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4 (196) THE I
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WHAT I ASK.
What I ask, On, blessed Saviour,
Is to feel Thy presence near.
Eehold the beauty of that fragrance.
Nothing on this earth can sear.
What I ask, Oh, tender Saviour! ,
Send me purity of heart;
Fill me with infinite desire.
Thou, alone, canst this Impart.
oc-aun, i ?sk ii;ee 10 inspire
Me with humility divine,
Lot not petty ills conspire
To mar the peace that may be mine.
Give me tender thoughts and phrases.
Kindly words and sympathy.
Life, not death's, the time for caresses;
Hearts need help along the way.
1 ask strength, for the noon-tide heat,
That I faint not, till my task's complete.
Heaven's hoignts lie beyond earth's struggles.
Every victory in this life is virtue.
This crowning grace is my desire;
With it Thy glories I can see,
And naught on earth, but this sufliceth
Till mine eyefe beholden Thee.
Kissimmee, Fla. ?Mrs. Helen Perdew.
"THE MEDIATION OF YOUTH IN CHRISTIAN
PROGRESS."
FROM AN ADDRESS BY WOODROW WILSON.
"It has been said that the best leaders are
those with ordinary opinions and extraordinary
abilities, those who hold the opinion of the generation
in which they live, but hold it with such
vitality, perceive it with such executive insight,
that they can walk at the front and show the
paths by which the things generally purposed
can be accomplished. There is in progress a
necessary conservative element, and therefore it
behooves us to ask whether we can entrust progress
to young men. Those who do not deal with
large bodies of young men suppose that young
i: i_ T i i? j hi T
men are rauicam. i nave never rouna mem so. i
think the most arch-conservative I ever dealt with
is the American undergraduate. He does not
want anything touched with change. He forms a
custom in his little community in four years;
the fifth year it has become immemorial, and he
forbids us to touch the immemorial observance of
the little community which he loves. He wishes
you not to alter even the exterior appearances of
things on the grounds where he has spent his life.
in the buildings to which his affections have begun
to cling in such a way that they can never
be torn away. It seems to him desecration to
touch the slightest thing that has been intimately
associated with his short experience. There is no
tenacity like the tenacity of the young mind, and
there is no conservative like the young conservative,
and I believe that the most conservative
body you can find is a body of young men. The
difficult, the dangerous, the desperate, radicals
whom I have known have been men past middle
life, men upon whose palates the taste of life
has fnmnyt hittor mnn n'tinoo amhih'Ano Viotta hnnn
checked and cooled; these are the desperate radicals
who want to clear some new stage upon
which they can assert their power; not the
youngsters compounded of hope, not the youngster
hopeful of everything, but the man who has
lost the impnlse of hope and is standing near to
the darkness of despair. He is oyur radical,
your revolutioniat. your man of recklesR change.
"And yet this ia true only in a certain field.
'RJS8BYTERIAN OF THE S(
headings
The youth is conserva/tav^ in this respect, that he
did not Jiiiuseii' originate his own convictions. The
young man takes his convictions from the world
into which he is born, which i& the world of older
persons; he takes ids convictions from the preceding
generation. Your radical is your man of
new and novel convictions; not your man who
takes his doctrine from the generation that precedes
him, but the man who seeks to originate a
doctrine for his own generation. There are young
men who seek such change; but you will generally
hnd, upon analyzing the convictions which
1 hnv 11 fffo nr.nn
vuvj uigv i/iiv. ix 1*1 Lil I tilCJ' ?11 C
not new, but old. One oL the difficulties about our
education at the present time is that we do not
thoroughly enough apprise our young men of
what has been done. The educated mind is the
lobe in the human brain which contains the
memory, the memory of what the human race has
done and thought and attempted and achieved
and failed to achieve, and if this lobe of memory
be not properly stimulated the race will lose its
sense of identity. The psychologist tells me that
1 know who 1 dm to-day because I remember who
1 was yesterday, and if I did not remember who
I was yesterday I could not for the life of me
tell you who I am to-day. Aud so the human
race. Unless it can reckon truly with regard to
its past experiences, it lias lost both its identity
and its direction.
"For if I do not know where I came from, 1
do not know where I am going to. My direction
is determined not by the spot upon which I stand,
but the direction from which I have come, and
the recollections of the human race are the standards
by which it steers. See the consequence
when it does not. I had a friend, a very learned
IVipn H 1a9 l r? no??t o in r? o n?v\t?r
?vm<-**vvk aaa vv& ium uuixvn uuva, nuvj
undertook to reconcile all the arts under a common
category. He worked out a beautiful and
symmetrical system that was most pleasing to the
abstract mind and submitted it to a colleague for
his comment, who said: * My dear fellow, that is
most interesting, and always has been interesting,
but was exploded in the time of Aristotle.'
