It is always hard to choose the last word you want a college to give to those who leave it.  But this year I had no problem.  Our theme this morning was almost forced on me—as early as last Christmas—by the conjunction of four ideas and images that seemed to come together out of those exciting days.  If, at the start, you will think with me on this four-part collision, you will at least understand the accident itself and quickly be on the ground of our thought this morning.

The first part was the International Geophysical Year, as interesting to many of you as it has been to me.  This attempt of scientists to cross the boundaries of many nations in a common civility of knowledge and inquiry, which we might well emulate in other areas of our life, has stretched our minds into new awareness of time and space, and of the staggering universe in which we live.  Years ago Alfred Tennyson thought of his Creator as 'boundless inward in the atom, boundless outward in the whole'—in a volume entitled Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After, etc. And now, sixty-two years after that, it is the 'et cetera' that is magnificent.  Magnificent in the inner space that is made solid energy by whirling electrons moving round nuclei at incredible speed; while the mind, on its outward run, can see through 2000 million light-years of space and recover something of the very creation of the stars.  Beyond the Milky Way, and its own 100 billion stars, are the 'two populations' of the other galaxies, and the Andromeda Nebula.  Far down below us are the vast trenches of the ocean floor that make the canyons we know look like gullies.  And the human race, which, as a scientific friend reminds me, could be put in a box of one cubic mile and dropped into a vast expanse of 329 million cubic miles of sea, refuses to be so tiny, and from its little spot of earth keeps its steady cosmic quest and, just for exercise, pitches its own bright satellites into the night.

There was a second moment of realization, at Christmas time, when we waited for three cold evenings on the hills in the hope of seeing a Sputnik that eluded us, thought of another star that men once went out to see, and came home to read before a bright fire and a Christmas tree orbiting its own gay satellites as if it, too, were joining in the Geophysical Year.

And the book I read had in it a poem of Robert Frost long dear to me.  In a New England winter evening, the night falling fast, the traveler sees the lanes and fields and woods filling with the sudden snow.  There is an obliterating whiteness, as the familiar landmarks fade away—and loneliness of the deeper sort.  And the poet cries: *

            They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
            Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
            I have it in me so much nearer home
            To scare myself with my own desert places.

That is the third part; the fourth part came shortly after.  I was reading the life of Sir Henry Jones by H. J. W. Hetherington, the Principal of the University of Glasgow.  Sir Henry is writing to his son away in Burma: 'Feed your soul a little when you get the chance with the fine things.  For it is the invisible world of motives and purposes, and ends, and will and justice, and loving-kindness—that is the big world, and not the mere shell we see.'

And so, out of the Geophysical Year, the satellite, the traveler facing the problem of our own empty inner space of a New England road, and a brave letter to a far-off son, I knew what I wanted the final word of the College to be this morning—that there is, authentically, a big world open to our possession, a fullness of life that men and women can have, not out in the galaxies, but here on the earth we live on, in the life we know.  And I want you, if you will, to think of what prevents this big world, of what fosters it, and its particular problem at the moment for you and me.

What is it that does spoil the big world and prevents our having it?  So many things, and every person here knows part of them.  I have no wish to parade our common faults this morning, lest we begin to look like Eden six hours after the snake arrived.  But we all know how he got there.  And the worst of what he left was pride—pride that can put a stranglehold upon us all.  Pride that makes us want things for all the wrong reasons—because our neighbors or the Russians have them.  Pride that sent the lady to the symphony in Kansas City, where David Riesman heard her sigh, at the end of a Philharmonic series, 'Thank goodness, that's over.'  When he asked her why, feeling as she did, she went to concerts at all, she replied, 'Well, Dallas has a symphony orchestra, and so does St. Louis!'  Pride that keeps us from entering many a world of knowledge and delight because we are afraid to admit our ignorance or to acknowledge we are behindhand or have lost our way.  A modern critic much admires the sentence with which Matthew Arnold began, at the age of nearly sixty-five—in America he would have been retired—his essay on the French journalist Amiel: 'It is somewhat late to speak of Amiel, but I was late in reading him.'  That is the humble, honest way.  It is also the learned, Olympian way.  Except you become as a little child, you do not enter the kingdoms of either earth or Heaven.

There are, thank goodness, the forces that work against the shrinking of our lives—that work for the big world and not against it.  And a liberal education ought to be one of them.  Do you remember how Woodrow Wilson, one of the best of teachers, used to put it: 'It would be a very petty life to live if we were merely schoolmasters; it would not interest me for twenty-four hours to be a taskmaster in respect to the studies of a lot of youngsters.  Unless I can lead them to see the beauty of the things that have seemed beautiful to me, I have mistaken my profession.  It is not the whip that makes men, but the lure of things that are worthy to be loved.'  Such is the way to the big world.

