IV - THE COLLEGE BENEFACTOR

Summary

You have just listened to a long catalogue of names, almost all unfamiliar to you, and many dating from times so remote as apparently to preclude all possibility of present reference to ourselves. Nothing as a rule sounds more uninteresting than a roll-call of bare names. Think with what indifference anyone—especially a young man—glances through the list of deaths in a newspaper! And yet even there, if we could lift the veil in each successive case, what a tragedy of passion and emotion would be disclosed. Here a career cut short at the moment when the prize of life seemed almost within grasp; there the catastrophe of a ruined and blasted life recklessly cast away; here the desolation of a loving home; there the bitterness of remorse for conduct which nothing can now reverse. It is well perhaps for the purposes of practical life that no such vision in all its detail is ever granted to us.

What I want to do at present is to spend a few minutes in trying to lift, here and there, the thick veil which hangs between our eyes and the lives and motives of those whose names you have listened to in the roll-call of this morning. It is but little we can effect in this way. Many of the donors are known to us almost entirely by the mere fact of their gifts.