e. Its vital principle is not its code, but its motive.
Love, clear-sighted, loyal, personal, is its breath and immortality. Christ
came, not to save himself, assuredly, but to save the world. His motive,
his example, are every man's key to his own gifts and happiness. The
ethical code he taught may no doubt be matched, here a piece and there a
piece, out of other religions, other teachings and philosophies. Every
thoughtful man born with a conscience must know a code of right and of pity
to which he ought to conform; but without the motive of Christianity,
without love, he may be the purest altruist and yet be as sad and as
unsatisfied as Marcus Aurelius.
Christianity gave us, in the fullness of time, the perfect image of right
living, the secret of social and of individual well-being; for the two are
not separable, and the man who receives and verifies that secret in his own
living has discovered not only the best and only way to serve the world,
but also the one happy way to satisfy himself. Then, indeed, has he come to
himself. Henceforth he knows what his powers mean, what spiritual air they
breathe, what ardors of service clear them of lethargy, relieve them all
sense of effort, put them at their best. After this fretfulness passes
away, experience mellows and strengthens and makes more fit, and old age
brings, not senility, not satiety, not regret, but higher hope and serene
maturity.
EDUCATION THROUGH OCCUPATIONS[12]
WILLIAM LOWE BRYAN
[Footnote 12: A commencement address, reprinted from _The Spirit of
Indiana_, by William Lowe Bryan. Copyright, 1917, by the Indiana University
Bookstore. By permission of the author and of the publishers.]
Young ladies and gentlemen, your chief interest at present, as I suppose,
is in the occupations which you are about to follow. What I have to say
falls in line with that interest.
In the outset, I beg to remind you that every important occupation has been
made what it is by a guild--by an ancient guild whose history stretches
back in direct or indirect succession to the farthest antiquity. Every such
historic guild of artisans, scholars, lawyers, prophets, what not, rose,
one may be sure, to meet some deep social necessity. In every generation
those necessities were present demanding each the service of its share of
the population, demanding each the perpetuation of its guild. And because
in the historic arts and crafts and professions mankind has spent in ev
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