THE TIME BEING”
Do not be deceived; God is not mocked, for whatever a man
sows, that will he also reap. For he who sows to his own flesh
will from the flesh reap corruption; but he who sows to the
Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal Bfe. And let us not
grow weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap, if
we do not lose heart (Galatians 6:7-9).
THE traditional office of the baccalaureate sermon is to
appraise the future in the light of the past—and of the
Christian inheritance—and this by an elder of the tribe for
the benefit of a group of neophytes. Thus bis hindsight is
proffered as tire raw material for their foresight. This could
be justified on the assumption that the pattern of the elder’s
past experience could be reasonably projected as a pattern
for the neophyte’s future experience.
Nowadays there is no use for the wisest elder among us to
pretend that he knows very much about the shape of things
to come—or that his memories can serve the use of prophecy.
In an unprecedented degree we are living in an interim
epoch in which the past has become alien and the future
palpably obscure. In summer, at the North Cape, I have
seen a dusk followed by a dawn, with only a crepuscular
twilight intervening. This seems to me something of a para-
ble of oiɪr own time. Modern men stand in the dusk of the
epoch of the Enlightenment, in the confused twilight of our
present turmoils, and in the dawn of a new age which may
be either the most wonderful or the most terrible which
mankind has ever seen. The passionate confidence of the
nineteenth century has been shattered and purged from most
of us. We know how bright the future could be, but this is
no assurance that it will be so. I have no doubt that any
β The Baccalaureate Sermon delivered at the Rice Institute, May
29,1958.
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