Page:The Fraternity and the College (1915).pdf/217



We had been listening to one of the grand officers of the fraternity as he presented forcefully and appealingly the best things which the fraternity had done and the best things for which it stands. We were silent for a moment after he had finished, overcome, perhaps, by the power of his words. My companion broke the silence.

"I had never realized" herealized," he [sic] said, "how real and vital these principles are which we advocate, how closely they touch the best things of life. Unless it has ideals and lives up to them, the fraternity has no place in college life." And so we all say, I have no doubt, if we have given these matters serious consideration.

The men who organized our Greek-letter fraternities were almost without exception men with a vision of the future. They had high conceptions of right and honor and scholarship, and they wrought these principles into the rituals and the ideals of the organizations. For the most part they were religious men with reverence for God and with respect for the principles of the Christian Church. Some of the regulations of these organizations went so far I am told, and still do, as to require membership in a protestant church as a necessary qualification for membership. The purposes of these organizations were social it is