character.
But to tackle the subject more closely let me name several ways in
which athletics worthy of an educational institution are particularly
beneficial. They serve as an outlet for the surplus physical energy of
boys and young men. In simply walking to school, even though he carries
some girl’s books as well as his own, the healthy young man does not
consume in twenty-four hours all the physical energy he manufactures.
Throbbing within him there is an exuberant physical life, excitable
and not yet under firm control. There is the consciousness of new and
untried powers in regard to which he feels deep concern. There is the
push of impulse not fully regulated by conscience or experience. Unless
there is some wholesome outlet he will burst the levee, devastating
whole fields of his own nature and of other natures besides, by an
unwholesome use of that surplus physical energy.
Training for athletic events means early hours, clean habits, constant
occupation of mind and body, for in any college worthy of the name the
young man must be a student all the while, as well as a quarterback or
a pitcher. The training, therefore, becomes a mighty safeguard thrown
around a lot of young fellows who are face to face with the devil of
temptation. Even for those who do not make the team or the nine or
the track, if they are taking regular gymnasium work in hope of that
success next year, or if in other ways they have caught the spirit of
clean, honest, joyous sport, athletics give an added motive and a
stronger impulse toward clean living.
“Wild oats,” as they are lightly called, produce a sorry and a debasing
harvest. No man with sense enough to be allowed to run at large ever
looks himself in the face and takes satisfaction in the memory of such
sowing. The fellow who thinks he is not wise or experienced until he
has become familiar with the haunts of gamblers and harlots, until he
has the smut and smell of those associations upon him, is regarded by
saner men as green, oh, so green! He sometimes calls his escapades
“seeing life,” but it is not life he sees there; it is death--and a
foul, rotten, ill-smelling type of death. The trainer will not tolerate
it. The man himself would be regarded as a traitor to the university
if on the team he “broke training” for such indulgence. And the whole
spirit of wholesome athletics is such as to stamp that course as base
and mean. As an outlet for surplus energy then and as a safeguard
against certain forms of wrong-doing, wholesome athletics in college
life hold a place of honor.
They furnish also a means of joyous recreation. The mind bent and
strained all the time with serious employment loses its spring, if not
sometimes its sanity. The relaxation of honest fun, the excitement
of a sport where one measures his strength and skill against that of
others, the self-forgetfulness which comes with absorption in something
other than one’s work--all these are imperatively demanded for the
normal development of youth into maturity. We would all bring up in the
madhouse or the sanitarium, if we did not now and then have some such
diversion!
This demand for recreation, if no intelligent and wholesome forms
of expression are at hand, crops out in those college pranks which
sometimes border on lawlessness. The spontaneous fun of college life
is ever enjoyed and applauded. There was a Yale man once suspended for
this excusable caper. The students were required to attend service
on Sunday in the chapel where the preacher was sometimes dull and
tiresome. One particular offender against the youthful demand for
vitality and brevity used to divide his sermons into heads and subheads
almost endlessly, Roman 1, Arabic 1. One in brackets, a, b, c, etc.,
etc. This friend of mine arranged to have his class of one hundred and
sixty men sit together well up in front, and every time the preacher
passed from one head to another, they uncrossed their legs in unison
and crossed them over the other way. When the reverend doctor passed
from one in brackets to two, or from a to b, he saw one hundred and
sixty pairs of legs taken apart and recrossed simultaneously. When this
had been done six or eight times the people in the adjacent section
and in the galleries became more interested in watching this mighty
movement of legs than in the sermon, and the minister himself was so
disconcerted that he presently gave it up and closed the service with
the sermon unfinished. The dull preacher might better have put more
life into his sermon, thus affording some legitimate opportunity for
the exercise of interest on the part of his hearers.
Athletics bring wholesome recreation not only to those who play on the
eleven or the nine, or who appear on the track, but to that larger
company of fellows who strive for that honor; to a multitude whose
interest in exercise and outdoor sport is quickened though they
never aspire to ’varsity positions; to the thousands of spectators
who assemble to witness the game and cheer the winners. The physical
quickening, the mental relaxation, the temporary forgetfulness of
hard work, the joyous hours in the open air, are all good for the
whole company of people who thus, directly and indirectly, share in
the advantages of athletics. Keep the game free from the taint of
professionalism, free from betting, free from the disposition that
would win fairly if possible, but win at any cost, and we have a form
of recreation distinctly beneficial to the whole community!
The discipline of athletics develops obedience, self-control, and the
spirit of cooperation, all of them useful, moral qualities. Many a rich
man’s son, ambitious for college honors, has gotten his first taste
of real discipline on the athletic field. At home he had indulgent
parents--they were self-indulgent because of their wealth and they
scarcely knew how to be other than indulgent to their children. The boy
was waited upon by well-paid servants eager to do his bidding and humor
his whims. His generous tips greased the way for him when he traveled
or went in pursuit of pleasure. He had never felt the rough, raw edge
of an exacting discipline.
