President Robert H. Wright's Chapel Talks: Responsibility
The following are excerpts from Robert H. Wright’s “Chapel Talks” given to students every morning from 9:30 to 10:25 six days a week.Chapel Talks typically consisted of a reading from the Bible followed by Wright's thoughts regarding the Bible passage or some other moral instruction for the students, along with any news, schedule changes, or other announcements.
This and other speeches may be found in the records of the Chancellor's Office, Record Group CH1050, Series 2, Subseries 1, Box 1, Folder 5, in the University Archives.
Chapel Talk: Responsibility and Freedom
By Robert H. Wright
November 27, 1926
I have been very much interested right recently in talking with a number of people about the present generation of boys and girls. I hope no previous generation of boys and girls have been talked about quite as much as this one.I suppose they have.I did not live back there, and when I was living back there, I was one of the boys, and of course I didn’t hear it. I quite often hear people still taking the position that we do not know what to do with this generation; they are headed in the wrong direction. It always riled me to hear any one use that expression. I don’t believe a word of it, and I always come to the defense of the boy and girl of today, and I invariably get thus answer, “But they are not like they used to be.” And I usually say, “For which I thank God.” Then the argument is on. We are not living in the same kind of word that we lived in ten years ago.Young women, I realize that. I don’t know whether I am changing as fast as you are or not, perhaps not, but if you are at heart right-minded, if deep down in your soul, and I believe it is true, there is burning that desire to do something in this world that is worthwhile; then hold to that, and let the tongues of the world wag on, but hold to your purpose.
It is the wicked who are not right in heart. It is the man or woman who has an improper motive that is doing harm in this world. O, I realize that the freedom that has come to women us causing a number of young women, perhaps, to do things that they ought not to do, and I am not at all sure that it is confined to young women, because it is no longer young women only who are bobbing hair and skirts, and it is no longer young women only who are powdering their noses before the public. There is a danger, however, (and it is because there us a danger that I am talking to you this morning about it) of letting this new freedom that has come to womanhood lead the womanhood of today a little too far into the field of so-called freedom, that is sometimes interpreted by some folks as license to do as one pleases, regardless of everything else.I say there is some danger there.
There are unquestionably an increased percentage of divorces in America.Statistics show that, and there is a pretty good article on it in the December World’s Work. It isn’t an article, as a matter of fact; it is on the front of the magazine, a running story of what is going on in the world. It is worth reading and considering. It may be in a measure due to the fact that our whole social structure us changed and that people are no longer living under the same conditions that they lived under a generation ago.I think that has a great deal to do with it. Do not let this new freedom that is for your good, I honestly believe that; do not let it be your undoing.The time has come in the world when the girl is given a better chance than the boy is. I mean most businesses will employ young girls before they will employ young boys, and that is a bad tendency. You are given an opportunity.You are given more freedom than any other generation of girls has had before, and it is not only true in America, but is worldwide. That carries with it a more serious responsibility than has ever rested upon any generation of young women. All freedom carries with it individual responsibility.
Perhaps the greatest evil in this country today, I say perhaps, is a lack of a willingness to obey the laws, and part of that is due to the fact that we have so many laws that no one knows how to obey them. The one place that is stressed, perhaps more than anywhere else is around the question of prohibition. I mean around the question of drinking, and there is a place that the women of the world will have to take a stand, if they want to save the world. I am sorry that my sex is not in part the standard bearer, but it isn’t, and I know it. It is the womanhood of the world that will establish the standards of the civilization of today and tomorrow, and it is the stand that you young women and other young women like you take that is going to determine whether or not the civilization of tomorrow will be the best type if civilization. It is in your keeping. There are a number of right-minded men who will fight with you and for the civilization of today and tomorrow, but the great masses of mankind, masculine gender, I mean, are going to do the kind of things that you want them to do. It has been said that God created man and after man woman, and she has been after him ever since, but it isn’t so. The creation is all right, but man has been after woman. It has been reversed. In the old order of things, man made the meat and bread and woman made the home and the civilization, and today man and woman are making the meat and bread, and, as I see it, there must be a union of the two in making a home. And the home must continue to be the central unit in our civilization. It is around the home that most all of the sacred things of life are centered. It is in the home and through the influence of the home that the civilization of tomorrow must be built. And in the home, the wife and mother, the woman there is the one who make it after all, and the standards she sets up are the standards that the next generation will inherit.
So, in all of this freedom that we have, let’s hold true to the things that are worthwhile, and to do that we must be right minded in heart.
