United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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vox 17 a moment the old man is magnificent. No more do we fear for him; no longer do we pity him. He is great. It is a truism, is it not, that the greatest tragedy in art, bringing - us most crucially front up to the greatest tragedy in life, brings us also nearest to a conception of the virtue and dignity within man. After hav¬ ing been wrought upon by a great tragic work in art, we walk the streets or merely lean and gaze over a gate, caught up for a while into great¬ ness, fused into the beauty and strength of the human factor upon this earth, the apocalypse of man’s sublimity and solidarity in face of what¬ ever is the Universe for a while before our vision. Rhetoric again? Rhe¬ toric only to those who have not glimpsed the experience. Such exper¬ ience, drawing out and disciplining man’s ultimate powers, carries the secret of his finest culture. And such experience should surely suggest the grounds of faith. Faith is come at hardly by the sensitive and the thoughful. That is why in its cheaper forms it is so common among commonplace people. Per¬ haps the deepest tragedy of all we have to face in life is just herein: that this acceptance of the challenge of the tragic fact and the consequent inner extension and enrichment of life is hard to come at and seemingly as yet come at only by the few. There are so few cultured people, people who know where to be tolerant and where to be magnificently intoler¬ ant, people who are wise without bitterness, and tender without soft¬ ness, people who persuade us that they know what is in man. Yet I venture a paradox at the end. Tragedy, even this last and darkest trag¬ edy, is the great breeder of faith in man, if man faces it. As to faith in God as well? I think Shakespeare was facing that question in Hamlet and Lear at least of the tragedies. The Man of Gali¬ lee faced it in Gethsemane and “My God, my God, why hast Thou for¬ saken me?” was the voice of humanity crying for its faith. Be very sure of this at any rate. You will never win to an adequate faith in God without an adequate facing of the tragic in human life. May I remind you of my funny little topics? Our Prematurely Afflicted Century, The Story of the World, The Challenge of the Tragic, The Achievement of Culture, and The Basis of Faith. Grant B.: It’s to be a battle of wits. Alice C.: How brave of you, Grant, to go unarmed. Pat S.: Wipe off your chin. Laur. S.: Can’t It’s fastened on. Waiter: Are you Hungary? Harold S.: Yes, Siam. Waiter: Den Russia to the table and I’ll Fiji. H.S.: All right. Sweden my cof¬ fee and Denmark my bill. “It is eminently essential,” shouted Mr. Birkinshawski, “that our party should hang together.” “Hang together is right,” from the opposition front bench. “I mean,” splutters our friend, “that we should hang together in accord.” “That’s what I mean,” came again. “And in a mighty strong one, too.” “Time flies.” “You can’t. They go too fast.”

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16 VOX (3) From the nineteenth century I should invoke Ruskin or C arlyle or Arnold: ( Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery”), a flash from a letter of Huxley’s, a bit from poor Clough. But instead I name and quote Wordsworth; Wordsworth in a particularly pontifical and petulant mood if you like, but Wordsworth telling the story of the world. A multitude of causes,” he says, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident. . . .When I think upon this degrading thirst after out¬ rageous stimulation, . . But I need not read on. You see my point. This “prematurely afflicted century” is just what all the centuries have been to the sensitive. And hence I may pass to my next topic, The Challenge of the Tragic, without too much worry over a definition. The word tragedy is admit¬ tedly difficult to define. It is like socialism or culture or the state of being drunk; you have the most amazing and unforseen complications on your hands the moment you desire precise finality of definition. Yet we pos¬ sess working meanings for these terms. I think the idea of waste seems persistent in our thought concerning the nature of the tragic fact; waste implying misdirection, confusion; disorder rather than order; if you go deeper, waste, seeming to imply lack of direction of any sort, an absence of that witting and loving control by a Providence, a Scheme of Things, or a God, by the assumption of which we normally comfort ourselves. However we may define the nature of the tragic element in human life, whether Aeschylus or Shakespeare or Ibsen or the New Testament may help us most in definition, the thing is there. I think in taking up its challenge we come upon sure steps towards the achievement of cul¬ ture. “Commonplace people,” says Masefield, “dislike tragedy because they dare not suffer and cannot exult.” Culture, as applie d to humanity, if we rescue the word from its sillier uses and even perhaps from Mr. Arnold, means the achievement of the highest quality possible in terms of the human element on the earth. To face the tragic—I mean by the tragic now, the total weight and implications of the anomalies, the in¬ scrutable black accidents, on the one hand, and the “moral offensive¬ ness” of the established order of our world on the other—to face the brutality, the absurdity, the waste of it all—I mean by facing it, really seeing it, accepting it—to face the tragic thus, and to go on facing it, is to learn the profoundest things that may be learned about the essential nature of the best in man. “Pour on. I will endure.” cries Lear, and for

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18 VOX What Will You Do With Your Education for the Kingdom of God? Rev. Alworth Eardley, B.D. John 7:17— “If any man willeth to do His will, he shall know . . . ” Some provisional definition of the Kingdom of God and of educa¬ tion are essential to any intelligent attempt to answer this question. The Kingdom of God is too big to be confined to any set of terms, but it must at least connote the creation of a God-like personality and the shared task of producing a God-controlled world. By edu¬ cation we mean the highest train¬ ing of mind and personality of which the individual is capable. It would seem on the face of it impossible that these should rep¬ resent conflicting areas, and yet a deep-rooted and long-standing suspicion of learning on the part of the Church is one of the famil¬ iar facts of history. On the one side has been the fear, often a most unworthy one, that the Church should cease to be the centre of authority. On the other side has been the very real danger of the arrogance of intellect, such an at¬ titude originating generally in the materializing of the motives for learning, and in a tendency to de¬ spise and to domineer over those who have not secured the advant¬ ages of education. In such a con¬ flict we see churchmanship and learning at their lowest and per¬ haps only the counterfeit of either. Over against it, and immeasurably greater as a formative force in his¬ tory, we find that unity of purpose and harmony of effort which sug¬ gest our first proposition in answering our question: 7 . The Aims of Learning and Religion Are Identical Going back to origins and rea¬ sons, .there is a very real sense in which religion and learning have a common starting-point. Take two old sayings that have become almost axiomatic: “Modest doubt is the beacon of the wise,” and “Conscious ignorance is a kind of knowledge.” What does this mean but that all learning begins with a sense of need, an insistent demand for something we do not possess? Religion begins at the same place, the gnawing, nagging pain of a felt want that drives men to seek, sometimes they know not what, but impels them to a search which in its multitudinous form can only be described as a quest for God. Get right down to the best known facts and stages of that search and you will find the iden¬ tity still more recognizable. What has the student been doing in that long drawn-out period at school and college? Review your career and try to analyse and appraise what you have been trying to do, from the least significant to the most outstanding features of your student life. You have been col¬ lecting and storing up facts, neces¬ sary indeed, but in some senses the lowest and most evanescent of your occupations. Better and broader, you have been endeavoring to in¬ terpret the meaning of things and to arrive, in however rudimentary a manner, at some philosophy of Baccalaureate Sermon delivered to the Members of the Graduating Class in Arts and Theology, United Colleges, Winnipeg, March 9th, 1931, in Fort Rouge United Chuich.