Jón Bjarnason Academy - 01.05.1931, Blaðsíða 25

abundant life is the ampler and more satisfying knowledge
which the Universities are bringing to us. Yet, most of our
Universities are giving an ever increasing number of unrelated
courses, in which the very existence of religion, the one great
unifier of all knowledge and all life is ignored.
These same Universities are too often staffed with men
who know only their own subject and never think of it in re-
lation to the whole of knowledge or the fullness of life. Young
people who have never been taught to think clearly and who
have not enough experience to realize the significance to life of
what they are taught hear the deepest experience of their child-
hood set aside or questioned, and being unable to think out the
problems raised for themselves often lose their early faith and
lapse into agnosticism or atheism. These same young people be-
come the teachers of the next generation, so that our Universi-
ties are full of blind leading the blind.
The profound unsettlement which takes place almost inevi-
tably in the adolescent stage needs constant and sympathetic
guidance from men and women who are themselves experts in
the spiritual life and that guidance the State University, as at
present organized, cannot give.
What we need above all else is religious training in which
all our multiform courses are related to life in God. Such train-
ing would give meaning and purpose to every other course.
The Scientist would see his field as a part of that wider know-
ledge which interprets God and transmits His fullness of life
to man, the student of literature would find in it the story of
man’s age old quest for his other, fuller self and all the wealth
of all the courses would be laid at the feet of the all pervading
source of life and of the knowledge of life, and reverence and
adoration would return again to the earth.
The Church has her own unquestioned sphere, as a fellow-
ship of those who are slowly taking on the Christ-life, as a
school of prayer and collective worship in which deeps of the
soul are touched which lie beneath and above those regions
to which knowledge can penetrate and where awe and reverence
are born; as a revealer of life, fuller and more real than any
the world can offer; as an agency which lays a wider, healing
hand on human frailty and human sin.
But the University has its sphere also. It is not for the
Church to lay a heavy hand on her, to set bounds to her quest
for truth; but rather to contribute to those who teach and
those who study her own rich and enriching experience of
God. To the University belongs the task of spelling out and
proclaiming the meaning of the multiforce manifestations of
God in nature and in human life and to relate them all to the
Church’s deeper and more vital life in God. Thus the University
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