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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 19, No. 2. March 10, 1955

[Introduction]

I Have been asked to write a few words of welcome for the freshmen. Welcome, then, newcomers, to the University, whether you arrive with hunger for more Greek or more Latin, or with the smell of chemicals already on you, and eager for scissors and cyclotron.

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.