here; and their loyalty is deeper and subtler and more a matter of
the inmost soul than the gregarious loyalty of the clubhouse pattern
often is.

Indeed, there is such an inner spiritual Harvard; and the men I speak
of, and for whom I speak to-day, are its true missionaries and carry
its gospel into infidel parts. When they come to Harvard, it is not
primarily because she is a club. It is because they have heard of her
persistently atomistic constitution, of her tolerance of exceptionality
and eccentricity, of her devotion to the principles of individual
vocation and choice. It is because you cannot make single one-ideaed
regiments of her classes. It is because she cherishes so many vital
ideals, yet makes a scale of value among them; so that even her
apparently incurable second-rateness (or only occasional
first-rateness) in intercollegiate athletics comes from her seeing so
well that sport is but sport, that victory over Yale is not the whole
of the law and the prophets, and that a popgun is not the crack of doom.

The true Church was always the invisible Church. The true Harvard is
the invisible Harvard in the souls of her more truth-seeking and
independent and often very solitary sons. _Thoughts_ are the precious
seeds of which our universities should be the botanical gardens.
Beware when God lets loose a thinker on the world--either Carlyle or
Emerson said that--for all things then have to rearrange themselves.
But the thinkers in their youth are almost always very lonely
creatures. "Alone the great sun rises and alone spring the great
streams." The university most worthy of rational admiration is that
one in which your lonely thinker can feel himself least lonely, most
positively furthered, and most richly fed. On an occasion like this it
would be poor taste to draw comparisons between the colleges, and in
their mere clubhouse quality they cannot differ widely:--all must be
worthy of the loyalties and affections they arouse. But as a nursery
for independent and lonely thinkers I do believe that Harvard still is
in the van. Here they find the climate so propitious that they can be
happy in their very solitude. The day when Harvard shall stamp a
single hard and fast type of character upon her children, will be that
of her downfall. Our undisciplinables are our proudest product. Let
us agree together in hoping that the output of them will never cease.

[1] Speech at the Harvard Commencement Dinn