50 
Proceedings of the Inauguration 
are losing the spirit of reverence; if we are abandoning our 
churches; if along with a vigorous mental discipline in school 
and college we yet fail to maintain a robust morality, a virile 
idealism; then we cannot succeed in the indispensable work of 
the conservation of men. 
Only so long as we conserve the nation’s highest intellectual, 
moral and spiritual resources, only so long shall be continued a 
righteous, a strong, and a free people. 
There is one question, before all of these, which we should 
ask of every college, and we may ask the same question of every 
home, every church, every school. Is it, or is it not, conserving 
the nation’s highest and strongest resources in mind and heart, 
in will and spirit? 
ABSTRACT OF ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT KING. 
Dr. Chamberlain, friends of Denison University, I am sure 
my first word ought to be a word of very earnest congratulation 
from the college I have the honor to represent. I congratulate 
Denison University on the splendid work that it has done in 
years past and the very bright prospects that it has before it. 
I bring this word with great pleasure. 
Once I stood with a few of my colleagues in front of the 
St. Louis station when a man who had had too much to drink 
asked the name of the building from which we had come. He 
said, “I bin in it and just wanted to check it off.” There has 
sometimes been a fear that college students were taking their 
courses in the same manner. 
What may the College be reasonably asked to do for the 
students committed to its charge? 
First of all, it would seem that the College ought to enable 
its students to enter into our great historical inheritance, Greek, 
Roman, Jewish and European. Our civilization is in the direct 
line of intellectual, moral and religious descent from ancient 
Greece and Rome and Judea and from modern Europe, especially 
Great Britain. We are fond of quoting Bacon to the effect that 
we are the ancients, because the last generation has always the 
advantage of a larger experience than any generation that has 
preceded it. But we should remember that we can make this claim 
to be the ancients, only if we have entered with some real under- 
standing and personal appropriation into what the past has ac- 
