BACCALAUREATE SERMON

The baccalaureate services of the Senior class were held in Appleton Chapel at four o'clock yesterday afternoon. The sermon was delivered by Rev. William De Witt Hyde, president of Bowdoin College.

The Seniors formed in front of Holworthy and marched to the Chapel, taking the seats reserved for them in the front pews on the floor. The services opened with the singing of "Onward, Christian Soldiers," by the College choir, and prayer by President Hyde. After the reading of a selection from the Psalms, and the scripture lesson, a prayer and an anthem closed the simple order of services preliminary to the baccalaurette sermon.

President Hyde took at his texts the fiftieth verse of the ninth chapter and the twenty-third verse of the eleventh chapter of St. Luke; "he that is not against us is for us," and "he that is not with me is against me."

These two verses represent the contrasted conditions of college and of the outside world. College life and college standards of judgment are lenient; those of the world are severe and strict. Nor is the reason for this hard to understand. Men in college, with no keen competition of the world's life to drive them apart and with countless ties of common associations to draw them together, naturally come to regard and to trust one another as friends: individual struggle is the characteristic of the life of the outside world; there is less common sympathy and forbearance there than among men in college, and if any man does not definitely show himself in heart and deed in sympathy with other men he is at once classed as against them.

What are the characteristics which will enable a man to meet this strict test of the world; to be considered as "of" and "for" men and not against them? First, he must give the world his best. He must make it the aim of his life not to look for easy positions, but to make himself indispensable and invaluable in whatever position he fills; he must feel "not that the world owes him a living, but that he owes the world a life." Second, he must not take something for nothing, but must pay full price for what he does receive. He must repay the love of men with his own best love, and, above all, he must repay the love of woman, which is the most precious thing in all the earth, with no transient endearment, but with his most faithful and abiding devotion. Third, he must be brotherly. College men have privileges which not one man in a thousand has, but this does not make them better than other men. The bread that men of culture and leisure eat they owe to the farmer and the miller and the baker; the houses they live in they owe to the carpenter and mechanic; the clothes they wear to the shepherd and weaver and shop-keeper. Let them consider themselves the equal of the toiling classes when they do their work as faithfully, but let them never, in vain condescension, consider themselves above them. Fourth, let men be self-sacrificing. Let them give themselves for others and let them sacrifice the lower part of their own nature for what is highest in themselves.

Yet, after all, this is all summed up simply in imitating Christ. He gave the world his best; he took nothing he did not win; he was brotherly, and he sacrificed himself to Gethsemane's agony and Calvary's cross for men. If college men will strive after the ideal of the social Christ they will learn to live with the world and to serve the world.