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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 1, 1900)
24 THE B4TTALI0N. to be a man in the true sense one cannot be a loose-jointed puppet, per forming all sorts of unlooked-for an tics as some one else pulls a string. To be an intelligent agent we cannot have one part of us wool-gathering on the prairie, hunting, Ashing, ball-play ing, visiting, whilst another part of us is supposed to be working a problem, demonstrating a mechanical theorem, developing a chemical formula, trans lating a dead language into living thought, in this class room. I tell you nay; it will not work To be “here” to duty of any kind is something like this: High up on a pedestal or throne of honor sits Con science with open ear and eye Axed upon every spring and joint of the lower man. Ranged about him in due rank are the; members of his cabinet— Reason, Judgment, Will; within easy summons stand his prime ministers— Attention, Imagination, Memory. A little lower down are his sheriffs and under ofAcers—the senses, the emo tions, the passions, the desires, the appetites. Still lower, but in Armer grasp as the distance is greater, stand in waiting, Brain Muscle, Nerve, with all the machinery of activity, all the bodily members and functions. It is an empire of the sternest require ments, that manhood of yours, young man, or I prefer to think, a Republic of the most harmonious agencies; foi the happiest and freest being in God’s universe is at least the creature who has all functions simultaneously at work for a common aim and that a moral one. Now notice this, the most important asertion I have made this morning. If we are here as students at college, with only partial, little, sel- Ash, mercenary aims; if we are here for ends which will not make us work and sweat and tire ourselves in every corner and nook of this our entire be ing, for ends which will not call out and drill our souls, our hearts our in tellect, our bodies, we are like the cadet who stands out yonder and delib erately answers “here” to his name, when he—the man—is not there in heart and mind and full determina tion. When you sign your names on those matriculation blanks at the opening of the year, your President, your Commandant, we all have a right to believe that it is unreservedly done. We trust you as we trust the man who endorses our personal check. There ought to be nothing between the lines. It is a contract as binding on us and you as if we went before a magis trate and swore to our good faith. We contract to encourage and, so far as we can, to give you the opportunity to exercise, all the manhood that is in you. You contract to put all that man hood at our disposal. When I speak of manhood I am not discounting the fun and frolic which make a part of youth. “A man’s a man for a’ that.” A manly youth is the masterpiece of creation, God’s own preferred, called protege and agent, for when he an swers “here” to his name there are in- Anite possibilities ahead of him. Let him be endowed, as an integral part of his manliness, with the youth’s faith—God rules—and the youth’s highest law—God shall rule in me and through me. Let him be educated to use his opportunities to advantage, and we have a creature without paral lel in the universe. I read you as a lesson God’s reveille call to young Samuel. His answer, you will remember was: “Here am I, for surely thou didst call me,’’and if you will read his life you will And that in that reply there was the nas-
