Ohio University - Athena Yearbook (Athens, OH)

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Pgg AT1EMA A Semi-Centennial Message to the Class of Nineteen Hundred and Twelve Being young people with your faces to the future, you may feel reluctant to listen to a Voice from the Past. In your calendar fifty years gone are an age. whose beginning seems last in the midst of intiquity; and a man who graduated fifty years ago probably appears to you as one of the last survivors of an almost extinct race. The class to which I belonged was not put to the test to which I am subjecting you; for there was no graduate of 1812 to send greeting to the class of 1862. Classes by years were not organized in the University until 1820, and no diploma was dated earlier than 1815. The stage in your college career which you have now reached should enable you to see as never before the meaning and value of it all. It is true of all growth that its true significance is revealed, not at the beginning, but at the end. And,

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atm: Board of Trustees Hon. V. C. Lowry, Logan. R. E. Hamblin, Toledo. C. C. Davidson. A. M.. Alliance. Hon. Lucien J. Fenton, Winchester. ¥ J. E. Benson, Cleveland. E. J. Jones, Esq., Athens. J. P. Wood. Esq., Athens. •F. C. Whiley, Lancaster. Hon. Albert Douglas,, Chilhcothe. Hon. H. W. Coultrap, McArthur. Thomas Blackstone, M. D., Circleville. T. R. B.ddle, M. D., Athens. Henry O ' Bleness, Athens. J. B. Foraker, Jr., Cincinnati. James E. Kinnison, Jackson. Hon. John T. Duff, Newcomeistown. William F. Boyd, Fsq., Cincinnati. Emmett Tompkins, Columbus. F. W. Crow, Pomeroy. Governor judson Harmon, Ex-Ofhcio. President Alston Ellis, Ex-Omcio. Officers of the Board Alston Ellis President E. J. Jones Vice President H. H. Haning ■ ■ Treasurer Israel M. Foster Secretary and Auditor ¥ Deceased.

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since college life is but a small part of life as a whole, you will attain a still deeper interpretation of it as your years increase. At seventy your undergraduate days will seem to you richer in prophecy and potency, though not, I hope, in actual result, than any other equal period of your lives, and will be enshrined in your memory as instaT omnium the days of light and hope. What is the purpose of college life? To impart knowledge, and thus en- rich the mind. To beget the love of knowledge, and thus lead on in a perpetual search and struggle for it as for food. To furnish discipline, that our powers may perform their tasks with grace and beauty, with strength and skill. To implant in our souls ideals great and high which shall constantly draw us upward by theii compelling attraction. To imbue us with wisdom, so that we shall sacrifice what is low for what is high, what is base for what is noble, what is transient for what is enduring, what is visible for what is invisible. In a word, its aim is spiritual transformation. Do you know Thomas Davidson ' s definition of education? I ihink it is one of the best. Education, in so far as it depends on consious exer- tion, is that process by which a human being is enabled to transcend his original nature and attain his ideal nature. How much of what you were when you en- tered college you have now ceased to be! Opinions, manners, habits, ways of looking at life, which seemed then as bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh, have dropped away; and others of which you had never dreamed or which you had viewed as absurd and impossible, you now hold as part of your most precious possessions. Subjects then unheard of are now familiar. Mental tasks then in- superable are now done out of hand. Your eyes have been anointed, so that whereas you were blind you now see. Where before there was total darkness you now see knowledge, truth, power, possibility. Your ears have been unstopped, so that whereas you were deaf you now hear. Where before there was total silence you now hear voices of wisdom and instruments of music. Powers that were sleep- ing unconscious withou you have felt the magical touch of Science or Literature or Philosophy, and have leaped forth in newness of life; so that whereas you were as dead you are now alive. How many fine enthusiasms have been born in you during these four years, and how the finest of them are glowing in your breast to- day! If you have derived from your education all that it should have yielded, it has done for you what Dr. W. T. Harris says the dialectic of Socrates did for the Greek people; This made possible the ascent from opinion to truth, from soph- istry to the vision of God. And yet no spiritual transformation, however complete, can annihilate or eliminate the past. What we have done and what we have been still abides in us in some form of consequence. our present gathers into itself all your past. Chiefly, it perhaps seems to you, it gathers into itself the experience of your col- lege years, these years of adolescent awakening and reconstruction. You are what you were; the same, — and yet how different! 10