1907-1909. AGE 19-21
It takes great strength to bring your life up square
With your accepted thought and hold it there:
It is so easy to drift back, to sink,
So hard to live abreast of what you think.
C.P.S.
IT WAS CHARACTERISTIC of Borden and of his friend Campbell that they did not room together either in junior or senior year. But they were on the same floor in White Hall and had what they valued most, the opportunity of being helpful to others. With lively recollections Campbell wrote:
In the selection of quarters for junior year, Bill had chosen a room in White Hall on Berkeley Oval, just off the old college campus. Malcolm B. Vilas of Cleveland was his roommate, a boy of fine character who had taken a positive Christian stand at the Lakeville Conference at the close of freshman year. Next door, I lived with Louis G. Audette, and across the way were two other classmates, Sandford D. Stockton and Frank Assman. It was a great combination, made up of very different types, and what times we did have! Every now and then we would get rid of superfluous energy in a big roughhouse. We would nag at Bill until we had him roused and then something would be doing. Around that room he would go like a tornado, crushing all opposition. It was a sight to see him really roused. He was a fellow of unusual physical strength and knew how to use it to advantage. I found that the best way to treat Bill when he went at me was to give right in. This seemed to mollify him, while resistance only spurred him on to greater efforts. We used to have many a tussle, but he was altogether too strong for the average man, and with his knowledge of wrestling was more than a match for any of us. We would laugh at him because of his strength and call him a “brute.”
The activities in the religious work went along much the same. There were the Bible groups, the mission study classes, the daily prayer groups, the Wednesday evening Bible classes, the Volunteer Band meetings and the Yale Hope Mission, all of which occupied Bill’s time. The last named was specially absorbing for Bill this year. I believe he took one night a week at the Mission, conducting the service.
In our Christmas vacation (junior year) Bill went with Mrs. Borden and Joyce to the Lake Placid Club in the Adirondacks. It was a beautiful winter with several feet of snow on the ground in the mountains. Bill and his mother with their wonted hospitality decided to have a house party. So invitations came to Isabel Corbiere, Mary Abbe and three of my sisters, with Mac Vilas, Bill Roberts, Lou Audette and myself. All but Mac Vilas were able to accept, and we arrived on New Year’s Eve.
How crisp the mountain air was as we drove up in sleighs from the station and started in for a glorious party! We cast off all thought of work and settled down to healthy outdoor sport. Bill was in the thick of it. We would all dress up in our warmest old clothes and go out to the toboggan course. The snow was soft and all kinds of stunts were possible. We spent a good deal of time trying to go down the hill standing on the toboggans. Four or five of us would get oh one toboggan, standing up, and would then launch out. There always came the time when one would lose balance and upset the rest, and away we would go headfirst into the snow. It was fine healthy sport, and Bill was right in his element.
Over on the road, coasting on the bobsled was possible, and near the Club was good skating. One day we all plowed off in the deep snow and climbed a little mountain nearby. Every night we would turn up tired, healthily so, and ready for the biggest kind of dinner and the soundest sort of sleep. Bill simply reveled in good fellowship and sport such as this, and it did one good to be with him. He made an ideal host and always saw that his guests had a good time.
Few letters are available for junior and none for senior years, as Mrs. Borden, who was at that time in very poor health, was living in New Haven to be near her son, but the recollections of classmates tell a good deal. The last of his own letters follow that Christmas in the Adirondacks.
January 13, 1908
DEAR MOTHER―Things have been moving here since came back and I am very thankful.
I believe I wrote you that we had gotten our prayer group started. It has been going nicely so far and will continue so I’m sure. Our mission study work promises very well indeed, not only the group I spoke of, but all the others. We shall have about twice as many men as we have had before.
Well, Saturday, things began to happen. Mr. and Mrs. Asher (Saloon Evangelists) conducted a union meeting of the missions in town. Charley and I prayed that it might be the right kind of meeting and then went to get some fellows to go. I got the whole of my last year’s group, the tough bunch, and they stayed until the invitation was given. The meeting was fine, and Dr. Dawson who was here last year contributed not a little to its success.
