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The College
ByG.H.C.
PROPOSE to give an impression of a phase of University life which
.IL may be unfamiliar to many readers, namely the college. In these days
it is necessary to observe that the words and
are
not synonymous; a college is to a university what an individual family
is to a nation, a united part of a great group. The college, as an idea,
is younger than the university; it arose from the need of fellowship and
discipline. The founders of the Oxford colleges aimed to make possible
a disciplined form of student life, to provide an opportunity for the
best work, to make intellectual comradeship possible under the best
ditions for body, soul and mind. The beauty of the Oxford fabrics is a
testimony to their appreciation of aesthetic value in education. Little
groups of men have lived there, passed into the world to be succeeded by
other groups—seven hundred years have elapsed since England tried the
college experiment—it has not failed. In the United States, by a strange
inversion of European experience, the elder universities have arisen
through college foundations.
college”
university”
con
There is a college on our campus, a representative of a line of
Anglican colleges which extends from Oxford to distant Madras, a scion
of the old family which began in the 12th century with University
College, Oxford.
It does not advertise; the only announcement heard by the busy
world is the tiny note of the bell, ringing to Matins or Evensong.
haps the world heeds the bell no more than it does the woodpecker in the
neighbouring clump of firs. The bell rings to its own world, and its
world, hearing, troops down to Chapel; black-gowned figures
kneel in the little room. The reader reads the words of a Hebrew to men
from the distant lands of China, New Zealand, Japan, Wales—I will
lift up mine eyes unto the hills.”
thirty
Per
Three thousand years ago that Hebrew had written of his hills in
Judea, but the hills which these men see are the dear hills of home, proud
Fujiyama or Blytch-y-Groes, mountains of Killarney or foothills of the
Cheviots. And, somehow, they have come to a smiling part of great
Canada, all assembled with a common purpose, feeling fellowship as the
reader’s voice rises and falls, as the organ’s notes invite the blending
voices, while the sunlight reddens the walls.
Such is one expression of college life, perhaps the greatest, certainly
one of the most unifying. The meals in Hall are another. The great
room looks out over the tall Douglas firs, over the blue Gulf to the hills.
The men, under the presidency of the Warden, sit at four long oak
tables. No boarding house could hope to reproduce the atmosphere, the
dignity of the setting, the lively conversation.
(Continued on Page Two Hundred and Eleven)
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