88 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
and viable “moment” when significant results are achieved
quickly, or with relative ease. One cannot readily hasten or
postpone such a moment, but what we can do is to live so
intensely, so rigorously, so devotedly in the interim that when
the right time comes, we are ready: the right men at the
right place at the right time with tire right training. This is
the only kind of real “luck” there ever is.
The Time Being, even more than the time of crisis, is the
time when the truly educated person comes into his own—
for he has as much incentive for well-doing in the time being
as in a more dramatic and irresistible situation. Let me
describe an educated person, as briefly as I can. He is a man
who has come to love the truth and to live by it, who has
learned how to learn and has acquired a real appetite for
disciplined inquiry; he is a man whose learning has bound
him to the common good and has loosed him from his na-
tural bad habits of pre-judgment and borrowed judgment.
He is a man whose courage lifts him above conformity to
the crowd and compels him to a creative maladjustment
in any “normal” society, and whose intelligence is the
instrument of his love. He belongs to a family, a race,
a class, a land, a nation—but he loves all these within a
higher loyalty to God and the greatest good. He is a
man whose morality springs from a source higher than his
super-ego and flows up from a deep love of the right beyond
mere calculation. This is what our schools are for; to furnish
the nation and the nations with the men and women of this
spirit and this mind. This is what our churches are for: to
call men of reason to the life of faith and to “unite the pair
so long disjoined, knowledge and vital piety.” The most im-
portant question before you now is whether your school and
your church have prepared you for the Time Being and the
crisis at its further end.