Afterward, I talked with a man until eleven, and hope to be able to help him more. On Friday Charley got a fellow he is working with to go to one of the Chapman meetings and I went to the Mission, and as the fellow who was leading (Bernhardt being away) didn’t want to give the invitation, I did it. About eight men came forward and I conducted things as best I could. I feel very hopeful about some of them and that we’ve got a most important work on our hands.
As it’s late, I’ll reserve the rest, and best, for tomorrow.
Lots of love,
WILLIAM
January 14, 1908
I think you will be interested in my report of Sunday’s happenings. The evening service was led by Dr. Dawson and was one of the most remarkable I’ve seen here yet. He spoke on the Price of Perfectness, from the rich young ruler passage, and put in very straight to the fellows. At the close he gave an invitation for all who wanted to follow Christ (I’ve forgotten just his words) and about twenty responded.
Right after I went over and saw a fellow named B., one of those I’d had at the Mission the night before. I started right in―having found him alone providentially―and we talked for about two hours, with the result that he finally decided that he would take Christ and try it. There are three others I want to get after.
January 20, 1908
Had a very nice group meeting which I didn’t deserve, as I had expected the “Prom” to be more attractive. After it was over, S. spoke up and said that he was practically a Christian, believing almost as I did. He is (or was) the skeptical fellow I’ve been working with for months, since freshman year in fact. I expect to see him come out openly now in a very short time. It is wonderful.
“To him that hath shall be given” was certainly true in Borden’s case, for one upon another, even in junior year, responsibilities came crowding upon him. The Student Missionary Union of colleges in the Connecticut Valley held its annual conference at New Haven that fall and Borden was chairman at all the meetings. Months of preparation lay behind the success of the gathering, and all the responsibility for speakers and arrangements had been on his shoulders. Stephen W. Ryder, a classmate who helped him, wrote:
As a stenographer and typewriter, I often took his dictation of letters to his friends. I specially remember quite an extensive correspondence which devolved upon him as chairman of the Connecticut Valley Student Missionary Conference. His apologies, his thoughtful explanations and general care to avoid misunderstandings, his desire to please, encourage and inspire others often impressed me. He sought no subterfuges or excuses, nor dealt in flattery to serve his ends. There was always frankness and sincerity in his letters.
John Magee among others was impressed with the organizing ability Borden showed in handling this undertaking.
Bill was busy enough with all he was doing in College to take the time of any ordinary man. But he seemed to have little difficulty in running this Conference, in spite of the large amount of work connected with it, of which I had had experience. It was held in New Haven that year (1908) and I remember hearing a number of people remark on Bill’s ability as a presiding officer. He was a regular John R. Mott, and had everything at his fingers’ ends, everybody knowing just what meetings were to be held, and where, through his conciseness and clearness. All his correspondence beforehand, tentative programs, bills, etc., were kept in such orderly fashion that he never had to waste time looking for anything.
This same ability in handling affairs came out in our work together in the Yale Hope Mission. Bill gave a great deal of attention to it, though he did not let it interfere with his other work as far as I could see. He went down to the meetings a great deal, and might often be found in the lower parts of the city at night‒on the street, in a cheap lodging house or some restaurant to which he had taken a poor hungry fellow to feed him‒seeking to lead men to Christ.
Yet his studies were not neglected, for in February of junior year when the list of those who had made Phi Beta Kappa was announced, Borden was one of thirty chosen, and when the society organized a little later he was elected president for the coming year. In this connection Charles Campbell recalled:
At the Phi Beta Kappa banquet, which came late in the winter of 1908, Bill as president of the society took the lead. The Phi Beta Kappa banquet is perhaps the finest of the yearly banquets given at Yale. Many celebrated men are invited from other colleges and most of the best-known professors of the University itself, so that the dinner is quite an affair. I have a pleasant recollection of the dignified way in which Bill presided and made the opening address. It was a striking illustration of the maturity and balance of the man.
