Passion for the Climb

Honoring the tradition of our 13 Baptist founders, Colgate’s Board of Trustees opens its meetings with an invocation. Trustee James Allen Smith ’70 composed this prayer for the board’s spring 2012 meeting, but its message transcended that occasion, encapsulating the university’s mission across the generations. As well, the effort he undertook to craft it was a quintessential manifestation of the theme of the Passion for the Climb campaign undertaken by Colgate to support that enduring mission. For that, we thought his prayer — and his account of writing it — would be the perfect capstone to the Scene’s essay series.


James Allen Smith ’70 (photo by Andrew Daddio)

I’ve sometimes wondered what those 13 men with their 13 dollars might have said in their 13 prayers. Sadly, we have no archival record of their words. I thought it would be a challenge — an exercise of both the historical and religious imagination — to try to compose their 13th prayer.
    I wondered especially how their language of prayer would have addressed educational aims. I embarked on cursory historical research, skimming the minutes of early meetings of the Baptist Education Society and triennial gatherings of the General Missionary Convention. I then looked at religious treatises that might have been on the shelves of our Baptist founders. I searched for prayers and sermons delivered by some of our more famous 19th-century seminarians. And I waded through a dissertation on the early history of Baptist colleges and universities, which relied on Howard Williams’s dissertation for its account of Colgate’s beginnings. (Williams, Class of 1930, was a longtime history professor and Colgate’s archivist.)
    Above all, I was looking for language that might echo the words of prayerful Baptists in upstate New York in the 1810s. On the cusp of the Second Great Awakening, they were profoundly concerned with the education of Baptist preachers and missionaries. I wanted both a particular voice to help us imagine our founding moment — the meeting in 1817 when Daniel Hascall and 12 others set in motion the plans for the Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution — and a more general voice that would remain resonant in our own time.
    By way of a prayer and in search of values that endure, I have cobbled together phrases and metaphors, the thoughts and aspirations, of early 19th-century Baptist educators from Colgate and elsewhere. The words are from long ago; the spirit should be familiar.

— James Allen Smith ’70

Our 13th Prayer

A charge to keep we have! A God to glorify! To the exalted One, who watches over travelers and pilgrims as they make their way along life’s paths and who sheds His light to help us see and surmount all stumbling blocks;
    We have planted — and those who come after us will cultivate — an institution in this congenial soil. It will grow and flourish in this village where we have made a sacred and solemn covenant between college and community.
    We are in this place — and will remain here — because close and successful application to study is best accomplished in a place of retirement from the feverish strife of life. The morals of youth will remain forever safe in a country village, and the health and vigor of their constitutions will be sustained in these hills, woods, and fields.
    In this close and familial community, let us always inculcate in our charges the dignity and grace of manners, the habits of morality, and the spirit of charity and gratitude; In this place of earthly beauty, let us take instruction from nature, which displays the eternal truth of God. The deeper knowledge we acquire of nature will be the key to unlock the storehouse of creation and open to us the treasures of the universe;
    Let us also look far beyond this place, for we have a sacred charge to use our learning in service to others. We will serve our nation and seek to preserve its democracy through intelligent citizenship, knowing that an ignorant democracy can become the most oppressive and odious of tyrannies;
    Let us acknowledge the brotherhood of all peoples, extending our reach to those abroad — the sick in need of healing, the ignorant in need of learning, the hungry in need of nurture, the oppressed and enslaved in need of liberation;
    Let us begin to build an institution where those of limited means will have manifold opportunities offered to them. Let us help to elevate them out of the obscurity to which they seem by economic circumstance to be so hopelessly condemned;
    Let our school, as it grows, become an instrument of higher learning in diverse disciplines so that it may prepare young people for useful service to others in many fields of endeavor;
    But in the end, let us never forget that even the highest learning without virtue is like a torch in the hands of a lunatic. Our torch must burn forever with one flame — a single bright fire emitting both intellectual and moral light as it illuminates our path.

Amen.