Medina High School - Medinian Yearbook (Medina, OH)

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3 Annual So marked has been the effect upon humanity of a recognition of this truth, that the line of cleavage between civilization and barbarism is clearly seen to be drawn in relation to it. The people who learn to know the world in which they live are the nations who are in the van of the world’s life. They who do not know their world are straggling somewhere in the rear. And thus it has always been. The burden which has rested upon the world because of ignorance is simply incalculable. It is a tremendous loss for a nation not to know its soils or the particular phases of nature with which it comes into contact. It is a terrible thing for a nation to be dependent for its physical well being upon the physician who does not know. It is an awful bondage for a people to have as its lawmakers men who do not know history or economics. It is a terrible thing for a nation to have as its teachers men who are themselves untaught. It is an awful thing for a nation to have as its religious leaders men who are themselves lost in their superstitions. I or when these tilings occur, individuals, communities, and nations will find that somehow the powers of nature are working against them. In some waj or another, their labor comes to nothing. Even tho they do not understand the causes of their defeat, yet the defeat itself will be written large in their lives in mental and physical suffering. So the place of the school is fixed and sure in human life. It is well for us to train our senses to the limit of our powers, so that we may indeed see, and hear, and feel, taste, smell, and otherwise learn correctly. It is well for us to study the sciences that w 7 e may learn what progress other men have made and to conserve the gain unto the generations yet to come. It is well for us to train ourselves in the arts, that we may be skillful to use the knowledge which we gain. It is well for us to know history and the philosophy which history teaches, in order that we may be able to choose that which is worth while from t hat which is not. For we neglect these things to our own sorrow and to the sorrow of those who follow us. The nation which has ceased to revere its teachers will soon cease to pro- duce them. And the nation which ceases to produce its teachers will soon have no real leaders. And then intellectual darkness, gross and dense, settles on the land and men suffer unduly and labor in vain. But when all this is said and allowed life will teach us anoi tier lesson. It is that there is such a thing as devoting ourselves too exclusively to the world which lies about us and to our relation with, and thereby neglecting another world which lies within us. One hun- dred years ago the poet Wordsworth, who was to usher in a new age in English literature, was saying: “The world is too much with us: late and soon Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. Little we see in nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.” After a while, England awoke and made him, the seer, her poet laureate. Is it thus with us? A generation ago, Matthew Arnold, a mind of keen appreciations, traveled among us and said of us as he left our shores: “ America is too beastly prosperous. In one of his late books, Professor Muensterberg, who is at the head of the department of philosophy at Harvard University, writes thus: “ There is an uneasy feeling pervading our times that the age has lost its meaning.” Last year we greeted Professor Eucken, the renewer of Idealism in Germany, as a man with a new message when he told us that the philosophy and life of materialism was a delusion and a snare. Why should this be greeted as a new message? Why should there be any uneasy feeling pervading the life of our times? Are we not rich? Certainly. Are we not prosperous, when measured by material standards? To be sure. Is there any immediate danger of real material need? Not at all. Then why are some of our leading thinkers uneasy? Because they feel that for a large portion of our nation, life has lost its significance. For an important fraction of our people there is no longer any reason to do things or to get them done. There is no longer an apprecia- tion of our place or worth in the world. They have lost the sense of the worth of their

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a ®l|p Annual Hamtlttun ' atr Sermon UIIIIIIIIIIIII 1 IIIIIIIIIM 111 1 iiiiii THE PERCEPTION OF SPIRITUAL REALITIES. BY FREDERICK W. HASS Text: Send out thy light and thy truth; let them lead me; let them lead me unto thy holy hill and to thy tabernacles. — P sai.m 43:3. It is a good tiling to know well the world in which we live. It is no idle task for us to learn to know well our relation to the world of nature about us or our place in the succes- sion of generations of men. For it is only thus that we can use to the full the rich heritage left us by the generations that have been, or can do wisely for the generations which shall be. Nature will not be used in just any way that caprice may indicate. She has her own ways. Out of these she will not be coaxed nor bullied. We work in her way or we do not work with her at all. And our own age has its own significance. To try to read into it the significance of some past age or the supposed meaning of some age to come, is to work our destruction. Only by having a true setting for our lives, both from the material and the psychical standpoints, is it possible for our lives to be useful. Our lives must square with the universe about us: the universe of nature and of men. Those lives are legion in number which promised much because of native strength but which failed because their setting was untrue. So we will repeat — it is well for us to know well the world in which we live.

