14
THE BATTALION.
think I have shown }^ou that you are not to keep company,
but to make company. You are to be molders., framers,
conservators, leaders, of society. Yes, you men who have
been trained by refined parents and in virtuous associations
and Christian churches at your home are to be yourselves
educators of those men here who may not have had your
advantages. Social life and moral life in the barracks will
be, like the stand which your class takes in the lecture-
room, just what you men of honest intentions make it. It
is not a matter of numbers either, or of betrayal of con
fidence, or of any great stir or officious intermeddling, or
of the “I am holier than thou” hypocrisy—it is a matter
of letting one’s little light shine all about in so kindly,
helpful, earnest, and yet so modest a way that those who
see it never think of you except as the benevolent agent of
One who is all-powerful, all-wise and all-merciful. (“When
I have confidence in the sixth (form), there is no position
in England that I would exchange for this; but if they do
not support me, I must go.”—Dr. Arnold, of Rugby.)
Some of our strong old English words have been so
abused by vulgar association that they have lost their
beauty. One of them is the word win. It has been stolen
and so falsified by the gamblers of the world, that inadvert
ently we attach to it some notion of trickery. On the con
trary, it means to gain by kindness.
Then win these men by kindness, you believers in rec
titude and virtue, make them feel that in lighting morality
they are not fighting you, but their own consciences and
common sense, that, like the foul bird, they are defiling
their own nest.