United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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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.

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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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vox 19 life. Still on the ascending scale, you have been slowly learning how to apply your knowledge to actual life and make it the fuel for the fires of action. Greater yet, you have been going through a process of being trained and train¬ ing yourselves so to think that what you are carrying away with you at the end of your college life is not so much what you have studied as the power to study. Best of all, you have been developing personality. In the class-room and in the field of games, in your pri¬ vate study and in your many col¬ lege activities, in your debates and in your banquets, yes, even in the hard knocks and the rough and tumble of the thousand and one struggles through which you have passed, the most significant thing that has been happening, unless by some disastrous misunderstanding of the whole situation you have missed the real thing for which you came, is that you have been building up a broad, full-orbed, dependable personality that now is well on the way to big things. And now, if you can, try to estimate the forces and processes of spiritual religion. First, the grasp¬ ing of the great elemental facts: the initial and dominating fact of God, the illuminating fact of Christ, the staggering fact of the Cross, with all those intimate and personal facts of fellowship with the Divine and response to the incomparable moral and spiritual leadership of the Living Christ. Then comes, gradually and with accumulative force, the acceptance of a philos¬ ophy of existence and a spiritual interpretation of the universe. In¬ separably bound up with any real religion there is the application of these facts and of the new phil¬ osophy to the stern realities of life and the consequent development of character. The field here becomes too vast for us to hope to survey it, but it certainly includes that training to think in the best areas which is implied in the amazingly suggestive terms of our text: “Whoever is willing to do His will, will know,” and it at once takes the open country in the crea¬ tion of wide and noble personal¬ ities, larger spheres of influence and careers of service that make all life abundantly worth while. If that little sketch has in any way served its purpose it has estab¬ lished the identity of the highest ideals that have ever spurred you on, whether as keen students or as would-be earnest servants of Jesus Christ. Whichever way we look at it we cannot escape the convic¬ tion that when we cease to be stu¬ dents we cease to live. They used to talk about “finishing schools”: what a ghastly idea! When any of us come to the point where we have ceased to learn about the only thing that is in order is a respect¬ able funeral. With this as our necessary back¬ ground we may proceed to our second proposition, which is: II. The Greatest Things Yet To Be Await the People of Well- Trained Mind and Consecrated to the Tasks of the Kingdom of God. Four keywords suggest the lines of our recognition of this fact and of our attempt to relate it to the pressing needs of today’s life. The first is Idealism. There is a regrettable tendency to allocate the task of maintaining our idealisms to the preacher or the writer of inspirational books and articles. It need not detract in the least from our lofty conception of a call to the Christian ministry for us to