Charles Reynolds Brown

“ The student who spends on vice or dissipation, money furnished by his father for term bills, entering them up in his financial statement as “sundries” or what not, is a whelp and a cad, no matter how good looking he is or how well his dress suit fits him! Dirt is dirt no matter how we may adorn it with lace; a lie is a lie, and theft is theft, no matter how they are smoothed over with fine words! There ought to be in all college life rigid, unsympathetic honesty, like that of the bank or the counting-room. ”

“ It is the power of vision cherished and cultivated more actively, perhaps, by women than by men. When her child is first laid in her arms it is only a bit of red flesh—that is all the canary in the window or the thoughtless observer who cares not for children would see. This bit of existence, so undeveloped as to have nothing one could call moral life, no power to choose or to aspire; so undeveloped as to have nothing one could call mental life, no power of recognition, discrimination, inference, has only the power to cry and to feed. ”

“ The highest return for doing anything lies in the power one gains to do it better and to do more of it. The reward for reading is not in the information gained or in the ideas acquired so much as in the mental stimulus which comes, enabling one to read more books and better ones and in time to produce ideas of his own. The artist goes out into the world to see the beauty of it in tree and flower, in landscape and mountain, in the quiet lake, and in the restless sea. His reward comes in increased power to see more beauty there than other people see and to transfer what he sees to canvas. ”

“ It is for you who stand on the slopes of Horeb, the mountains of God, by reason of the higher education you have received to cultivate this power by a spirit of obedient trust and by the habit of loving service. In every situation form the habit of turning aside from the commonplace shapes which engage your eyes that you may see some great and significant sight. Watch for the bush which burns with a mysterious fire! ”

“ The whole wretched habit of life comes from the lack of the power of vision, the inability to put these matters in right perspective, the great things great and the small things small.
Your real life does not consist in what you have. Your real life does not consist in what you are actually able to do. Your real life does not consist even, as men often say, in what you are. Your real life consists in what you see as possible and desirable for you, and in that capacity you feel stirring within you to gain all that sometime! ”

“ The truth of the first statement we see at a glance, for the blood, the inner life-quality, of any nation shapes its history. And the second statement is equally true; if the history of a nation is stained by incessant warfare, if generation after generation consents to the destruction of those courageous, virile young men whose hearts respond readily to the call for heroic sacrifice, such a history eliminates from the blood of that nation those very elements which it sorely needs. ”

“ Just how is right rewarded and wrong punished when the two are so intricately interwoven? No man is so white a sheep but that there are patches of goat about him here and there. No man is so bad but that there is some good in him if we observingly distil it out. And what of the final outcome—can good people be happily content if the sinful souls they loved are in conscious pain or even if they have been remorselessly wiped off the slate of existence? Is it too much to hope that God’s persuasions to righteousness being infinite may prove irresistible and so at last successful in every case? ”

“ Let the church and the university join hands in helping the people of our country to realize that when the final estimates are made up, it will not be “Blessed are the warmakers,” but “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.” How mighty would be the influence of the thirty millions of professing Christians in our own land in shaping public opinion, in determining our national policy, could their hearts be really fired with the magnificent principles and the passion for human well-being which possessed the heart of the Prince of Peace! ”

“ Risk is involved—so be it! A far greater risk to the general welfare and to the perpetuity of our institutions is involved in the opposite course. Why should not we, as a land of high principles and shining ideals, make the moral venture of staking our future upon a splendid obedience to the appeal of the great Messiah? Beat the swords into plowshares! Beat the spears into pruning-hooks! In peaceful, joyous industry let not this nation learn war any more! ”

“ The world is defrauded if by his foolishness, dissipation, or laziness it is put off with a whining, grumbling, irritable caricature of what the man might have been. He owes it to the members of his family not to burden them with unnecessary doctor’s bills, nursing, and anxiety. He owes it to them not to break down and die before his time, leaving them to struggle on alone. Good, sound health, clear up to the limit of what intelligence, conscience, and that resolution which will not take “no” for an answer may achieve, becomes a moral obligation! ”

