Page:Moral Obligation to be Intelligent.djvu/51

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THE CALL TO SERVICE

also some due and ardent recognition, some rising to the moment, from those about to be served. Their need, to be sure, has no such focus, no such rallying-point, as the impulse to their rescue; no commencement address puts them in mind to receive, as you graduates are stimulated to give. But their need itself, we might think, should at first prepare in them, and experience year by year confirm, a receptive and a thankful heart. Yet those about to be served are silent. If there are distinctions in silence, theirs leans less toward humility than toward defence. Those who have already been served and who now hear again the summons to their benefit, break silence by gradations of reproach. They deprecate the ministrations of the educated. They invite the physician to heal himself. They intimate hypocrisy in their would-be rescuers, who, they say,

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