But when the trainer took him in hand this son of affluence was treated
as though he had been working his way through college by currying
some man’s horse or by waiting on the table at a boarding club. If he
played football he was knocked down as promptly and as hard, when he
got in the way of a bigger and better player, as if his father had
been a hod-carrier. And all this is exactly as it should be! Sometime,
somewhere, he should learn the democratic spirit by being compelled to
meet his fellow men without favor shown or advantage given; he should
learn how to take the hard knocks and keep sweet, not losing his head
or his temper. The boys say, “If a fellow plays football it does not
take long to find out what kind of a fellow he is.” The real quality of
the man comes out more readily and more genuinely perhaps than it would
in a college prayer-meeting. And the man himself finds out what kind of
a fellow he is, to his own lasting advantage.
Wellington used to say that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the
athletic fields of the English schools. He meant that when he found
himself standing up against Napoleon’s fiercest attacks, he had under
him a body of men who had not waited for their army experience to learn
discipline. Obedience, self-control, and the necessity of standing
together had all been learned long ago at Rugby and Eton and Harrow
until these qualities were bred in the bone! Now as mature men they
fought the great battle through to a finish just as they used to put
the pigskin across their opponent’s goal in the years gone by.
To gain this benefit in any worthy measure there must be a genuine
participation in the athletic life of the institution. Some students
imagine that they are greatly interested in athletics because they talk
about the various events, smoke countless cigarettes on the bleachers,
gossip endlessly in the fraternity house as to how the game was lost or
won, taking up the time of the players with their useless prattle. All
this, however, is as much like real interest in athletics as a bandbox
is like a granite block. The interest to be worthy of the name and to
insure any actual benefit must be a genuine interest.
There is something admirable in the attitude of those men who try
for the team or the nine, and having failed, show themselves glad to
play on the second eleven or nine. “Scrub teams” they are sometimes
ignominiously and erroneously called--their loyalty and devotion to the
institution is often such that they might be called “Sequoia teams.”
Their spirit of sacrifice is such that they are willing to stand out as
only second best and to be practised on by better men to the end that
those better men may gain still more honor and glory for themselves.
This spirit of loyalty and good will serves to exalt the part they take
into a genuine culture in character.
The spirit of cooperation is strengthened by college athletics. Men are
knit together by close ties when they participate in training or in the
game. They learn to rely upon each other. Conceit and selfish pride
are eliminated until the whole nature is in a fair way to be genuinely
socialized. The man learns that he cannot catch and pitch and play
left field all at once. He must fill his own place and act with other
men who are filling their places. He must take his color in the pattern
and join his yarn to their yarn in a genuine spirit of fraternal
cooperation. He must subordinate his own personal interest or advantage
to the larger interests of the institution which he represents. If he
has really entered into the spirit of the best college athletics, he
will forever after be a better husband and father, a better neighbor
and citizen, a better man in the world of industry, and a better
churchman, for his systematic training in this spirit of cooperation.
Athletics also express and develop what we call “college spirit.” This
sense of joy in one’s own college, the generous pride and enthusiasm
over victories won by other students, the knitting together of the
student body in paying the necessary dues, in cheering the games, in
helping to maintain high and honest standards, all go to make up that
“college spirit.”
This bit of sentiment over one’s own institution does not pay term
bills or prepare lessons or write examination papers, but it aids
in the doing of every one of these things. The fife and drum in the
army do not throw up breastworks or fire off guns to disable the
enemy, but they do aid in the general undertaking by the enthusiasm
and _esprit de corps_ they help to arouse. That college spirit,
which is indeed a useful educational force, is always heightened by
wholesome athletics. That splendid hit when there were three men on the
bases; that break through the line or around the end and the run down
the field; that last spurt at the end of the hundred-yard dash, with a
whole horizon of students and other spectators rending the skies with
their enthusiastic cheers, all aid in the development of a wholesome
enthusiasm over one’s own college.
The student who holds himself apart from it all in blasé fashion,
affecting to look with cool contempt on the joyous fervor of his
fellows is either diseased or else his show of indifference is only
skin deep. The sneering, flippant, cynical young person is as much of
a freak as would be a ten-year-old boy bald-headed, with a long white
beard. Intensity, enthusiasm, absorption, belong to college life and
they work their good results in transforming youth into manhood.
The two main evils, aside from the common evils of betting and
dissipation which are not confined to athletes, to be guarded against
are the spirit of professionalism and the habit of unfairness. The
smuggling in of a professional baseball or football player whose
college standing is maintained by snap courses or by indulgent
professors, is a thing despicable in the eyes of all right-minded
college men. It is the sacrifice of the university idea to the demand
for victory in college sports. And in similar fashion the disposition
to win by fair means or by foul, which has sometimes disfigured our
college athletics, lies at the root of the ugly distrust felt by
institutions for each other on the athletic field. Better no victories
than victories of dishonor! The word of the old professor is always
in point: “Play your games as gentlemen, fair, true, and generous.