“ Those universal forces of love and grace, of forgiveness and redemption, of guidance and comfort, to which in all ages men have learned to look, they are all ours if we will only use them. And when we learn to use them aright they bring peace, and strength, and joy.
There was the sense of an adequate horizon, then, in the words of this ancient poet as he stood that night on the field of battle looking up at the stars. The wind and the rain, the hail and the sleet had all aided the Israelites in winning the victory. ”

“ There are church services in which he will refuse to participate, but sincere, reverent, and rational worship will commend itself to him as a suitable expression of that deeper something growing within his heart. The upward look, the outward reach of a higher aspiration, the need of a hand-clasp which is not of earth, all these appeal to him! Let the music, the lessons, the prayers, and the atmosphere of the church be made a true, good, and beautiful expression of intelligent worship and the thoughtful student will rejoice in the aid it gives him in working out his problems. ”

“ There are other forces, unseen but mighty, moving the race up out of darkness into great and ever greater light. With all its groping and stumbling the race has never been allowed to lose its way altogether. Yesterday it thought as a child and understood as a child; today it puts away childish things and knows in part; tomorrow it will know still “in part,” but a larger part. And it is the sublime conviction of serious men that it is on its way to know even as it is known. ”

“ For the other one hundred and thirteen years our swords have been plowshares, our spears have been pruning-hooks, the fine steel of our young manhood has been devoted to those useful activities which do not destroy, but feed and save. If we can thus live and grow to be one of the mightiest nations on earth by the policy of peace, why this sudden spasm of military preparation now retarding our genuine development!
But we have become “a world power” men say, and some of the nations might attack us! ”

“ In the growth of international agreements, in the gradual advance of what might be called international litigation before courts of arbitration replacing the barbarous methods of slaughter and conquest, in the steady increase of that good understanding and mutual good-will promoted by travel and the interchange of products, by fellowship in the work of science and education and through the joys of sharing responsibility in the cause of philanthropy and religion—in these vast movements of thought and feeling lies the hope of that better day when peace shall hold an undisputed sway. ”

“ The smuggling in of a professional baseball or football player whose college standing is maintained by snap courses or by indulgent professors, is a thing despicable in the eyes of all right-minded college men. It is the sacrifice of the university idea to the demand for victory in college sports. And in similar fashion the disposition to win by fair means or by foul, which has sometimes disfigured our college athletics, lies at the root of the ugly distrust felt by institutions for each other on the athletic field. ”

“ To know him who stands revealed in brief on the pages of the four gospels and revealed at large in the splendid history into which he has built himself during the last nineteen hundred years, is to gain the utmost help for character-building that the world has thus far found.
We know Jesus Christ, not only by the study of his life and teachings, but by sharing in his purpose for the race and by participation in his spirit. It is this that enables us to see life whole, and to put ourselves in the way of gaining a fuller measure of that life complete. ”

“ Some by intemperance and some by licentiousness, some by sly dishonesty and some by cold-hearted selfishness—the roads to ruin are various, and men travel them all! Here they come at last, bruised, battered, and broken! They have been fighting the stars with the usual result. If here and there one keeps his head up and his face like polished brass, thinking he may escape the same ugly fate, you have only to wait for a time to see him with his face broken and his heart crushed like the rest. ”

“ The man who cannot perform unless he is in the lime-light, hearing the plaudits of the many, is made of poor stuff—he is lath and plaster, where there should be sound material. All such speedily lose the finer qualities out of whatever measure of righteousness they seem to possess. When a man goes straight along about his business, intent upon doing his own piece of work well and succeeds in such a way that the gratitude, esteem, and appreciation of his fellows come, he scarcely knows how, he finds this a beautiful and enduring source of satisfaction. ”

“ But the operation of this law reaches all the way down to those subtler sins of pride and envy, meanness and selfishness, moral indifference and spiritual neglect—all these in their final outcome make for misery and discontent as surely as two and two make four. No man ever outwitted or vanquished the stars, no man ever will. The sun rises when it is due, no matter how he chooses to set his individual clock, no matter what lies he may tell in his particular almanac. No man ever outwitted the moral order of the universe which is august and irresistible in its ongoings. ”