But in 1958 all education, liberal or otherwise, isn't worth much unless we solve some very specific human problems that bedevil us just now.  One of these is the short-changing of our selves by making the word 'security' not the important word it rightly is, but the main word, the top goal that discounts the high risks that have always ennobled men and women.  Life doesn't belong, of course, to the uncalculating fool and the facile optimist.  But neither does it belong to the facile pessimist, who can win an easy reputation for soundness and profundity merely by carrying an automatic Flit gun in his brain.  'Looking for fleas in the lion's mane,' as someone said, is no way to spend all twenty-four hours of a given day.  The big world does not readily open to those who have succumbed to the law of averages, the kind of statistical determinism that cancels the dynamic spirit of men.  Do you remember, in this connection, Webster's fine cartoon, showing the bridge expert, with Goren in his hand, saying to the couple who have just taken the game, 'You wouldn't have won if you'd played it right.'

Even the great men have had to keep their courage, and it's nice to know that they do.  Sir Winston Churchill has been called our nearest reincarnation of the Renaissance man.  'Certainly for sheer virtuosity we have not seen his equal in our time.'  Yet, at the recent exhibition of his paintings, one reads again of the Sunday morning he started to paint in oils, when he knew not where or how to begin, and his 'hand seemed arrested by a silent veto.'  With a tiny brush and tremendous caution he made at last, in the area where he knew the sky ought to be, a blue mark 'about as big as a bean.'  Then he stopped.  And his career as a painter might have stopped, had not Sir John Laverty's wife arrived at the moment, asked for a bigger brush, and, with 'large, fierce strokes,' proved to him that the canvas 'could not hit back.'  And his hand reached forth to possess a new and wonderful world.

The 'hand arrested by a silent veto.'  This spirit of negation did not stop the pioneers.  Alfred Kazin believes that the great theme of Willa Cather's novels is 'the struggle between grandeur and meanness, the two poles of her world. . . .  She did not celebrate the pioneer as such; she sought his image in all creative spirits—explorers and artists, lovers and saints, who seemed to live by a purity of aspiration.'  Likewise, 'the old pioneer grandfather in Steinbeck's The Long Valley, remembering the brutality of men on the great trek, also remembered enough of its glory to say: "It wasn't the Indians that were important, nor adventurers, nor even getting out here. . . .  When we saw the mountains at last, we cried—all of us.  But it wasn't getting here that mattered, it was movement and westering.  We carried life out here and set it down the way those ants carry eggs. . . .  The westering was as big as God, and the slow steps that made the movement piled up and piled up until the continent was crossed."'

Some of the pioneers stay at home, and make a big world of their own few acres, the familiar ground.  By some singular gift of imagination they translate into significance the tract of land below their sky.  Thoreau did in at Walden, the Brontes on the Yorkshire moors, Wordsworth in the English Lakes, Charles Lamb in London.  People can make 'a great heart within a little house' till their names are mentioned in the travel bureaus only in whispers lest they spoil the trade.  And I see no reason this morning why I should not mention a friend whom I have admired a long time.  This June our community will celebrate its one hundred fiftieth anniversary, and no one has been the moving spirit of its preparation more than Arthur Miller has.  Beyond what was once a rubbish dump and on what were barren hills, he has made life grow into what a discriminating visitor and much-traveled man described as one of the most distinguished places he had ever seen.  The creation of a new world on one's home acres is not just a matter of having the means and the right bulldozers at hand.  Trees and lakes and flowers in inspired proportion spring from the imagination, such as this man has in vast measure.  And so, looking back upon it, it seems not too strange now that his son—a member of the class of 1941, a boy so many people loved—did what he did one afternoon some months ago.  In charge of a loading operation up by Lake Erie, he saw a workman slipping down into a huge pile of loose slag.  Straight as an arrow from his own heart's bow, he leaped in to save him, losing his own life, proving as much as anything else that he was his father's son.  On the home ground, in one's little world that the mind and the soul can touch and transform, the big world can come.  For out of the heart, as always, are the issues of life.

