# The Sunday Eight O'Clock/Commencement

MY first conscious memory as a child is of standing in the open doorway on a spring morning and of looking out upon a world to me unknown. There was before me a pleasant flower-bordered path leading down through a shadowy valley, and beyond all this the hills frowning dark and mysterious. It was an untried world that beckoned to me and that stirred within my childish heart longings to get out into it. It was my first Commencement.
You stand on Commencement day much as I did then, eager, curious, uncertain, holding out your hands hopefully to the future. It is a good many years since I had that first view of the world. I have been down the flower-bordered path of youth. I have seen something of the shadowy valley of sorrow and hardship and sacrifice, and I ​have tried to struggle up the hills beyond. I have not found it a bad world. If the flowers along the path faded or disappeared it was perhaps because they were not tended, or I did not sow the seed. If I failed it was as often my own fault as otherwise.
There are those who will tell you that the world into which you are going is a sort of world different from the one in which you have been living these four years; that you will never know real life until you get out of college; but those who say this have seldom realized what real college life is. They have joked with their work, they have shirked moral and mental responsibility, they have not looked duty squarely in the face, they have not taken their obligations seriously, and until they do they will never know real life in college or out of it.
At a meeting of college graduates not long ago I was struck by the contrast be tween the speeches of two men whom I had ​known fifteen years before. One man has found the world exacting, unreasonable, unjust, and cruelly difficult. The other thought it a beautiful place; kind, gracious, and considerate as an old friend. He said he had been lucky.
As I sought an explanation, it seemed to me to lie in the college life and development of the two men. The first one had been a loafer who just managed to slip by at examination time. If he passed he gave a party to celebrate his luck; if he failed he did the same thing to drown his sorrow. He had cultivated neither ambitions nor ideals; he had congratulated himself that in his various derelictions he had never been caught, and he was hilariously satisfied merely to pass his work.
The second man had done his work honestly and well; he had studied whether he was expecting a quiz or not, and he had practiced physical and moral self-control even when he was not in training for an ​athletic event or at home during the summer going to church with mother; he had played the game honestly with himself and with the college.
You who are going out into the world will not find it all a flower-bordered path. For you there will be, I have no doubt, often the dark valley and the steep rocky hills. Go to your work with honest hearts, with eagerness to struggle, with courage and hope in your success. If you fail at first or if your progress is slow, do not despair. You have youth, and strength, and training, and if you have in addition ideals and faith in yourself, you will succeed, and you can look back as the years follow each other rapidly to a happy, successful Commencement.
June