Baccalaureate Hits Hypocrisy

William Alfred Eddy Refuses Comfort to Our Enemies In Hard-Hitting Address to Seniors

President William Alfred Eddy of Hobart College, who recently asked to be assigned to active duty as an officer in theU. S. Marine Corps, and who has beencalled up as an officer, assailed the "fairweather friends of democracy" who "are agreat comfort to our enemies," assertingthat those who assume the privileges of citizenship must also accept its responsibilities,in a hard hitting Baccalaureate Address tothe graduating class of 500 seniors in Rollins Chapel June 15. Mr. Eddy is an honorary member of the Dartmouth class of 1919and formerly was professor of English inHanover. The complete text of his Baccalaureate Address follows. The Lesson wasMatthew XXII:15-22.

I

A COLLEGE' EDUCATION AT DARTMOUTH was simpler in 1841. There was a handful of professors and a handful of courses, and every professor could teach every course for was not all of knowledge to be found along the straight and narrow road of Classics, Philosophy, Divinity, and Mathematics. I sometimes envy the simplified and unified college life that was the rule 100 years ago even though required daily chapel came before our breakfast! Today, however, we cannot go back.

With the unified curriculum has disappeared also the common stock of ideas shared by all two generations ago, when every family was raised on Shakespeare (even if only Lamb's "Tales"), Aesop's Fables, "Robinson Crusoe," "Alice in Wonderland," Greek mythology, Charles Dickens, and the Bible. In those days one could count on a familiar body of metaphor, allusion, parable, legend, and Bible stories, as well as an accepted idiom in ethics and social life learned from those sources.

Today we have no common language, common books, or standards of conduct on which we agree. Books pour from the presses, voices shriek at us on the radio, but it is a Babel of strange tongues, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Life is out of focus, each man quarrels with his neighbor,—there is no vision, and where there is no vision, the people perish.

The problem of sovereignty today is not simply a division of authority between Caesar and God. Modern man is entangled in a dozen conflicting loyalties and owes allegiance to a dozen realms. If there is one reality of politics which can be affirmed, it is the necessity to limit the independent sovereignty of each Pretender to the throne: the individual claim to self-expression: parental authority; the club; the col- lege; the nation or the race to which we belong. Many are the threads in the pattern of this crazy-quilted world.

On the other hand, it is not difficult to discern the image and to read the superscription stamped upon most of us. Some use a local currency bearing the image of tribal or household gods, valid (like street car tokens) for a few miles at best. We meet citizens of tiny, and often bankrupt, prin- cipalities whose frontiers hedge in a blueblooded family, a business corporation or an expensive city club. Others with a larger vision give their first allegiance to the nation, to the democracies, or to the fraternity of free men fighting aggression all round the world. Those who have enlisted in these several armies are citizens of a tangible patria which can be mapped, bounded, extended, or obliterated visibly.

The image and superscription may describe a family homestead, an industrial plant, or a national expanse unfolding under spacious skies from Maine to California. For centuries men have been fighting like beasts of the jungle, or seals on an island, to secure or to seize a cave, a rock, an ocean, or a continent. The image and superscription stamped upon their lives is that of an earthly monarch who rules some bit of geography or of society. These are the "inhabitants of the land," blind obedience to whom is idolatry. We are familiar with the names, the Amalakites, the Moabites, the Jehusites, Fascists and Philistines, Hittites, and Hitlerites.

II

We belong to other kingdoms, however, which are not of this world. In graduating from Dartmouth College you do not emigrate from a few acres in Hanover, New Hampshire. In sharing together for four years the traditions of Dartmouth, you have not been confined to the climate of Grafton County. As Dartmouth men, you are citizens of a province which does not appear on any map, a republic whose inhabitants are a host of Dartmouth students and teachers, living and dead; of artists, philosophers and scientists of all nations; of lovers of freedom back through the days of the American Constitution to Magna Charta, back to the founding of the University of Paris, back to the Epistles of St. Paul, and to the promises of God with which the world began. The promised land, to which Dartmouth men belong, knows no frontiers in time and space except the frontiers between darkness and light. We are bound together not by common acres but by common dreams; we are servants by no compulsion except that which we impose upon ourselves, made in the image of Him whose service is perfect freedom.

When Moses came down from the Mount, with the Commandments of God written on tablets of stone, he found the people in his absence had made and were worshipping a golden calf. This calf, they said, just happened. They took their earrings, bracelets, and necklaces, cast them into the furnace, and 10, it came out a calf, a cast-calf. The only instance in history of spontaneous generation, a veritable Melchizedek among cattle, without father or mother. Between the Law of God and the Golden Calf, perpetual war has been waged since the beginning of time. Either men kept the eternal word of God, or they turned aside to adopt the local gods of the inhabitants of the land wherever they happened to be,—the animal worship of Osiris or Baal, the path of least resistance, animal indolence and easy surrender to appetite and expediency.