Borden’s college activities were summarized in the Yale Alumni Weekly as follows:
He was president of Phi Beta Kappa. In athletics he was active in football, baseball, crew and wrestling, rowing on the winning, 1909, club crew in the fall of junior year, and playing on the winning Philosophical and High Oration baseball team and on the Phi Beta Kappa team. He served on the Class Book Committee and on the Senior Council. Elected a Class Deacon, he devoted himself largely to religious work. He was unwilling to join any fraternity or secret society, because he feared that it might set him apart from the body of the class. He accepted, however, an election to the Elihu Club.
Not a little additional work was entailed by his election to the Senior Council, with its special relation to the faculty, and by his duties as a member of the Senior Class Book Committee.
“Bill was keenly interested in doing his full share of drudgery for the good of his class,” wrote a fellow-deacon. “I remember going into his room frequently when he was summing up class statistics. He spent hours collecting from the blanks the votes for individual preferences. Often he would pause for a rest, and joke about some bright answer to a question.”
His own standing, when the Class Book appeared, was third in the vote for “the hardest worker,” fourth among “the most energetic,” ninth among “the most to be admired,” and seventh in the vote for “the one who had done most for Yale”; this in a class of close upon three hundred.
But it was in the small, intimate meetings of the Student Volunteer Band that Borden was most himself, as Stephen W. Ryder recalls:
It was there the flame of his spiritual life seemed to glow most brightly. There reserve was thrown aside; he was among those who were in sympathy with his life purpose. His presence in the Band kept the spiritual tone right up to concert pitch.... It will always be an inspiration to remember him there, in his true element.
And Dr. Kenneth Latourette:
Of course the outstanding thing in one’s memory of Bill is his missionary motive. He was so sane and unpretending about it, and yet it was so completely a part of his life. The memory of it and his courage to carry the gospel to unreached fields is a constant rebuke and inspiration to me. He had the Pauline spirit. I recall how he quoted him, about not wanting to build on another man’s foundation (Rom. 15:20, 2120Yea, so have I strived to preach the gospel, not where Christ was named, lest I should build upon another man's foundation: 21But as it is written, To whom he was not spoken of, they shall see: and they that have not heard shall understand. (Romans 15:20‑21)). The steadfastness of that purpose of Bill’s had no small part, I am sure, in bringing the largest Volunteer Band in Yale’s history into the days of his college life.
The same friend touched the secret of the power of that life when he wrote:
How easy Bill was to pray with! He was a jolly fellow―loved a roughhouse; delighted to get hold of a man and crack his ribs! He could be jolly with the rest, and when the crowd was gone it would be just as natural for him to say, “Come into the bedroom and let us have prayer together.” There was no sense of incongruity about it. I remember very vividly―how could one ever forget―those times of prayer, when just the two of us would kneel down and take to God some of the problems we were facing. Bill was so simple in his prayer life, so natural, so trustful! He was the easiest man to pray with I have ever known.
Prayer was to him his most important work, as well as the breath of his life. He had a card system for recording prayers and their answers in connection with individuals who were on his heart, and a loose-leaf notebook in which he listed subjects for prayer in groups, one for each day of the week. To take in the meaning of those notes even for one day is a revelation of the depth and thoroughness of the prayer life they represent, reaching out to the ends of the earth. It helps one to understand the statement made by his most intimate friend, Campbell:
Through all the time I have known him, when there has been opportunity, we have never parted without going on our knees and praying for God’s work.
It is easy to see how much this friendship must have meant to the two who were in every way so fitted for and worthy of each other. But there was nothing exclusive about it, any more than about Borden’s religion. “Bill was to me the rarest Christian spirit I have ever known,” was the estimate of one now on the faculty―and yet he was so very human too!
