Westminster College - Argo Yearbook (New Wilmington, PA)

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Robert Gracey Ferguson, D.D.. LL.D. Professor Emeritus of Biblical Literature

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W. Chari.es Wallace, D.D. President and Professor of Christian Evidences

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The Voice of Our President Having been honored with an invitation of the Staff to become one of the Argonauts, our President covets the influence of an Orpheus that he may fortifv the seekers of the Golden Fleece of Culture against Siren voices v ■hich would divert attention from the genuine quest. For Dr. Flugh Black was right, was he not, in the assertion that Culture begins by accepting the Christian ideal, which aims at perfection of life It emphasizes the dut - which a man owes to himself to be what it is in him to become, the duty to use all means to attain to a full development of all his powers. In cheaji sneers at culture, we forget that e ery great man set it before him in some form or other, and it is no broad and flowerx ' path on which one can gaily walk, but a narrov one through a straight gate. W ' e forget that it was not a light task, for example, which Goethe presented to himself, when he made it his aim in life to develop his ever - capacitv, till he died, after a long life of mental activity, with the words on his lips. More light! What made Cjoethe the repre- sentative man of culture was that he resolutely set aside all extraneous interests, and calml ' ga e himself up to his engrossing idea; that he was, as .Mr. Hamilton Alabie puts it in one of his cultured and suggestive essavs. .A man who dis- covered in youth that a life ought not to be a succession of happenings, a matter of outv ard fortunes but a cumulati e inward growth and the cumulative power of protiuctivitw The narrative of e ents within the Argo will record a ear of Cx)llege life. A ' lay the narrati ' e stimulate us each and all to those nobler achievements which constitute the histor - of a growing culture. For 1 am indebted to George Ak.Aulev Trevelyan. in Garibaldi and the Alaking of Italy for the discovery that the histor ' of e ents is ephemeral and for the scholar: the poetry of events is eternal and ' lor the multitULle. It is the acted poem that lives in the heart of the millions to whom the written records of histor ' and the written words of poetry are alike an unopened book. Be it ours, fellow students of life, to make out of all our college activities, avenues leading into the larger liberties of life and knowledge, thus making excursions. to use I r. Eliot ' s fine phrase, into ennobling experiences. Dr. W. Charles Wallace.