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10 Annual souls. There is no longer a certainty that things are worth while. We know from the history of nations exactly what happens when a nation becomes a people of lost souls. The nation itself becomes a lost nation. No props will sustain it. No songs can cheer it. No thought can strengthen it. Its labor ceases. And with the labor it too ceases. From our own transient moments of despair, we may as individuals get a glimpse of the paralyzing effects of the doubt of life’s worth. In the moments when we give up the struggle, when hopes give way, the battle itself is stopped. For no one ever struggles valiantly after the sense of possible attainment is gone. As it is with individuals, so is it with whole nations ; which sheds light upon the fact that all the world’s republics have died rich. Tho wealth had increased, the power initiative was lost, and with this the power of advancement. Why? Because nothing seemed worth while any more. In order that life may have a meaning and shall be best expressed, it is first of all necessary that life shall be thoroughly charged with a high purpose. But that which always measures the strength of our purpose is our sense of the presence of God in life — in our lives and in others. A man coming into the studio of the artist Burne-Jones remarked to the painter: “I cannot see the beauty of that thing.” The reply of the artist was: “Do you not wish you could? ” This is only one of the evidences that not all persons can see the beauty of the many scenes which life presents to us. The beauty is there, but they have not the faculty of seeing it. At a recent concert given by Paderewski a man was noticed who was evidently drowsing. There was indeed beauty in the music; but the man had no ears with which to perceive it. There are a great many people who cannot appreciate the beauty of poetry. The beauty is there but they have not been trained to feel it. In all these cases, perhaps the persons in question did not have the opportunity to have trained in them the necessary sense with which to perceive the particular beauty involved. Opportunities are not alike to all people. It may be that they had not the patience necessary to stay by the task of development until it should have reached its maturity. In either case, something real and worth while was lost to them; something upon which the soul can lean for strength when it needs it. In like manner, there are undoubtedly persons who do not perceive the spiritual real- ities of the world. These realities are present and abide. But the sense by which they are perceived has never been developed, or it has been destroyed by the cultivation of opposite tendencies, or it has been allowed to atrophy and decay thru sheer neglect. A noted astronomer is said to have remarked: “ There is no God; I have searched for him with my telescope and there is no room for him.” The story taxes our credulity. It seems that no mature persons could speak thus. Almost any child in our Sabbath-schools could have told this astronomer that the God of whom we speak simply cannot be found in that way at all. A physician once told me that our praying seemed to him like talking at one end of a telephone with no one at the other end. In matters of medicine, this man was indeed to be trusted ; but in the matter of spiritual realities, he was as a babe. Another man was asked in regard to returning thanks at the table and replied: “ I do not believe in talking to my potatoes.” Now surely something is absent from these lives that other men have considered very much worth while. That for which Jesus waited all night long on the lonely mountain or in the desert place must surely have been a real thing to him — to him who stilled the tempest and made honest persons of publicans. Surely it was a real tiling in his life which the great King David was voicing when he wrote : “ The Lord is my shepherd ; I shall not want.” Surely it was a real thing to St. Cuthbert, the missionary to Scotland, who driven out of the country by the natives took to sea with his few followers. For when one of these latter remarked that now every path was closed, St. Cuthbert replied : “ There is yet one way open; the way upward.” Surely it was something real which William the Silent,