William Smith College - Pine Yearbook (Geneva, NY)

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Memorial to Dr. Silver From the Ridge, May, 1916 The sudden death of Dr. John Archer Silver, Professor of History at William Smith and Hobart Colleges, occurred in Geneva on Feb- ruary 6. We, as students of the College Which, throughout its brief history, had known Dr. Si1ver's devoted service, cannot express our appreciation more fittingly than Professor Yeames has done in an address delivered in St. john's Chapel, Hobart College, on March 24. It is a universal human instinct that is summed up in the old adage, De mortius nil nisi bonum,-Of the dead speak naught but good. One who knew Doctor Silver Well has said that the only fault 80

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Q LW? - . 1 v We weep for you, the alumnae Wrote We deeply sympathize, The need of rules like those at Smith We can not realize! Can it be true that Hobart men You do not all despise? 79

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'Co be found with him was his lack of religious faith. To me there Seems to be misunderstanding here. He had been trained for the ministry of the Church, but had never entered upon that work be- cause of his honest conviction that it was not the work for him, and because of his honest doubt of many of the things that a minister of the church is supposed to believe. 'There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.' Anything like hypoc- risy or even compromise was impossible to him. Intellectual integ- rity is the first requisite for any real religious faith: that first step he had firmly taken, and his sincerity would allow him to take no further steps until he could see the way clearly. Such integrity and sincerity, I may add, have far more moral value--yes, and spiritual value too,-than the easy acquiescences of many so-called believers, Or the narrow-minded dogmatism of many teachers of religion, and one of the reasons for the ineffectiveness of the Church is that it has too many preachers who preach what they only think they believe, what in truth they have never done any real thinking about at all. I believe then that even in his destructive criticism Doctor Silver's teaching was an influence for good, helping at least to clear the air, to broaden the outlook, and to establish the elementary essentials of honesty and clear thinking. He was perhaps an agnostic: who is not? Who is there that in the face of the eternal problems of an infinite universe must not bow his head in utter humility and say, 'I do not know'? He was of course a skeptic: what else would any one wish to be? The skeptic is merely the man who keeps ever alive the spirit of inquiry-that intellectual curiosity in which, as Aris- ' - ' l k t f totle says, all philosophy begins, -who is always on the oo ou or new truth, always growing mentally, .always following the gleam that lures us on the fascinating but baffling quest, the' endless voyage of discovery into 'that untraveled world whose margin fades forever ' th d 1' t and forever when we move. Move we must, as long as e e ica e machinery of the brain holds out-and why not longer? Is the hu- man s irit completely dependent upon the frail vessel in which it P sails on this brief voyage of its earthly life? No, though the ship surel his adven- goes down, though the Voyager is lost to our eyes, y 81