“No picture of Bill at New Haven would be complete,” wrote Jefferson to another of the Class Deacons, “without the old slouch hat he used to wear so often. Remember it? It was of brownish gray, pointed at the top, torn on the side, and with a large convenient hole used to hang it up by. One time I set fire to Bill’s hat. When he discovered the flame he was suddenly active to rescue the treasure and punish me for my presumption.” The hat, it may be added, was not discarded even after this fiery ordeal.
Mac Vilas, his roommate for two years at Yale, spoke of him as “a Christian, first, last and all the time”; but he was interested in recalling details that showed that he was not narrow in his sympathies, and that socially as well as physically he was an all-round man.
In the letter he wrote accepting an invitation to be usher at my wedding, Bill spoke about not being a social light, etc., but we were delighted with the way he entered into the spirit of the occasion, and I believe he had just as much fun as the most frivolous of the rest of us. I mention this because it shows that his social instinct was strong. Here were a dozen or more young men and women, and Bill was simply one of us. All the girls told Helen that he was most entertaining and attractive to them, and they were girls used to meeting all sorts of men.
Bill also went to the 1909 Tea at our Junior Prom., with Helen and me and my aunt, who chaperoned Helen, and was very much at home on that occasion. I had a good time, too. Bill was not slow at the “fussing game,” as his taking girls to the intercollegiate matches also indicates. I, personally, was very happy to see this trait in him, and if it had not been there to a considerable extent our Cleveland “social butterflies” would never have enthused over him as they did.
Bill’s interest in business affairs was something I frequently observed. He read the New York Times regularly at College, and also took and read the Wall Street Journal. I know that he was fairly conversant with the stock quotations from day to day and that he followed the big financial developments eagerly. How he could go the Wall Street Journal was a mystery to me. I think Prof. Emery’s lectures in economics had something to do with starting his interest in those things.
Bill was very reticent about mentioning his financial affairs to me. In fact, I don’t remember ever asking him a single thing about them, as I considered it none of my business. This reticence was, to my mind, another indication that he would have been a shrewd businessman. He was able to keep his own counsel, to say little but think and work hard. Bill seemed to pay considerable attention to his Chicago business affairs, for he corresponded a good deal with Mr. Spink (I used to see the printed envelopes), and I remember his mentioning several business trips to Chicago....
As to his wrestling, you know what a bull he was and how hard he wrestled and roughhoused. I remember in senior year one night, when Jeff was holding Lou and Frank at bay easily, how Bill just for fun rushed in, grabbed Jeff by the legs and tossed him back on his couch without much effort. You were there, I am sure. How thankful I am for those happy, happy days together, Charley! Len Parks can also witness to Bill’s physical prowess and athletic enthusiasm. They used to wrestle together quite frequently, and Len was no slouch, but he couldn’t throw Bill. He told me once that Bill was a “regular bear,” and that though he didn’t go in for fancy holds, etc., he was the hardest man to tackle in the whole gym. Len, I believe, threw even Bill Goebel a few times, but not Bill Borden.
Bill was also a loyal rooter for the teams at Yale. He attended practically all the games and meets, as I recall it. I remember well how he stood on Derby Avenue, between the bridge and the lower entrance to the track and baseball field, on the day in November, 1907, when we had the first cross-country run with Harvard. As we came up the little rise on Derby Avenue, before entering the gate, there was Bill, who had come down to meet us runners. When he saw that I was in the lead, he let out a most encouraging yell! Perhaps it was partly surprise―and I wouldn’t blame him if it was. You and all the other fellows may have been there, I don’t remember about that, but Bill’s enthusiasm for and interest in his roommate I can never forget. He had come down a little further than most of the fellows to give his encouraging support.
I believe I am right in saying that Bill was elected to every class office for which he was nominated, and I well remember one stormy class meeting‒we could scarcely hear ourselves speak—when a word of suggestion from him brought order out of chaos, and showed very clearly the quality of the fellows’ respect and admiration for him.
