PRESIDENT LOWELL GIVES BACCALAUREATE ADDRESS BEFORE ASSEMBLY IN APPLETON CHAPEL--EMPHASIZES NECESSITY FOR CLEAR VISION IN LIFE

Taking as his text the twenty second and twenty third verses of the sixth chapter of Matthew. "The light of the body is the eye if therefore thine eye be single, the whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be 'evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!", President Lowell delivered the Baccalaureate Sermon to the Seniors and visitors who througed Appleton Chapel yesterday afternoon.

"Religious literature and romance," began President Lowell, "are filled with examples of the choice between good and evil. The young man stands before them and deliberately makes his decision. The good path is represented as hard, encompassed by temptations, requiring purpose and fortitude; but the decision to be made is on each occasion clear. Moral earnestness is required, yet the choice is between obvious right and wrong. Such a choice would be easy. In the maze of life, however, the conditions are much more insidious. The alternatives are by no means always a rugged but righteous road that winds upward, and a pleasant way leading surely to ultimate perdition. Often the paths do not seem very different, or to diverge much; and a clear vision is required to see whiter they tend Nor does a choice settle the destination, for there are by ways to return to the true road, arduous, no doubt, but passable.

"A simile or a parable may be pushed beyond its proper meaning, and hence one must not carry it too far. All I want to point out is that many of the important decisions in life are by no means evidently momentous at the time. The right and wrong of the choice may be clear, but not the seriousness of the consequences involved; because they affect not so much the outward career of the actor as his own personal character, and the result may not be manifest for a long time.

"Some years ago two young men sailed a small boat, built on the south shore of Cape Cod, to the purchaser at Marblehead. As they rounded the Cape a thick fog came on, and thinking they might have to drop the anchor quickly in the night they brought it aft, with the rope fast, and lashed it on the quarter by the cock-pit. When morning came, and they could see somewhat through the haze, they found themselves off Minot's Ledge instead of Marblehead. The anchor on the quarter had caused a deviation of the compass in the cock-pit; a result they had not foreseen. Of course no moral was involved in this case, but it may illustrate what I mean. The compass is to the mariner what conscience is to a man. A deviation involves a wrong course. That is the significance in our text of the eye being single and whole body full of light.

"Conscience may suffer deviation in various ways. One of the most common is by small concessions to one's own inclinations, known not to be right, but not thought of much consequence and self-excused at the moment. Stevenson's tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is popularly thought to be the well-worn fable of a struggle between a man's better and worse natures; but to me it has always seemed far more subtle. Dr. Jekyll was not the good part of the man. If it had been it would no doubt have prevailed over the baser qualities. These would have appeared as they did finally in all their abhorrent reality, and the better part would have been shocked into rejecting them. But Dr. Jekyll was the whole man; with both higher and lower impulses. To the latter he yielded, turning himself for a time into Mr. Hyde, with a sly wink at his own cleverness. He did not, indeed, want to be found out, but had not supposed that he was doing anything very bad until at last he allowed the evil habit to grow so strong that he could not resist it, and he was a permanent Hyde.

"Call it searing the conscience, call it dimming the moral sight, call it what you will, the process, in greater or less degree, is not confined to fiction. Men have started in life with good intentions and ended reprobates. When the catastrophy comes in such cases. When, for example; an embezzlement is discovered, a long series of gradually increasing malversations appear, beginning with a self-pretence of borrowing money to be replaced, growing by degrees more reckless and ending in desperation. All along there is a series also of excuses causing the edge of the conscience to become gradually dulled. The end was not willed from the beginning; there was no deliberate choice between honesty and a life of crime. One step led to another as with Dr. Jekyll, and till near the close the true state of affairs was not appreciated. That this is true is evident from the fact that the defaulter sometimes continues to hold a respected position, or even to be an active church member. Such a contradiction is certainly not always, and from the outset, conscious hypocrisy. There has been a gradual numbring of moral sensibility, a growing blindness of the soul, and when the light of such a man is darkness, how great is that darkness.

"On purpose I have sketched an extreme and sombre picture of trifling with that eye that started single; but in lesser degree every man must guard his vision jealously lest he fall short of the highest character that he would reach; for a dimness of the moral sight, a blunting of the keen edge of sensibility, is the most insidious of perils. This, I think, is what Phillips Brooks meant in a sermon I heard him preach half a century ago, when he spoke of the difference between a man's falling within his resolution and outside of it. The former is a conscious fault; recognized by the man as such, which he thoroughly regrets and resolves not to commit again; the latter an excused fault, condoned by himself, and therefore likely to be repeated. Such a fault may be small, but small faults gradually dim the keenness of discrimination between right' and wrong. Well did the old testament singer exclaim, "Take us the foxes, the little foxes that spoil the vines.

"How should we keep our eye single and our vision clear? We cannot see our selves as others see us. Perhaps it would be neither pleasant nor profitable if we could. It might merely substitute one distorted image for another. But we can