Over and over and over again, the faithful were warned, "Take heed to thyself lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land," lest thou believe the latest orator, follow the local political boss, sacrifice principle to immediate profit, and become therefore a worshipper of the Golden Calf. Whitman recommends that we forget God, do not wait for Moses, and take it easy with the local quadrupeds:

"I think I could return and live with animals, they are so placid and so self contained;

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition;

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God; Not one is dissatisfied—not one is demented with the mania for owning things; Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago; Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth."

As far above this, as the heaven is above the earth, is the code of Emily Dickinson, who worshipped no quadruped, recognized no external master, but was bound by her own vows alone: "I had not minded walls Were universe on rock .... But 'tis a single hair, A filament, a law— A cobweb wove in adamant, A battlement of straw A limit like the veil Unto a lady's face But, every mesh a citadel And dragons in the crease."

This "cobweb wove in adamant" is my theme, the word of God written with the finger of God in stone. Either you and I make covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and worship the sub-human calf of Whitman, or we make a free covenant with God and live and die in obedience to his law. It is the choice the French people are making, by ones and by twos; the slaves of Vichy make a covenant with the rulers of the hour, while the free French remain faithful to the image in which we are created, the image of God. Americans are making the same choice today.

Some of them are saying, Lincoln is dead, Moses is gone away, who knows when he will return? The God he told us about is invisible, and perhaps doesn't exist. We may as well cooperate with the Nazi strong man who will make a good customer, and anyway, it's too late to bother much about religious or civil liberty. Let's follow the inhabitants of the land and join the cult of the Golden Calf of Berlin, or the cult of the sacred and sickly cow of Moscow. There are others, thank God, who agree with the physically frail but spiritually strong Emily Dickinson, rather than the muscular but stupid Walt Whitman.

"In the beginning was the Word." We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against spiritual superstition in high places, against the modern superstition that faith, the substance of things hoped for, is empty, merely because its power is not visible, like the power of muscle. Tell a disbeliever that faith can move mountains, and he laughs cynically, but I have seen a mountain moved by faith, even though it was a dead faith.

The great pyramids of Egypt were built, in the last analysis, not by muscle, nor by the whips of the overseers, nor by the edict of Pharaoh, but by blind faith in the resurrection of a mummy, if that mummy, protected by enough stone, could remain undisturbed through the centuries. This invisible and scientifically foolish belief evoked the edict, that raised the whips, that smote the backs of the slaves, who quarried the stone, and moved a mountain five hundred miles away.

The power of the Word is nowhere more evident than in the pains taken by rulers to confound language. The death penalty in Germany is imposed, not for drunkenness or adultery, but for listening to news from abroad. Let me give you a free tip for success as dictator or gangster: if you would lay the axe to the root of the tree, and utterly destroy a civilization, don't go about bombing cities. They can be rebuilt. Attack the language.

When Mustafa Kamal Pasha, the founder of the new Turkey, wanted to destroy the old traditions, he did not go about siaying the Moslem teachers and tearing veils from the faces of the women. He merely changed the alphabet. Thus, over night, he burned all bridges to the past. All culture, learning, and libraries became inaccessible to the people, while in the new script and alphabet he permitted the printing only of what was politically convenient. Man can live without hands and feet, but when the artery of ideas is cut, he bleeds to death.

III

There was a time when a man's word was his bond, when a man would bind himself by giving his pledge word. A faint memory of this code survives in the indignation which would descend upon a "pledge" of the Alpha Delts who went over to the Dekes. There was a time when sons sought their father's blessing, and dreaded his curse more than the plague, because the word was sacred. There was a time when men of faith could say, "Lord, speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed." Even godless, secular life was for centuries so affected by this reverence for a promise that a gentlemen's I.O.U., scribbled and signed, was still in my Dartmouth days the best security you could ask after a late game of poker in Middle Mass.

The fraternity of scholars, and of Christians, is bound together by the promises of God, and by men's faltering replies. The kingdom of God is founded upon the rock of men's faith, and the republic of letters likewise is founded upon the rock of man's faith in ideas which no tyrant can destroy because they are eternal.

Centuries ago mankind had substituted for God a Tower of Babel which tumbled upon them bringing the curse of a con- fusion of tongues so that no man understood his neighbor. We are witnessing today a second fall of men into a babel of unintelligible sounds, a disease more fatal than the destruction of cities or the sinking of ships. The only thread that binds free men together through the centuries is the sanctity of man's given word, of his profession of faith, and it is a melancholy sign of the times that we have fallen into the worship of Baal whose prophets utter sounds without sense.

According to a recent issue of Time, if we may believe the Gallup poll, Americans favor intervention in the war but don't wish to fight themselves; Germany is our enemy but we should not be at war with Germany; we should use our navy for "patrolling" but not for "convoying"; we should spend billions of dollars for the Good Neighbor policy but refuse to buy a little beef from the Argentine; there is terrible danger of a German victory, but Lindbergh is a traitor for saying so. "What this country needs is a good five-cent psychiatrist!" Perhaps our chief weakness as a people is our willingness to say one thing and to do another: to preach international cooperation but kill the League of Nations, to vote prohibition into the Constitution and retire immediately to a cocktail party; to applaud the Finns, the Greeks, and the British for defending our liberty, and at the same time decline to risk a ship or a life of our own.