Others also recall characteristics which impressed them:
No matter if some said he was too religious, or others that he was too narrow, or that he was heavy, there was one thing nobody at Yale ever questioned―that was that he was strong. He was red-blooded and he had the punch. He played hard and he studied hard and was intense in his religious beliefs. When he bucked the football line, every ounce of his hundred and seventy-five was back of him. When he was elected to the presidency of Phi Beta Kappa he received the highest scholarship honor in Yale. There was power written all over him. You either followed him or you let him alone.... I can vouch that he was the strongest religious force in our class at Yale.
He certainly was one of the strongest characters I have ever known, and he put backbone into the rest of us at College, who were interested in the same things but did not have the strength he had. There was real iron in him, and I always felt he was of the stuff martyrs were made of, and heroic missionaries of more modern times. Our point of view differed on many things; but it was always refreshing to discuss matters with him even if we disagreed, because I knew so well his strength of purpose and consecration. I had complete trust in him as a man.... He never seemed to lose his vision for a single instant.... Among many fine qualities, the supreme impression he made upon others, it seems to me, was that of moral rectitude.
Bill was the great example to me of one who seemed to realize always that he must be about his Father’s business, and not wasting time in the pursuit of amusement.... He was a man who had very high ideals and lived up to them; who impressed his sincerity upon you by his daily life among his fellows, no matter how restricting his beliefs might be. We disagreed about some things, and I thought Bill narrow, but as the years pass I am beginning to see that his perspective was the one which I am only just reaching. But I want to say that even when I disagreed with him, there was never a moment that I did not respect him for those same beliefs and the way in which he lived up to them.
In his sophomore year we organized Bible-study groups and divided up the class of three hundred or more, each man interested taking a certain number, so that all might, if possible, be reached. The names were gone over one by one, and the question asked, “Who will take this person or that?” When it came to one who was a hard proposition there would be an ominous pause. Nobody wanted the responsibility. Then Bill’s voice would be heard: “Put him down to me.”
Thus he got together a group of the hardest to reach, the least attractive, and worked for them faithfully. In a house in College Street he had three of his incorrigibles, anything but promising material for a Bible class. I remember one meeting of the group when only one man was present, while another listened through a half-open door into the next room. But Bill held on, glad that they gave him the opportunity.
His rugged yet simple faith in Christ as Saviour and Lord, and in the Bible as God’s inspired Word, is a tonic to me, for one, whenever I am tempted to drift into barren doubting’s or a purely intellectual attitude toward our faith. But with all his convictions as to the futility of higher criticism and his distrust of the so-called new theology, I cannot recall hearing him speak unkindly, or even frequently, of the many who preached it to us from the Yale pulpit or lecture desk. He was always the Christian gentleman.
There never was a time during those years when Bill was not looking for the opportunity of doing personal work.
Joe Twitchell’s remark in our Deacons’ meeting one night was interesting, as showing something of Bill’s idea of personal work. Joe said, “Bill hunts up the worst skunk in College, and goes after him.”
One of the passions of his life was for righteousness. He had indeed that “hunger and thirst” we read about in Matt. 5:66Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. (Matthew 5:6). His prayer life was full of petitions that illustrated this, and his actual living illustrated it too.
I remember, in this connection, that after we had finished our final examinations in College we had a four days’ interval before Commencement, and Bill with a few others of us ran up to his place in Maine and attempted to sail his boat down to New Haven. We had headwinds all the way, and could do no better than reach Cape God and put in to Hyannisport in time to take a train to New Haven. As we walked up the streets of Hyannisport, where Bill had spent a summer as a boy, he remembered that at the close of that vacation he had gone away owing some shopkeeper in the place a few cents. He had forgotten all about it, but it came back to him as we walked up the street that day, and he must needs find the little shop and pay the debt, that he might be straight with the world. That was his nature all through. If he found anything wrong with his life, he set to work to make it right.
