University of North Carolina Chapel Hill - Yackety Yack Yearbook (Chapel Hill, NC)

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came into contact with him could escape the feeling that here was a spirit richly human that yet gained its power in remote and secret places. To get beyond one ' s immediate circle of duties and interests, to enter into some sort of relation with the world outside, with even the remotest parts of the earth, and then to bring to bear on the tasks of the day this sharp- ened vision, is one secret of greatness. For it gives breadth, drives out the provincial, corrects values, enables one to see the day in its relation to all the days of the children of men. Such was Graham ' s secret. It explains why he could speak so simply and yet so wisely, and to all men. His life, looked at from this point of view, was not only an embodi- ment of the Christ-life ; it was a proof of the immortality of that life. The wonder and the mystery of life is that thru the ages this divine life is born, now here, now there, from one race and from another, incarnate in spirits that catch the flame from heaven. Here is the answer to all the doubts that assail us when we look upon the wrecks of civilizations and cultures — The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven ' s light forever shines, earth ' s shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity. So to us who are left to carry on as best we may the work to which he called us conies joy as well as sorrow. We will do as he taught us. His spirit shall have a double immortality — an immortality in the life of the University that he loved so well, and that other immortality which is the substance of things not seen, the secret life whence he drew his strength. The One remains. That this clear spirit dwelt among us for a time is proof that, amid the crash of principalities and systems, man still may lay hold on the infinite; proof that, whatever be the fate of the individual, the human spirit is an undying flame. And to us who knew him best this, after all, is but another way of saying that he is not dead. He is the Beloved Captain — we feel towards him as Donald Hankey felt towards the leader whom he lost : But he lives. Somehow he lives. And we who knew him do not forget. We feel his eyes on us. We still work for that wonderful smile of his. There are not many of the old lot left now, but I think that those who went West have seen him. When they got to the other side, I think they were met. Someone said: ' Well done, good and faithful servant. ' And as they knelt before that gracious pierced figure, I reckon they saw nearby the captain ' s smile. Anyway, in that faith let me die, if death should come my way; and so, I think, shall I die content. — Edwin Greenlaw

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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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OUR MASTER O speak for the men of Carolina is to speak for men who shun affection ; who know not sham ; who love naturalness ; who seek the truth, and when they find it follow it as their guiding star. To phrase the feeling of these men toward Edward Kidder Graham is to phrase the relationship of free men toward a life which lived with the freedom of the open air and the romance of the morning in a personality which breathed into their lives the inspiration to aspire. It is the revelation of leadership. It is the story of men who, free to choose, chose him as their leader. He saw with the keenness of insight which symbolizes the prophet. He illustrated a strength and stamina transforming inward conceptions into the body and substance of reality which signifies the master builder. His was that way which loses itself in the perfect realization of its pur- pose disclosing the artist. It was the presence of these fundamental parts, each in its fulness, which gave to his life its perfect proportion of life ' s realities, and explains how, in the intense activity of executive require- ments, he was a stimulus without a sting, a force without a jar. These elements, thus perfectly proportioned, and each in its fullness, blending, grew into a life — whole, and wholesome in its wholeness, which gave reality to his vision and accuracy to his conception. Its very com- pleteness e.xplains why he never was, or could be, one-sided, unreasonable, impractical. And so it follows, even as the rosebud is followed by the full-blown rose, that he was the source of his own truth and the origin of his own standard. Being this, there was no place in him for imitation, and he was free from the hollowness and pretence which attends it. Being this, to increase by addition was to belie his nature, and he was free from the affectation of qualities not his own. Attaining his fullness thru growth, his life demonstrated the freshness and the richness of simplicity. Because he knew himself, and was true thereto, there were no other gods before him. Without constraint or friction in himself, he brought into his relations with others that rare union of sweetness and gentleness and strength which breathed the incense of consecration. Self-contained in his completeness, he was come not to be ministered unto but to minister. Complete in himself, what could he gain by con-