Win your games as gentlemen when you can, with no offensive conceit
over your success. Lose your games as gentlemen when you must, with no
whimpering or silly excuses.”
It is of vital importance that the whole interest of college
athletics be held firmly within the grasp of that larger purpose
already indicated. The main business of life is not to play baseball
or football, but to do certain things treated more directly in other
departments of college life. You cannot afford to play any game at the
expense of your highest development as one preparing to do his full
share of the world’s work. Strive to make your life rich in meaning,
full of the power to serve, fine and true in its inner quality, and
that fundamental purpose will so dominate your interest in athletics as
to render your bodily exercise profitable both for the life that now is
and for that larger life that lies ahead.
III
THE FRATERNITY QUESTION
The sentiment of love between persons of the opposite sex has
monopolized the popular interest, while other fine forms of human
relationship have failed of their due recognition. The feeling of
friendship between persons of the same sex has a profound significance.
The friendship of Damon and Pythias and that of David and Jonathan
have been sung by the poets and the memory of them perpetuated in the
rituals of well known fraternal orders in such a way as to make them
classic.
It is good for us to know and to love those with whom the question of
sex, with its mysterious attractions and repulsions, does not enter
in. The woman who cares little for other women, who is only happy when
she is talking with men, or the man who is so much of a “ladies’ man”
as to be ill at ease when thrown for an hour exclusively with men, is
mentally, if not morally, diseased. It is good for the souls of men
to be knit with the souls of their fellows; it is fitting that women
should know and enjoy other women.
It is the need for that association which lies at the root of the
almost countless fraternities found in all our cities. In searching
out names and mysterious forms for them all, men have gone clear over
the border into what is both fantastic and foolish. The secrecy of
these societies is not to be taken too seriously--as a rule it is
mere dust thrown in the eyes of the uninitiated. The members laugh
in their sleeves knowing how little the “secrets” amount to, but the
organizations offer opportunity for social fellowship in a way to
satisfy a wide-spread desire.
The same tendency, with some additional leaning to clannishness and
to the love of mystery found in most young people, is evidenced by
the Greek letter fraternities in the colleges and in many of the
high schools. These have been in operation for more than a quarter
of a century and they have not yet by any means so justified their
existence as to win the cordial support of the best educational
authorities. There is still “the fraternity question,” with a big
interrogation point after it, put there by parents, teachers, and
citizens, and by many of the young people themselves as they grow wiser.
I speak of this matter as a fraternity man. I have been initiated; I
have worn a “pin,” at such odd times as my “best girl” did not happen
to be wearing it. I know the mysterious significance attaching to the
“grip” when one student meets another and taking him by the little
finger pulls it surreptitiously nine times to the left. I have been
through all this, for I am a member of Alpha Eta of Sigma Chi. What
I say, therefore, is not spoken in that prejudice which sometimes
attaches to the utterances of the “anti-frat” man who sees it all from
the outside and comes up hot, perhaps, from some hard-fought campaign
where the line was closely drawn between “frats” and “anti-frats.”
I speak also with a deep sense of the importance of the question. The
principal of the high school in my own city, which has an enrolment
of twelve hundred pupils, said to me recently when I had been asked to
speak on fraternities, “You have a big subject on your hands.” He spoke
as an educator watching the lives of that large company of young people
five days in the week. I speak as a pastor and a teacher of spiritual
values and I agree with him that it is “a big subject.”
The power of intimate association for good or ill--no nation under
heaven, Christian or pagan, has failed to condense its observation and
experience on that point into some terse proverb. “He that walketh with
wise men shall be wise: but a companion of fools shall be destroyed,”
said the old Hebrew. “Evil company doth corrupt good manners,” said
the Greek, and Paul quoted it in his letter to the Greek Christians
at Corinth. “Talent is perfected in solitude, but character is formed
in the stream of the world,” is the German of it. “Live with wolves
and you will learn to howl,” the Spanish proverb has it; and in homely
Holland fashion, the Dutch proverb is, “Lie down with dogs and you will
get up with fleas.” In these terse sayings, elegant and inelegant,
the race has recorded its judgment as to the power of association.
The fraternity promotes certain forms of most intimate association at
a crucial period and thus enters powerfully for good or ill into the
lives of young people.
There are certain credits to be entered in making up a trial balance
for the fraternity. It marks out a definite group of special friends
for closer association. One cannot become intimately acquainted
with the whole human race or even with as much of it as happens to
be present in a large high school or college. Whether it is done
in organized or in unorganized ways, there must come a process of
selection by which one’s social interests are kept to a manageable size.
