BACCALAUREATE SERMON

Yesterday afternoon in Appleton Chapel Professor W. W. Fenn, S.T.B. '84, Dean of the Faculty of Divinity, preached the baccalaureate sermon to the Senior class, his text being: When the young man heard the saying, he went away sorrowful for he was one that had great possessions. Mt. 19, 22.

Men usually grieve not because they have but because they lack great possessions, said Dean Fenn, and yet this clean, ardent, and dutiful young man who ventured to say to Jesus, and doubtless with entire sincerity, that he had kept all the commandments, was completely changed in his attitude toward himself and his possessions by a single sentence from the lips of Jesus. In considering the requirement of Jesus in this case, Christendom has unfortunately fastened its attention not upon the essential but almost exclusively upon the accidental element, for the point of his command lies in the "Come, follow me," and to part with his possessions was but a preliminary which, in existing circumstances and in that particular instance, happened to be necessary. This young man's possessions stood in the way of his wondrous possibilities, for if he had been ready for the sacrifice which the acceptance of the command required, he might be living today in the appreciative memory of mankind among those who shine as the brightness of the firmament and as the stars for ever and ever. This tragedy of Palestine has been enacted repeatedly in the history of mankind, for those who have fought a good fight and won a great victory pause to congratulate themselves and enjoy the fruits of their labor while others who have been their inferiors pass beyond them toward the greater triumphs that await. The security of the past depends largely upon the fidelity of those to whose keeping the tradition of the past has been intrusted. The splendid past of Harvard depends, in some degree at least, upon its keeping ever in the van of educational advance. For possessions to check possibilities--that is tragedy.

Turning now to personal life, Dean Fenn said that there were many specific ways in which a man's possessions might stand in the way of his possibilities. Many a man of brilliant parts has made little of himself simply because he was never obliged to put forth all his powers. A man of means frequently fails, just because of that fact, to become a means for the highest ends. Occasionally crises come in which the Christ appears bearing the sword and demanding utter self-renunciation. No one here, almost under the shadow of Memorial Hall, can doubt it. Today, however the demand usually comes in a different form, namely, that a man shall keep his possessions that he may give himself, for there is a vast amount of work needing to be done in the world which is and probably always will be unremunerative and which on that account offers an attractive opportunity to young men of wealth. There are few joys in life to be compared with sustained interest in some in- tellectual pursuit. Yet young men of wealth often miss this gladness and fall far short of their possibilities, because their possessions encourage laziness.

Again, it often happens that a man's wealth spoils his possibilities of deep and diversified friendship. For it is among workers and never among idlers that true friendships are formed. But there are other possessions than those of money which interfere with a man's possibilities and foremost among these are intellectual possessions. These hinder the fulfillment of intellectual possibilities in three ways. First, many men of exceptional intellectual endowments waste themselves and their abilities just because their very brilliancy makes them unwilling to undergo necessary mental drudgery. Again, a man's academic possessions interfere with his possibilities when they are accompanied by academic snobbishness which leads them to disdain the wisdom of intelligent but nonacademic persons. And thirdly, a man's intellectual possessions may be injurious to his mental possibilities if he allows what has been taught him to harden into formulae.

It is true, nevertheless, that a man must necessarily renounce many of his possibilities in order to accomplish anything in this highly specialized world. His interests almost unavoidably contract: he cannot leave the main fine of his pursuit to wander off into devious ways, however alluring. But while engrossment in a chosen task does reclude the possibility of comprehensive self-development and activity, it is nevertheless true that if life is to be kept wholesome and happy, the sense of a wide horizon must not be lost. And it is just that sense of the wholeness of life including all the fragmentary individual interests and pursuits which is of the essence of religion. And hence it is that religion brings salvation from narrowness. In these days of high specialization religion has become indispensable to the worker whether with hands or brain just because it does mean that sense of a wide horizon which redeems one from littleness and pettiness by keeping alive the sense of vast possibilities, while it also braces him for his chosen task. And so for their own sake and for the sake of the society in which they aim to be most highly useful members, college graduates ought to ally themselves with the church. But if their possessions of whatever sort they may be keep them from hearing and obeying Jesus's present call to loving discipleship, the tragedy of the text will be repeated in their lives and their noblest possibilities will be sacrificed. There can be no nobler ambition than, in the words of John Stuart Mill, "so to live that Christ would approve of one's life." There is no higher type of manhood, there is no better, more useful, more satisfying way of life, there is no greater joy, than to be at one in spirit and purpose with him and with the great company of loyal and loving souls who gratefully acknowledge his inspiration and guidance and to set before ourselves any meaner ideal is to be faithless to our grandest possibilities