What is academic rule?  It is rule over the pride of man.  A college is a place whose chief power is to inculcate humility by the means of true learning; to establish intellectual honor and integrity by searching out the ways of God in nature, science, and philosophy, and in letters and in art.

It is the primary work of a university to make men humble.  The Freshman is not teachable.  The Sophomore is an intellectual upstart.  But by the time a man has been beaten and conquered by the great ideals of the world, which have pierced his bones and humbled his conceit—­by the time the race-passions and the race-sorrows have crept across his spirit, by the time that he has been confronted with the achievements of Homer, Empedocles, Hippocrates, Michelangelo, Socrates, Buddha, Plato, Emerson, Gladstone, Bismarck, Lincoln, and Carlyle—­his self-exaltation drops from him like a garment.  He—­who knows how to construe a few pages of the classics, who knows how to demonstrate a few mathematical problems, scan a few verses, recite a few odes, carry on a few scientific experiments, undertake a small research—­how shall he compete with these rulers of the thought of men?

Then it is that the real rule of a university—­its spirit of humility, and of reverence for antiquity—­begins.  The true university man, born and bred in the century, not in the years, in the race halls, not those alone in his Alma Mater, is neither a scoffer nor an atheist, nor a critic, sceptic, or cynic.  He is a man of simple and exalted faith.  God, who hath brought such great things to pass in science, nature, and art, in human character, in the destiny of nations, and the history of humble men and women, is a God before whom there must be awe and reverence, and not a flippant scouting of the ancient ideals.  Man, who is so tried by temptation and scourging of the spirit, is a creature to be loved, appreciated, understood; not a being to whom shall be shown arrogance, aloofness, and pride.  The university that makes snobs of its graduates has not yet entered into its kingdom of control.

A university also holds rule over truth.  Absolute truth is in God’s hand.  But the university has class-rooms and libraries, apparatus and laboratories, which are intended for the discovery and furtherance of truth.  The university is not a place to cry out for big salaries.  The salaries should be living salaries.  The seeker after truth should not be left without enough money for heat and shelter, for bread and meat, rest and summer-change; for the coming of children and their education.  But truth may lodge without shame in an humble dwelling and may be greatly furthered without an elaborate bill of fare.