But in the summer of 1958, we are all somehow called by our destiny, because we happen to be living now, into a larger world.  It should be the concern of every man—beyond his home ground.  On a June morning I am not launching a panel discussion on international affairs.  I have never subscribed, indeed, to the notion that if the world isn't saved by commencement, it won't be saved at all.  Don Marquis used to say that 'economic problems that cannot otherwise be solved should be abolished.'  But it isn't that easy.  The anthropologists sense that 'we who are now alive are passing through an age of transition, the first major cultural shift since the Neolithic began about 6000 B.C.'  Man, who learned to speak and warm himself, to cook and sew, to hunt, and cultivate and invent, is now in a new phase—he has learned to waste the materials of earth and to destroy himself.  His present task is, not just political unification, but all that lies behind the possibility of political success—the conservation of resources, the control of population, the right use of brain power.  Dr. Carleton Coon, who brilliantly analyzes this situation, thinks the heart of the problem is simply the cultural lag between our invention and our wisdom, and that our greatest need is humility and, at the same time, a new declaration of the importance of the individual.  Beyond atomic war and the erosion of the earth is the failure of the peoples of the earth, of different cultural backgrounds, to understand each other, especially when seven hundred million people in eighteen nations have just tasted freedom for the first time.  This is the tough task of our day.  And the big world will be the little world—the ominously dangerous world—till this gets done.

Part of whatever wisdom we attain will come, as so much of life comes, from whatever faith is in us.  And the fact that we think this will not come as news, either, to the class of 1958.  I believe we have honestly tried to show them, especially this year, that the divers faiths of the world—Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and the rest—have been full of the spirit that strives toward God.  We can learn much from faiths that are not our own.  And tomorrow morning we shall give a sound diploma even to anyone who has no faith at all.  We have no religious test for graduation.  But we do want something better for a man than his own bootstraps, something better than drugs, and drink, and 'ordinary sex,' and a submission to the herd instinct, Communist or Fascist, that Aldous Huxley rates as the favorite forms of escapism just now.  We want the big world to include more than even the wonderful heritage we have out of Greece and Rome.  We want it to include more than even the love of ideas alone, and the analysis and names of things, lest we become like Phillips Brooks's train caller of whom David Redding, on of our graduates, told us.  The temptation of the train caller is the temptation of ministers and teachers and college presidents.  He had cried out 'the destination of life so many times, that he was betrayed into thinking he had himself been to the place about which he recited.'  We want it to include a life of thought and feeling and action of the kind Paul found in the deeper reality of a Lord who was what He said He was: the Son of the Living God.  Rooted and grounded in love, Paul found himself able to comprehend the 'breadth, and length, and depth, and height,' and was 'filled with all the fullness of God.'

Men have always gone to school in the night above their heads.  Some have found the frightening silence of the infinite spaces; some, the hint of the moral law; some, the sense of the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.  The Milky Way, with its hundred million points of light, speaks nightly to the high part of our imagination.  But it speaks less, I dare assert, than the great windows of King's College Chapel at Cambridge, the most complete series of ancient windows in the world.  There in blazoned glass is history—the rose of Lancaster and York and the Tudors, the Hawthorn Bush of Bosworth Field, the fleur-de-lis and the red dragon.  The angels and prophets are there, the old law and the new.  And the golden calf, the Queen of Sheba, Cain killing Abel, Job tormented, the flight into Egypt, the life of our Lord and His Lady Mother, and Pilate washing his hands.  There is also a death and an arising.  These windows know more than the stars know or seem to tell.

But we do not know them, as long as they stay in windows.  The big world does not live in stars and glass and stone.  It must come down from the stars and the windows into the hearts of men—into their hands and their heads—till they have all the boldness of life, transformed by the love of very God Himself.  This is the size of the life you want for your sons and daughters—not just happiness, and success, and health—but a creative life of meaning and real worth.  And a college has the right to want it for them too.

Earlier this morning I remarked that it was always hard to choose the last word that a college said to its graduates.  And suddenly I realized that it isn't hard to choose at all.  The last word is said tomorrow.  As you walk to receive your diploma the Dean will pronounce your name—even the hard middle names.  It is disconcerting to find somebody you have known as a good plain fellow for four years turning up at graduation with a middle name like 'Theophilus.'

But this is what we give you as the last word—your own name.  And you can make that, if you want to, a better thing than any diploma any college can put in your hands.  You can take it out from here and set it down in the big world and know what work and love and joy are till the day you die.  And when you get tired and want renewal, come back here to the old ivory tower.  We shall let you gripe and sign petitions and write letters to the college paper and break off your heels in the brick walks and feel young again.  And, strange as it may seem to you, we shall not remember your failures.  We shall remember the youth and the life and goodness and beauty you brought here in your time.  We are very grateful for all that.  We are even more grateful for what you may yet become.

* From "Desert Places," in Complete Poems of Robert Frost.  Copyright 1936 by Robert Frost. Copyright ©1964 by Lesley Frost Ballantine.  Reprinted by permission of Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.