The Morehead-Cain

It has been one hundred and twenty-one years since Hinton James, the first student here, made the journey that each of you has just made. What he found here was chiefly and I may say solely the Presiding Professor, Dr. David Ker, who had been waiting for a month for the first student to come. When James finally arrived, I have no doubt that the President assembled him at once and gave him some excellent advice. Without any information whatever on the subject, I will venture to say what it was. He told him that he was at a critical time in his career, that he enjoyed opportunities not enjoyed by other young men, that the country was also in a peculiarly critical situation, and that it looked to the college men to save it!

All of which I take to be perfectly true. Every age is a critical age to a thing that has life, and especially so to a young man who feels the surge of abounding life in every limb. Seventeen hundred and ninety-five was a wonderfully critical year in the life of the University, of this country, and the world at large, and especially in the life of the youth Hinton James, as he came here asking the way of life. But not more wonderfully critical, I am sure, than the year 1916-17, to the world, to you, and to me. And so it has been always and will be to every young man as he gathers up his strength and faces the world with it—to Cain, to Samuel, to Absalom, to David—to the young man who came to the Master by night, asking the true way to life; just as it has been to the unending procession of eager-hearted young men who have followed Hinton James through these halls, and with the same question in their hearts, if not on their lips.

I do not know what Hinton James thought of what the President said. Students here seem always to be normally hospitable toward listening to advice, and abnormally sensible about forgetting as much of it as they don’t care for.

Being a freshman, James may have felt that the President needn’t worry about the country (someone has said that a college ought to be a wonderfully wise place—that freshmen bring such a lot of knowledge, and the seniors never take any away); that he could look after the country in his odd moments if the President would only tell him what there was going on now to keep a fellow from being bored to death.
Or, if he was not possessed of this confident spirit of “let Hinton do it,” he may have been of that other type that has no reaction whatever to the sharp challenge of opportunity and the appeal for a critical decision.

There is plenty of evidence that James was keenly alive to the opportunities offered him: he had an honorable college career and an after career that was an honor to the college; but if I knew nothing whatever of his record I could say with assurance two simple things about him, as I think I can about you or any other average college man: (1) He wants to enjoy his youth, and gratify the thirst for use that every muscle and pore of his growing body craves. Life through a hundred keys of interest appeals to him, and above them all he holds a sort of fierce, invincible belief that he has the right to immediate happiness. There wasn’t anybody here in 1795 but Doctor Ker and Hinton and the Davie Poplar, but one of the first things the boy did was to write an essay on “The Pleasures of College Life.” But he also wrote one on “The Uses of the Sun,” and another on “The Effect of Climate on Human Life.”

And that suggests the other thing that I would know I could say about him or any other young man coming to college: (2) He not only wants to enjoy to the full the youthful physical life that is his only once; but also he wants to realize the more keenly felt, though less clearly defined passion for something of larger, freer use, more deeply rooted, of more permanent satisfaction. Through the eating, drinking, and sleeping of every day, the buttoning and unbuttoning routine of existence, this deeper life of the mind and spirit sends up signals of its hopes and dreams, asking for expression and liberation and to get born through him in great forms of useful work, science or art.

Every college man recognizes these two clear calls to him, and most men feel that in the ordinary life of every day there is a sharp contradiction between them: that there must be a surrender of one of them, that college life at best must be a compromise between one’s youth and his maturity, what he is now and what he wants to be fifteen years from now—a truce between his happiness and his ambition.
Now it is at this point, I think, that the college speaks its great word, and speaks the one that you have come to ask it to speak.

You may think that you have come to ask it how to get into medicine, or how to make money, or how to make an N. C. sweater or a Phi Beta Kappa key, or how to be an engineer, or how to get into society—or any other of the one thousand things that men work and die for. These are understandable motives for coming to college, and the college incidentally can respond to them all; but it could not answer them successfully if there were no deeper motive behind them. The great question that you bring to the University to-day has a deeper center than a desire for either physical satisfaction or success in the world. It is the question that the young man came to the Master with—“What shall I do to inherit life”—the larger, abundant life that will satisfy all of the finer passions of my life.