There would have been a great deal of effort
saved this gentleman if he had only recollected
as far back as Aristotle. The educated youngster,
therefore, is the youngster who carries the
|/iwiuu3 nun ui uii-iuuijr, lie eairies a eumpusii,
besides, for he knows which ip the north and
which is the east and which is the west; and he is
not your natural radical; he is your natural conservative
; the stock that he means to trade on in
this generation is the stock which was accumulated
in the last generation.
"But the youngster is progressive none the less
?in a sense which older men seldom sufficiently
realize. The youngster does not take his convictions
with any very nice discrimination; he takes
unera wnoie, in the mass, as they are administered
to him, in the bulk. The difficulty with us older
men is that we sickly the whole matter over with
the pale cast of thought. We begin to analyze,
we begin to split hairs betwixt north and northeast
side; we begin to say this part of the doctrine
is true, that part is false, this part of the
fJrwmnl ia trnn +V10+ an ? 1? 1'
-?w u uv, btiui uu luiti ^uianuii, mm Liitr uuia
ceases to beat upon us with its whole majestic
force. We feel the little discriminations that pull
us this way and that, and by the time we reach
sixty or thereabouts these pullings have slackened
all the speed in us, and we stand still and say,
Whither shall we go? Whereas the youngster does
not discriminate between one part of the.force
0 U T B I-March 5, 1913
nnd the other; he goes steadily forward before
the beating wind that blows upon him out of the
past. Professor Langley, of the Smithsonian Institution,
not long jigo tried a very interesting ex
periment. He was interested to know how even
the weaker kinds of birds could stand still with
outstretched wings in a gale, not being driven by
it. but simply tipping themselves very gently and
deftly, shifting themselves and standing always
.still, not driven. He erected in a window a little
line of paper windmills such as we have all
used when we were boys, and through this window
blew a powerful drauerht of air He found
that not all of the windmills rotated in the same
direction, that some were reversing, that others
were standing still; and it became evident to him
that the wind was not a solid movement of the
sir, but a movement in eddies, in currents, in
counter currents, the most of the movement being
forward, but not every part of it moving
rorwara at once; and that what the bird was
doing wa3 finding the interstices in the wind
and balancing himself where the gale did not
beat upon him. That is what we are doing in
our discriminating doctrine. But the youngster
is like a boat with a sail spread to the breeze,
lie may sometimes run close to the wind, but
nevertheless he is governed by the bulk of the
current and not seeking the interstices where it
does not blo*r and impel him; and so, being impelled
more than we are impelled, he seems to
"nave a pace that we cannot accomplish. He is
yielding himself to the net power that is in the
convictions which he holds, and so he moves
forward with a confidence that seems rash, with
a confidence which seems blind to those of us
who are older, more circumspect, more prudent,
more thoughtful
"I sometimes think of the movement of
youngsters in the field of thought like the movement
of volunteers, particularly American volunteers,
in military movements. The volunteer
will often accomplish what the seasoned troops
eannot, because the seasoned troops know where
it is dfln<rpmiis t-r> rrn and tllo vnlnntnnpo dn
and by their very ignorance of danger they face
and accomplish impossible tasks. Not only that,
but the volunteer is impatient of discipline when
he is in process of movement. He wishes to act
as an individual; wants his fellows at his side,
but will not stop if they lag; and will often in
little groups climb some height that it was supposed
no troops could take?not overcoming the
obstacles, not knowing that they are there, unconscious
that he is climbing barriers, with his
evas so lifted that he sees no barrier and
scrambles to the place of power with the sheer
impulse of ignorant audacity.
"This is tho power that is in youth; this is
the power that makes us afraid of young men.
Convince them of something and let them get
the bit in their teeth, and they will bolt in spite
of you. If you do not want them to bolt, do not
convince them. If you want them to bolt, have
convictions that are sufficiently hot to be communicated.
and thev will take them. Thev are
a transmitting medium, but the only thing that
can set them on fire is fire itself. This, it seems
to me, is the function of youth, which I should
designate as the function, not of pushing ideas
?that is a function of discrimination?but the
function of pushing ideals forward in *he
world; and, after all, one ideal is worth twenty
ideas. I mean in propulsive force; I do not
mean in intellectual training, but in propulsive
force, in acoomnlishment. in what, one mav r??ll
spiritual dynamics. One ideal is worth twenty
ideas. It takes a certain movement of an idea
to make it an ideal. No mere idea, stripped and
naked, is fit to become an ideal; you have to
dress it becomingly, yon have to recommend it in
insinuating ways, yon nave to illuminate it with
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