The fraternity gives opportunity for learning to subordinate the purely
personal and selfish interests to the larger good. The fraternity man
has in view something beyond his own individual pleasure or success.
He is taught to aid some fraternity brother who has good prospects,
in athletics, in a race for some class honor, or in debate. Mutual
admiration, a common enthusiasm, a corporate ambition and the spirit
of cooperation, are thus developed in the whole group by a feeling of
common interest.
The fraternity brings the lower class man into closer touch with
upper class men. The first year man is not a mere unbaked freshman to
the juniors and seniors in his fraternity. They have an interest in
him, a responsibility for him, because of his fraternity connection.
These organizations thus cause the line of social cleavage to run
perpendicularly as well as horizontally. My own life will be forever
different by reason of the friendship of two upper class men in my
university days. Such friendships are wholesome for both the younger
and the older men.
The fraternity serves as a convenient basis for fellowship when a man
visits another college or when alumni return to their alma mater. The
house of one’s own fraternity is open to him, and affords opportunity
for him to come into touch with the eager, throbbing life about him.
The alumni of a chapter may also exert a real influence for good upon
the resident members of the fraternity, because of this continued
association.
The fraternity house offers a useful center for returning social
courtesies. The students, in their class-day spreads and at other
times, may thus indicate their appreciation of social attentions
received from townspeople.
All this can be said and said heartily. It may seem that I am making
out such a strong case for the fraternities that any criticism offered
later will be of no avail. It would be unfair, however, not to state
the advantages as strongly as one’s own judgment would approve.
But there are certain offsets in fraternity life which must come up
for an equally frank and thorough consideration. There is a constant
tendency in any fraternity house to spend more time and more money
than many a student can afford. No fellow of spirit can allow others
to treat him, take him to the theater, show him all manner of
attentions without feeling an obligation resting upon him to return
these courtesies. A few men in a fraternity with rich fathers, large
allowances, and warm hearts, can, with no sort of wrong intent, set the
pace in such a way as to demoralize a whole group of young men. The
man of modest means and simple habits, dependent upon a hard-working
father for his education and for all the comforts of his home life,
is apparently forced into a gait which it is wrong for him to take.
He does not intend to be mean or cruel, but he adopts a scale of
expenditure which he cannot afford; he runs into debt; he becomes
unjust to his parents, who are making sacrifices for his education.
It requires more grit than nine out of ten young fellows of the high
school or college age possess, to stand up and oppose the course of
action which leads to these ill-advised “good times.”
It is to be regretted that simplicity is so overborne in all our social
life by the elaborate and the expensive. Business men, husbands,
and fathers, are being killed off, before their time, by nervous
prostration, heart disease, or exhaustion of other vital organs, in
making the necessary money to keep it up. Society women, mothers and
daughters, are being sent to sanitariums and rest cures by reason of
the strenuous tasks imposed upon them in devising and arranging new and
elaborate ways of spending the money. What a caricature much of it is
upon real social life, which ought to be a joy, a recreation, a means
of relief from serious work, but never a burdensome, exacting labor!
The young girl in high school gives a luncheon for her fraternity
elaborate enough for a society woman of fifty. The boys plan for a good
time on a scale which might indicate that they were solid business men
well on in their prime, with fortunes of their own earning completely
at their disposal. The whole tendency of it is bad and only bad. The
simple pleasures are the best for everybody and especially so for young
people. The tuxedo is not a suitable garment for a five-year-old boy
even though his father is able to buy him a hundred of them; and some
of our social activity is quite as ridiculous as such a coat would be
on the youngster. It rears up a set of young people who, having tasted
it all and become blasé before their time, are now nervously intent
upon some new sensation by more startling and stimulating forms of
social life. And all the while the simple, serious, quiet interests of
education have been suffering a loss irreparable.
There is also the tendency in most fraternity houses toward a wasteful
use of time. Where there is a lounging room with its open fire, the
university colors, pillows, pictures, trophies scattered about, and a
group of jolly good fellows always accessible, it is not easy to turn
one’s back upon it and sit alone digging on some difficult subject. Eve
holding out an apple or even a ripe peach in the garden of Eden suffers
by comparison when placed alongside the temptations thus offered to a
student whose will may already be a trifle lame.
I recall a certain fraternity house which I watched for a number of
years. Splendid fellows they were--my heart warms within me as I think
of their faces! It was always Indian summer there--cigarette smoke
until one could scarcely see through it. It would not be entirely true
to say that one could cut it with a knife; some stronger implement
would have been needed, an axe maybe--perhaps “the Stanford axe.” A
number of the boys were keen and the jolly talk was sometimes equal to
a page from “Life” or “Fliegende Blätter.”