TRUTH, BEAUTY, AND GOODNESS

The memory of Charlie Lingley is a consolation and a challenge. We are saddened, crushed, by his sudden passing. There was an intimacy between him and his friends that was as peculiar to the man as it was delightful to those who were privileged to enjoy it. There have been many whose testimony through the years has revealed that they found real inspiration in his high way of life. Recalling his smiles and kindness, his lifting character and joyous approach to work and play, more than one of us may resolve to "be more like him." For all the tragedy of his death with its sickening loss to family and friends, for all the cruelty in the abrupt passing of a beloved figure of the College, the memory of Charlie Lingley is a glorious one.

We have been made richer by him and are grateful beyond words for him. We ought never to get blase about death, but it does seem that we must come to realize that it is an inevitable part of the great picture that we call life, framed by birth and death. His life was rich and honorable and beautifully balanced. It was touched, too, with the lights of laughter and love and had about it an indefinable something closely akin to the aura of mysteriously mingled power and sweetness that lies back of and shines through every work of art. There is present in such a thing a proportion and balance of strength that are inward rather than outward. Yet they convince us who look that in them is the real and the ultimate that nothing can touch.

While those who knew and lived with Professor Lingley will miss his daily presence and fellowship, the real man, the essence which we loved and trusted, has done its work and does it still in those who knew him. And not only in these fortunate ones but through them as their own lives learn to build into themselves some of the things for which he stood. "Thus the whole round world," bit by bit is through the circling, climbing centuries and by the transmission of such glories and values as he inherited and refined and passed on to others, made ever nobler, ever a surer mirror of the ultimate realities—truth, beauty, and goodness.