Ohio University - Athena Yearbook (Athens, OH)

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ATW. The good that you have gained is good in itself, good for its own sake. But it is also preparation. Momentous as your college life has been for what it has already brought you, it is still more momentous for what it will bring you in that wider world into which you are about to enter. The quality and issue of your whole future will be dyed through and through with the hue of your life in college. As your present dreams become reality and your present purposes crystallize into action, the hue, bright or dark, will deepen. As time passes and years accumulate, you will feel the ichor or the poison of youth still throbbing in your veins. If your life hitherto has been pure and strong and your tasks have been performed und;r the inspiration of great aims, your student toils and triumphs will open the way to results far surpassing any that you have yet accomplished; so that fifty years hence you may look back on a record of fine achievement and noble service, and will find that the best of the wine has been kept till the last of the feast. Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be. The last of life, for which the rest was made. Our times are in His hand Who saith, ' A whole I planned; Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid. ' William H. Scott, Class of 1862.

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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

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