New Britain herald., 1920-06-21

names to conceptions that were al- ready familiar. The God we brought with us, from home is little more than an enlarged figure of father or mother projected against the back ground of the ages. I know not which most to pity, the boy who, having had no father or mother or friend that could take their place in child hood. has been forced to construct his own God from the bare phrases of the written word, or the boy whose parents have had some essential ele- ment left out of their nature so that their sternness has given him an un- pitying God or their weakness capricious one.
 Nor does this process end with childhood. The grown man seeks companionship and leadership just as surely as the boy seeks the society of his brothers or the guidance of his father. Companions and leaders shape our ideals of God in later life, just as the members of our family did in early life. Amid all the pleas ure and profit of these friendships, the most important thing that we get out of them is a new revelation of God; a background for our religious ideals, wider at any rate, if not
 
 in our homes. To be like our friends is our ideal of good; to do what they do. our ideal of success. Infinitely important, for good or for evil, is the reaction of these ideals upon our idea of God. Every great movement of popular feeling, in college, in the nation, or in the worlds history, is funda mentally a religious movement the finding of a new object of wor- ship. Every leader in such a move ment, here or hereafter, is a prophet true or false. according as he leads his followers to worship something better or worse than they did before.
 There will not be many of us to whom is given the power of the prophet to reach men of all nations and of all ages; but to each man who will live his life unselfishly it is given to do something of the same kind of works and add something to the worlds knowledge of God. In the family and in business, in the nation and in the world, three points stand out clear for every one of us; first, that people get their religion, not from the constituted teachers of re- ligious doctrine, but from the men they know and the men they admire; second, that the choice of men to knoW ana determines what kind of God each of us will have and in what spirit each of us will do his work; and third, that whatever power of leadership a man possesses is in its essence d power of shaping other mems religion and giving them ideals of the divine purpose. AS a man does this work we'll or ill, falsely or truly, for his own apparent benefit or for the lasting be7efit of mankind, so shall that work be judged in the final account.
 Gentlemen of the graduating class: The great thing that a man accomplishes in his life, the thing which is probably more important in the long run than all the rest of his lifo put together, is this revelation of God which he gives to his fellow men. In one sense the experience of Jesus Christ stands out apart from the rest of humanity. In another but perhaps equally important sense, it is typical of what every man can do and NAould do according to the measure of bis ability. So to live and so to think that those about Us will have more courage and self-sacrifice. i and larger and truer vision of what is required of man-these things are more important than all tho scien- tific principles we can discover or all the material results we can achieve"