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Page 15 text:
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EDWARD KIDDER GRAHAM THE BELOVED CAPTAIN 5]|0 explain a man ' s personality is no easy task. Personality is elusive. It is not a matter of external impressions — a man ' s carriage, his manners, the peculiarities of gesture that enable the surface observer to differentiate him from others vi ho wear sim- ilar clothing and occupy themselves with similar tasks. Person- ality is secret. I found recently, in an interesting autobiography, the thought that in all the great moments of life, the moments that are charged with the deepest meaning for ourselves, we are alone — utterly, irretriev- ably alone. We cannot share such moments with others. It is in such moments, and after such a fashion, that a man ' s personality is a thing apart, not to be appraised by others however sympathetic or however intimate, perhaps not even within the consciousness of the man himself. Hamlet resents the crude examination to which he is subjected — You would pluck out the heart of my mystery! For the heart of a man ' s mystery is his personality. Nevertheless, no subject is so fascinating. Studied rightly, no theme is so important. In the realm of the elementary and the rule-of-thumb, to study personality is to study the secret of worldly success. In the advanced course, to study it is to study immortality. On the one hand, the secret of the great banker, of the great jurist. On the other hand, the secret of Socrates, the secret of Christ. Wordsworth somewhere speaks of spirits that catch the flame from heaven. It is from this text that I would try to set down something of my appreciation of the great personality whose departure has left us poor indeed. It explains, I think, his power over men. All things were tested by him in this flame. To say that he made the abstractions of philosophy concrete is but to touch the surface. Always it was the ma)i that interested him. The main enterprise of the world, says Emerson, for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man. And it is as a builder of manhood that Graham will remain most vividly in our memories. In this building he did not make the mistake, so easy to the ordinary intelligence, of working out an abstract system, a theology, and making
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Page 16 text:
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man fit this theory. Here lies the weakness of much of our current think- ing about life. We inherit or build an abstract religion, and fit ourselves and others into the frame. To Graham, life and serving God ' s the same. We pass laws based on an abstract theory of what a perfect society should be, and try to force all men to become righteous by edict. To Graham, the discovery of the law within the self, and the voluntary submission of the self to that law, is the only way to righteousness. His was no fugitive and cloistered virtue, but the sturdy discipline of an ordered liberty that can look on evil and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better. Here also was his philosophy of education. It was not, as it is with many of us, a system imposed from without, a series of studies and examinations followed by a degree. The kingdom of heaven is within you. To use his own words, the growth of a noble faith .... is a thing more deeply felt than seen. It is the aspiration, even the yearning .... for higher things — a passionate docility, combined with the strength of native independence, a yearning for great leadership founded on great principles. There is all the difference in the world between a plan of education in which the college becomes a factory, wherein the teachers are assigned piece-work at so much per hour, and diploma-holders are poured forth as standardized factory products each Commencement — there is all the difference in the world between such a conception of education and a method by which a yearning for higher things is awakened in the souls of young men; docility, in the fine old sense of the word, united with independence; a reaching out from the self into the great knowledge — as the roots of growing trees bury them- selves in the soil from which they derive the fullness of life. This is why he wrote as he did about education as a faith for which men should be willing to die; our beli ef in it to be judged not conventionally or abstractly but, as he phrased it in words instinct with a sense of the shortness of his o-wn years, in the swift, inevitable terms of life and death. A great biologist has recently set forth an analogy between the secret operation of the individual cell and the secret operation of the human spirit. According to his view, the individual organism, like the individual cell, belongs to a wider organic whole, apart from which much of its life is unintelligible, and it is only by losing his individual personality in the wider personal life that a man realizes his true personality. Of this, Graham ' s life was a supreme example. He drew for strength on all things human and divine. Nothing human was alien to him. And none who
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