This contempt for the plain meaning of our professions and our ideals is corrupting the soul of America. An instructive example is the political pacifist, a contradiction in terms. I have the greatest respect for the real pacifist who refuses responsibility in temporal affairs and devotes himself entirely to the improvement of his soul. These devout men and women who withdrew from the world, as monks or nuns or Mennonites, are consistent in refusing to use force and in declining, therefore, to meddle in affairs of this world.

The man, however, who is active politically, an advocate of the economic doctrines of Karl Marx, or a crusader for the redistribution of wealth and privilege, or an advocate of class war, and at the same time seeks exemptiop from military service as a Conscientious Objector is assuming the privilege of a citizen without accepting the responsibility. One has no right to go about lighting fires which destroy his neighbor without responsibility for the consequences.

William Penn was able to govern Pennsylvania successfully so long as Presbyterians and Baptists were available to do his frontier fighting for him. It is greatly to the credit of his successors in the Society of Friends that they came, themselves, to recognize the inconsistency of presuming to administer a commonwealth without being willing themselves to defend it. Liberty, today, is applauded by many who draw back in distaste from commitment to its defense. These fair-weather friends of democracy are a great comfort to our enemies.

We have no collateral to secure our investment for the future except the eternal promise of God, no permanent home except the promised land. Geologically, Palestine was, and is, a land of sand and thorns, but the "Promise" converted it into a holy land abundantly blessed with milk and honey. The common fraternity of those who together obey the Word, always converts the wilderness into a garden? You don't believe it? It sounds like unreal theology? How do we know? By word only, no other way: a voice from the void, saying, "Let there be light." A covenant with Abraham. A Testament, Old and New. Words from a burning bush.

The still, small voice that outlasts the earthquake, wind, and fire. The law graven on tablets of stone with the very finger of God. The word which came to the prophets, who reported, "Thus spake the Lord ...." The primal, eldest command whose disobedience brought death into the world, and all our woe. The vow whose observance kept Samson invincible, and whose neglect made him helpless before the Philistines. The Gospel, the good news announced to Mary, and sung for the shepherds by an angel choir. Quiet words that stilled the wave, raised the dead, and burned into the hearts of disciples. Words woven into epistles and dispatched precariously by messenger to Rome, Corinth, Ephesus, and Salonika.

Words forged from experience and hammered into the historic creeds.

The word of God reverently repeated by the faithful at countless altars on which the sun never sets. The word that led the pilgrims to build their homes on our stern and rock-bound coast, and to light the lamp of Christian scholarship in the dark forests of New Hampshire. The unbroken promises of 172 classes of Dartmouth alumni who have kept the faith. In the beginning was the Word, and in the end, when all else has crumbled, there will still be only the Word, the burning purpose in the mind, the divine energy that divides life from death, human from beast, and that binds you to each other, to your College, and to your God. This is our authentic stamp, the image and superscription to which we must render allegiance.

In the Near East, where I was raised, lives a legend a thousand years old in oral tradition. Back in the Dark Ages, a Mogul led his hungry and desperate army of adventurers out of Turkestan, seeking greener pastures in the West. As he tramped with his ragged and barefoot army over the Steppes of Central Asia, the Mogul stepped on a sharp thorn which penetrated several inches into his foot and filled him with pain and rage. In a paroxysm of fury he summoned his viziers and commended, "Cover the entire earth with leather so that I shall step on no more thorns."

Not daring to dispute the dictator, the miserable viziers salaamed and bowed themselves backward out of his presence. Gathered in a huddle out of sight they took counsel of despair. How could they carry out the command of the madman? There was not so much leather in the world. Even if there were, they had no money with which to buy it. And if they had it, long before it had been tacked down in the far corners of the earth, it would be worn out close to home.

Then one vizier, with a truly creative mind, had an idea, and he proposed an amendment to the Mogul, which would be quicker and mone efficient. "Your majesty, just cover your feet with leather, and wherever you go, you will we walking on leather." And so the first pair of shoes was made!

Think of this parable when you remember your heritage. Men of Dartmouth, you too serve a totalitarian realm.

Caesar demands that the earth be covered with his culture, that his system be nailed down everywhere, after stamping on every acre that is alien, and every race or idea that is uncongenial. Dartmouth has not taught you to stamp an image and superscription, not on others, but upon ourselves, to cover ourselves from head to foot with tolerance, reverence, and charity; and then, wherever we walk, we shall find ourselves standing on holy ground.

COMMENCEMENT SPEAKERS President William A. Eddy of Hobart College shown with President Hopkins following the Baccalaureate exercises June 15.Mr. Hopkins delivered his Valedictory address to the graduating class (see page 9) atthe Commencement exercises Sunday evening, June 15.

SECRETARY-CHAIRMAN OF 1941 Robert W. Harvey who will manage affairsfor the graduating class until the first reunion five years hence. He was editor-in-chief of "The Dartmouth," and has startedwork with the Washington, D. C. "Post."