The daily morning journal and courier., 1905-06-26
COMMENCEMENT OPENS
 WITH BACCALUREATE
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to college. If during his college life he has come to identify goodness with the keeping of a complex set of rules and observances. he is in great danger. It is almost inevitable that under the new conditions which he meets he will dis obey some of these rulss or disregard some of these obseryanees. If he has placed his trust in keeping the letter of the law, the breaking of one rule is apt to be followed by the breaking of a great many others. This experience is a typical one. Every man and every race which relfes for protection on the text of the law rather than on its spirit is menaeed by this risk of com plete failure in emergencies.
 But even if no emergencies of crises arise which stretch our rules to the breaking point, there is another and more insidious series of dangers which beset the man whose morality and re- I ligion are matters of rules alone. The keeping of definite rules produces self satisfaction; and standardization is but one step short of moral stagnation. Few of us realize how hard it is to es- cape this peril or how much harm it , does to it's victims.
 It is inevitable that a body of men brought up together and working in harmony with one another should value their rituals and creeds and codes of law. To certain extent it is right and wise, as well as inevitable. For all these things represent the sum- marized experience of the rast. A rit- ual is a set of observances which past generations have gradually accumula- ted because they found them valuable in promoting a reverent and religious frame of mind. A creed is a set of propositions which past generations have collected because they found them useful in helping people toward working philosophy of life. A code is set of laws which past generations have established because they found them effective in securing that orderly conduct which is the basis of E. good morals. Any man who recklessly throws aside these means of promoting religion and morality is lacking alike in reverence and in practical wisdom. But it is easy to exalt these things into place for which they were never in- tended; to make them ends instead of means, goals of human progress in !, stead sof steps in human progress. A man may take such satisfaction in the observance of a religious form that he ceases to value the religious spirit. He may repeat the words of a creed until he cares more for the words than for the meaning. He. may obey a code of laws so implicitly that he rufuses to- recognize the need of any moral au-. thority outside of that code. :
 Poor Christian. in Bunyan's Pill grim's Progress, is forever stumbling. into this kind of pitfall, The very. intensity of his desire to be good makes him overvalue any step, real or appa- rent, in the direction of goodness, and think that he has practically reached the end when he has only grasped a8 more Or less imperfect means. He has a burden of sin, of which he would be rid. He hears that MT. Legality has skill in relieving people of such bur dens, and he follows MT. Legality until a mountain threatens to fall upon his head. At a later stage of his journey he goes to sleep in his satisfaction at being half way up the Hill Difficulty, and loses the roll which was to give him admission to the Celestial Clty.' Again, he is so puffed up with the knowledge which he has received at the Palace Beautiful that the next stages of his Journey are fraught with perils which he himself has created; and. he finds the weapons which were given him in that palace a most uncer- tain defense against the assaults 3<ot Apollyon. Not until the end of his ca- reer. when he is fit to pass into the kingdorn of heaven, has his experience taught him to keep awake on the En- schanted Ground of convention and business usage, and to preserve him self from that sleep into which many, pilgrims, safely past the physical trials and dangers of the way, fall, never more to awake. .s ..es As #
 Never more to awake: for the sleep of conventionality is of all slumbers the most fatal. Life is progress pet petual adaptation to new conditions. The self-satisfaction which leads a
 man to be content with the old is the beginning of death. The apparent ex- oelIence of result actually attained, the mistakes and errors involved i'll imperfect efforts to advance to better results, must not be allowed to ob- scure our view of this truth. No man, however far and however well he has managed the voyage of life, can afford ct rest complacent in what he has achieved. The best of us. said an old sea captain, has made mistakes enough 4to throw him half a point off his course; and if a man is half point off his course the light which he fondly believes to be the harbor entrance marks the reef on which he is going to X destruction. .
 The Doctor Faustus of mediaeval le- gend was a man who bargained his soul away to the devil for a brief sea- son of indulgence in riotous living and the practice of black arts of magic. Not so with the modern Faust-the Faust whom Goethe saw and knew. His fall comes not through magic arts that fail to meet his souls longings, or sensual pleasures whose last taste is bitterness His fall is to come when- ever, in the gradual unfolding of his life's plans, he shall profess himself