May I tell you what you especially want to know? What will the first year be like? It will be first and foremost a year of discovery. If the root of the matter is in you, literature, for example, will become a new and entrancing domain. In my first year, I found Horace and Edmond Rostand; I can still read the epistles and Cyrano de Bergerac with the tang of that first revelation in the lines. And it was in my first year that I discovered Christ.

Do not dismiss that sentence as something unreal or inappropriate for print. All life has been coloured by the philosophy which has flowed from that discovery. Professor But-terfield of Cambridge in his remarkable book "Christianity and History." maintains that belief in God makes for "greater elasticity of mind." I do not make claim to such a quality, but I do insist that faith creates a mental stability without impeding or frustrating a genuine and a healthy search for truth.

Often young students under the strong Impact of new ideas, overwhelmed by seeming authority, lose such faith as they have. Mine was the contrary experience. If you are worth your place in this community, your year of discovery will be a year of growth.

A True Faith

In the world of plants, unnatural growth unbalanced at the toots can produce the tree upon which poor Swift looked with fear, "withered at the roots." Faith forms a root [unclear: system] which, if healthy, promotes [unclear: s[gap — reason: illegible]g] growth above. A true faith, held sanely, does not spoil. It stimulates the mind.

Second-hand Thinking

This year will be one of temptation, temptation to petulant rebellion. I do not wish to appear at all avuncular, but it is natural, to vary the figure, that you should be a little eager to try your wings. Unless you are fortunate enough to have parents who can put rings around you intellectually, you are going to feel something of a pundit in the home, a trifle superior intellectually, and the temptation will be to discard old tradition and old beliefs simply because they are your parents', and the heritage of another generation.

Urge to Rebellion

Do not be hasty. There is an urge to rebellion in the heart of youth. Turn its power on wrongs and errors worth rebelling against. Most vices are perverted virtues, and unpleasant rebels are sometimes crusaders going in the wrong direction.

Your second temptation is secondhand thinking. People who teach in universities, and people who write books which find their way into the university reading lists, are usually authorities in some branch of learning. That does not qualify them to speak with authority on spiritual matters.

University teachers are human. They try to be honest in their thinking and teaching for the most part, but sometimes they succumb to the "last [unclear: Insrmity] of noble minds," and like to have the class before them accept everything they say. Please do not do so. I like to see von put down your pencil occasionally and look doubtful. Think with your own mind, and remember, that a philologist has authority only on philology, and is not even Infallible in that.

And docs this apply to a teacher of classics who presumes to write in this strain? Of course, except that for a generation now I have read classics, ancient history, Biblical criticism, the New Testament and Its allied literature, and the newspapers of the weary and tormented secular world, without seeing any reason to doubt the validity of the Christian assumption.

The old ISS (International Student Service) Trust Fund account of approximately £270 has been closed and the money forwarded to World University Service ((WUS) Dominion Committee in Dunedln, with the request that as much of this money as possible be spent on relief work for students in the South-East Asian area.

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Mr. J. Whitta is Board and Accommodation Bureau Officer with Mr. J. G. Hutchison in second fiddle.

The author of this article is Professor E. M. Blaiklock, Professor of Classics at Auckland University College. We regret that owing to space limitations, the article has been abridged.—Ed.