I
OUR DEBT TO ROME, GREECE, AND JUDEA 1
N the course of the baccalaureate address delivered with-
in these classic precincts last year, Dr. Stockton Axson
of the Rice Institute made this weighty utterance: “All
that has been learned in all the centuries concerns you, even
you, contains some guiding matter for you, even you. Not
to discard the past, but to understand it more deeply is part
of your work. With all of your present equipment you
cannot without disaster jettison the past”. And a former
member of the Rice faculty, Dr. Lindsey Blayney, recently
reasserted this thought by saying: “Our disinclination, oι
inability, to let the clear light of human experience of a long
past illuminate our acts of the present . . . is responsible
for much of the unrest and disregard for the higher things
of life from which we are today suffering”.
With such pregnant words as our text and with the con-
viction that “It takes a lifetime to understand that the future
is only the past entered by another door”, we recall the
fact that the three greatest nations of antiquity were the
Romans, the Greeks, and the Hebrews, and it will be valu-
able for us to realize what were the qualities, the virtues,
and the characteristics which made these three nations so
preeminently great. So, today let us consider what were the
legacies which these three nations bequeathed to us moderns.
And first the Roman.
a Baccalaureate sermon of the eleventh annual commencement of the Rice
Institute, preached by Rabbi Henry Barnston, Ph.D., of Congregation Beth
Israel, Houston, Texas, in the academic court, at nine o’clock Sunday morn-
ing, June ¢, 1926.
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