nineteen hundred and forty-six - Amazon Web Services

102 SOUTHERN BAPTIST CONVENTION
white way around this campus? More living quarters—all rooms in the dormitories
are now reserved for next September, with a considerable waiting list.
The library reading room is wholly inadequate. More classrooms is the cry.
Our teachers do not have classes; they have congregations.
We are gratified at the reception given Professor Ellis Carnett, Director
the School of Music. The faculty, student body, and our great denominational
constituency, near and far, have given enthusiastic acclaim to his election and
wise direction of this strategic school.
Dr. Floy Barnard, in her capacity as Dean of Women, is going forward
in glorious fashion. She has come to this position for just such a time as this.
The spirit of the entire Seminary family is wholesome and healthy. The
faculty is making notable progress in scholarly attainments and wide-reaching
ministry, being ever in demand for services far beyond that which time allows.
The student body, in spite of crowded conditions, is maintaining high morale
and manifesting genuine sportsmanship.
It has become already a truism that we are entering upon a new era. The
year through which we have just passed marked the close of the old and the
beginning of the new. It is a day of released power. All that matters is the
hands at the controls. We shall not have trustworthy hands at these controls
if such hands are not directed by the nail-pierced hands of Christ. No hand is
safe if it is not under the pressure of the scar in His hands. Keep the atomic
bomb a secret! Impossible! Other nations have sense. No secret is dangerous
if under the proper control.
This institution finds justification for its life and ministry right at this
point. "A supreme peril threatens this generation. It is the peril of a spiritual
vacuum, the opening of a hollow void in the souls of men. In the lives of
multitudes of people an appalling emptiness is forming." "The only people who
can meet the present crisis are men and women who have seen life's meaning
and experienced its reality in Jesus Christ. What our generation with its
haunting vacuum needs more than anything else is to learn how to become sons
of God by inward renewal."
God is speaking to us through the lips, the pens, the very knuckles of scores
of young people who are knocking at the doors of this Seminary, reminding us
that God has called them, they have found His will for their lives; and we
cannot receive them because there is no place for them. Southern Baptists
had better listen to these young people. It is their hour of destiny; it is their
time to go up and possess the land. No little thinking or planning, no limited
horizons are sufficient now.
The following is the statement with which Dr. L. R. Scarborough closed
his book, A Modern School of the Prophets. It has even stronger appeal now:
"Surely, it is God's will for this Seminary to be enlarged and its needs
provided. Surely, in the unfolding days ahead it will become man's will
and the funds will be provided. I should like to see it done while I live:
and, if not while I live, in a little while after I take up my residence in
heaven.
"The Seminary's needs have been pressed into every drop of blood that
has coursed my veins for thirty years and have been on the ends of the
nerves of my physical being and have been wrought into every brain cell,
and have found their way into every prayer and into every particle of life
for these thirty years. ... I have carried it on, poorly enough indeed, but
my direction has always been upward and onward and outward. I should
like to pass my part of the Seminary life on into the hands of others better
equipped, more largely endowed, more thoroughly lashed to the heart of
the Redeemer, more hot-hearted and missionary and co-operant, and with
the prayer that others who take the torch may pass it on better equipped
and enlarged in every way, but always true and loyal to the Lord Jesus
Christ and to all the involvements and expectations of his truth for the
enlargement of his kingdom."
Brethren, there is a grave out yonder in Rose Hill Cemetery, Fort Worth,
Texas. Dr. L. R. Scarborough calls to us from that grave. Better still, he
calls to us from heaven itself. Not only does his flaming soul warm ours today.
The voice of Dr. B. H. Carroll, mighty champion of the doctrine in faith and