Greenville College - Vista Yearbook (Greenville, IL)

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ONE SPIRITUAL LEADERSHIP Two HIGH SCHOLARSHIP THREE MOTIVATED ACTIVITY FOUR CHRISTIAN CULTURE FIVE GOOD SPORTSMANSHIP SIX COOPERATIVE COMMUNITY

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eRe Nes elation In his announcement of the opening of Greenville College on September 20, 1892, President Hogue said, “ ‘Education for Character’ will be our motto. Hence the Bible will have a place in all our courses of study.” It was for his spirituality and powers of Christian Leadership manifested in this statement, that Wilson T. Hogue was chosen to be Greenville’s first president. Not without much prayer did that first board of t rustees make their choice, and he in turn prayed earnestly before accepting the presidency. It may truly be said that Greenville College was born through prayer. The college grew, and the presidency changed hands from time to time. Hogue once wrote concerning the second president, “Mr. Whitcomb, M.S., was a man of marked ability, whose piety, scholarship, dignified and spiritual bearing, eloquence .. . en- ergy and tact ... admirably fitted him for administration over such an institution . . Eldon G. Burritt, who succeeded Whit- comb in 1908, once said that “like a home, it takes a heap o’ livin’ to make a college. It requires Christian optimism, it requires much labor and sacrifice, and praying, and living, and some crying, to make a college.” In her recent history of Greenville Col- lege, Still Abides the Memory, Dr. Mae Tenney has written concerning the in- augural address of Leslie Ray Marston on April 20, 1928: “Concluding with the declaration that ‘the Christian college is not a cloistered retreat from the problems of a changing world,’ nor ‘the last feeble stand of a dying orthodoxy,’ but rather ‘a foremost experiment on the frontier of Doctor Marston pledged his allegiance to the Christian ideal in education, and his energies ‘to the ex- pression of that ideal through Greenville 99 educational advance,’ College.’ And now, since 1936, Dr. H. J. Long has been at the helm. Often and often have the students remarked his earnest- ness and humility in searching out the will of God. Better than his enthusiasm in putting Greenville across to the public, better than his closeness to the lives of all the students, better than anything else that might be said of Dr. Long is the fact that through and through he is a Christian. Truly with such men as her presidents down through the years, the ideal of spir- itual leadership has become for Greenville Nor has leadership rested with the presidents alone, but for fifty years the young people of this school have been under the beneficent influence of Christian men and women on the fac- ulty and board of trustees. a living tradition.