Pickering College - Voyageur Yearbook (Newmarket, Ontario Canada)

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The Voyageur But wonder and aspiration, imagination and disapproval were not dead. For those same men by their wonder about the nature of God contributed volumes to our theological literature. Gothic architecture is the finest ex- ample of religious aspiration in stone known to man. The Holy Roman Empire which they strove to create was a magnificent political conception -all men living at peace under the protective vigilance of one Emperor- all men worshipping as Christians under the spiritual guidance and father- hood of the pope. This was the period, too, of the dauntless faith which produced the first crusade, of the burning zeal which drove men to tear their bodies with whips and assume the hair shirt and solitude of the hermit. The Black Death came, cutting men down like the sickle of a careless harvester, and some men went mad, and some lay down naked on hot coals, and some turned cannibal, and some drank themselves to death. But in the monastery and the hermit's cell, in the church and in the field others worked on. And the disapproval of mediaeval man finally brought on the Renais- sance, when the culture of Greece and the law of Rome was rediscovered and passed on to succeeding generations together with the church of Christ. The wonder, and aspiration and imagination and disapproval of the new masters of Europe added two great contributions to this heritage. One is the power of modern science, the other is the doctrine of the right of the individual. They, like all the achievements of men, have had evil results as well as good. The power of science has been and is being used to end the life of man as well as to prolong it, to make it insecure as well as to provide for its security. The doctrine of the right of the individual has caused bloody revolution, narrow patriotism, blatant nationalism, anarchy and warg even while it has liberated the oppressed and given rights and voice to those who hitherto had been without benefit of law. This has been a brief and very sketchy attempt at portraying the amazing story of man. I am afraid that by attempting to show you so much in so short a while I may have succeeded only in confusing you. If so, I apologize. But in a day such as ours, which to superficial examination may seem so dark and whose shadow falls on every man, I would beg of you to make yourselves familiar with manis story and with your heritage. For it is only by a knowledge of man's achievement in the past that you can keep a decent set of values in the world of to-day. I mentioned the prophets of doom and gloom. Pay them little heed. There have been dark times before. There was a time when every road in Europe echoed to the marching feet of the Roman legionaires. There were hundreds of years when not a sun rose in the western world but it blazed upon the burnished wings of the imperial eagle of Rome. The legions are gone and the eagle has found new arms to bear-but the true grandeur that was Home is with us still. History has been and will be ever thus, a chang- ing and a growing but never complete tragedy and death. I assure you that the work of the great men of the past is not to be blown away in the boast- ings of some of the leaders of our present day. I assure you that our civilization goes too deep to have its roots torn up by the shells and bombs 26

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The Voyageur this epitaph-the body within must have been that of a philosopher of sorts-uHe fell down a well while gazing at the stars. But the chief factor in their struggle for existence was their disapproval of things as they found them. A nut would not crack in their teeth so they hit it with a stone. The same stone would not cut down a tree so they sharpened the stone. The tree once fallen was hard to move so they invented the square wheel. The square wheel bumped so they fashioned the round wheel. That early discontent and disapproval began the accumulated heritage of material safeties and comforts which are yours today. Its story contains many great names-Hippocrates, Pythagoras, Galileo, Edison, Pasteur, Marconi, Einstein, Bell, and lately, Sir Frederick Banting-men of every age and race and creed. After the early civilizations came the Greeks. Their great contribution to your heritage lay in the cultural field. Strangely marked in them are the qualities of wonder and aspiration. They were great seekers and great artists. Truth was their goal and beauty the high priestess of their art. Great was their achievement in sculpture and philosophy, in architecture and literature. The Parthenon still stands in Athens and will stand forever in countless pictures and models and in the minds of men, as a monument to free and uncoerced beauty, even though its physical remains be reduced to rubble in these coming days. The words of Plato and Socrates, or Aeschylus and Sophocles are yours, and their spirit will be ever, though the search for truth may be for a while an illegal and unpatriotic proceeding in some parts of the world. Towards the time when Grecian brilliance was on the wane a man was born in Jerusalem. As he grew older he taught a doctrine which said all men were brothers and should love one another. He said love was a prime necessity for man's salvation. Some men called him the Son of God-and others thought him mad. But a mighty Empire arose in the Western world, an empire of organizers and builders-an empire which believed in its own eternity and built things to last for just that period. The men of that Empire took over the culture of the Greeks. They added little to it but they forged it into buildings, and books, and laws. Then, as their life grew rich and soft, a great fear shook the Roman world. Fierce, energetic, dauntless men were pounding at the frontiers of their wide empire and, in the north, were breaking through. The men of Home saw all that they had believed permanent disintegrating and passing away before their eyes. ln fear they turned to a new faith- the faith of that Christ whom one of their governors had delivered to crucifixion in Judea. To that faith they erected a church and to it they attached that permanence which they had hitherto attached to the Empire. That church did live on and carried with it, throughout a thousand years of darkness, a strange companion. That companion was the culture of Greece as the church had inherited it from Rome. The period of the middle ages was dark-that is how we are accustomed to think of it-but it was far from barren. A new race had taken over Europe. The men from the north were in the lusty childhood of their civilization. For a thousand years they fought one another and preyed on one another, father killed son and brother slew brother. 25

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The Voyageur of this generation. I assure you that man's courage and endurance and ability for work and faith are a metal too tried and proved in the fires and infernos of history to dissolve away into nothingness before the blast of a few menis anger. The world is at war. Though it is none of your making it must be fought out to a finish that you may get on to a better use of your heritage. It is your immediate affair. The doctor of preventive medicine does not throw up his hands and quit if disease comes. He resorts to a curative method that he may later get on with his work when the disease is past. Your heritage is great. The qualities of wonder, aspiration, imagination and discontent are still yours. Use them. Fire and the wheel and the axe are yours, the truths of the Greeks are yours if you dare defend them, the stainless moral garment of Christ is yours if you have the courage to put it on, the laws of Home are yours to save from oblivion, the power of science is yours to turn to a constructive end, the rights of man are yours to proclaim aloud in the public places. John Bright said to his generation 100 years ago '4You are the heirs of all the ages, you may stand on the shoulders of your forefathers and look over their headsfi The same applies to you in this hour. Count this war but as a mistake in the total life of man. A builder who places a brick awry does not give up and let the building fall. The mistake must be paid for, corrected, and the work must go on. Therefore, do not listen to the prophets of doom and gloom. Do not bemoan your lot, but count yourselves fortunate to be partners in this great undertaking, citizens of this wide city. As citizens you must pay your taxes of sorrow and hardship if you expect to share in the rewards of human happiness, human brotherhood, and that intangible satisfaction that is the rarest and greatest of all human joys -the service to a common cause, the sharing of a common faith, the knowledge that your courage and your strength, your muscle and your brain, your desiring and your aspiration, your hopes and fears, your love, your pity, your wonder are working toward a common goal, that these are placing you shoulder to shoulder, not with your generation only but with all the generations past and all the generations yet to be. So the great race of man will move onward, goaded by the whips of discontent, lured by beautyis retreating star, worshipping at the altar of a still veiled truth. And many will fall by the wayside, and many will shirk their job, and some will take wrong paths to oblivion, and whole generations will follow the prophets of false faiths to destruction. But the earth will go on and man will go on, and somewhere, someday, in an age a long way off, in a city you will never know, among faces you will never see, that strange creature, man, may find his answer. ' 27