But there is another characteristic of Bill’s that I want to speak about, that is his great loving heart, which always seemed to me his richest and rarest quality. There were many, perhaps, who, seeing him in a casual way busy with the work he had to do, set him down as severe and unapproachable. We knew that the very opposite was true. He had one of the most affectionate, lovable natures of any man I have ever known. No one who visited in his home could for a moment doubt this. But I mean more than family love. He had a way, for example, when walking with a friend, of putting his arm over his shoulder as they talked. I can feel the great loving touch of his arm about my shoulder now.
After graduation we attended Northfield again, sleeping in a tent as before. For two summers, at least, Bill waited at table during the Conference. He never did this if there was a man needing the job to help to make expenses. But if the coast was clear, on would go the waiter’s apron and he would do the work, getting nothing to eat himself until the crowd had left the dining room. He never told me why he did this. It may have been partly to keep friends company who had to wait for monetary reasons. But I always felt it went deeper than that, and that Bill was trying to be among us as “he that serveth.”
Just one more picture from the Yale Hope Mission, from one of the early converts:
I came in here on the twenty-seventh of March, 1908. I was on a drunk and hadn’t much use for religion. I’m not going to tell the worst part of my life, but I was a rambler all right―a down-and-out bum. There was only three states in the Union I hadn’t been in. I had heard of the Mission, same as a good many of them do. I knew it was the only thing that would save me from booze. Well, I went out, that first night. I had a Christian mother, and I got to thinking of her and I came back. That was the twenty-ninth of March, and that night Bill was here and he spoke to me. Bill was a great personal worker. He always believed in getting right down and talking to a man. If Bill had anything to say he gave it right out. I know the gist of what he said to me that night.
“What are you going to do about it? Can’t you see where you’ve missed the road?”
He would tell you to hope again; tell you of the God who’d made the universe and held you in the hollow of His hand and could help you if you’d only ask. That’s the way he talked. He was one good boy. I could never forget him as long as I breathe―no, I never forget him. And he barely twenty that night I first knew him! He was at Yale College here then, and Louis Bernhardt was superintendent of the Mission.
I went forward and kneeled down and Bill came and kneeled down beside me, and he explained as much as he could the power of Jesus Christ, and how it was only Him who could help me. I never drank from that night to this, never felt like it―never felt like it, from that twenty-ninth day of March to this―and before that I was drunk most of the time. I had been drunk all that winter. Bill was a great man to watch you and not say much, but just ask how you were getting along. Well, after I was converted I come every night―didn’t miss a night after that for seven weeks.
It’s all fresh in my mind yet. I got work, too, soon. I got a job on an ice wagon. That was one of the greatest tests on the booze question that a man ever got. I was boss of the team that year, and went back and was boss again the second summer. I was boss sixteen or seventeen months altogether. I hadn’t worked only three weeks when they put me in charge of the team.
I saw Bill right along those times, except in his vacation; then he was in Europe. And he wrote me a letter. After some time I went back to the shop, and then I was foreman in the New Haven County Jail, where I’d served time in a cell. About two years after I was converted I was remarried right in this building, right upstairs. I think Bill sent a letter that he couldn’t come. He knew I was going to be married. He met my wife and family―seemed tickled to death, too, to meet ‘em. We’ve got a home now in Yalesville, Connecticut, and a big garden, plenty of land, lots of chickens, and a piano in the house―makes quite a change from when I first came to the Mission drunk, with no prospects but whiskey! There’s not been a day since my conversion that I haven’t had money in my pocket, not a day from that day to this. God has wonderfully blessed me.
After my conversion I was baptized and joined the Church. If Bill hadn’t opened this Mission I’d been dead. My old chum who was once on bums with me, he’d never have been converted if it hadn’t been for this Mission. We was holding prayer meetings at different houses. They’d come in drunk sometimes. Then I always took ‘em after the meetings and gave ‘em a talking to just before they left. Told ‘em about this work here at Yale Hope Mission. There’s no time in a drunkard’s life when he don’t have serious thoughts. When he drowns his conscience in booze, he’s tearing away from the voice of God, think. Well, someone asked my chum to come when the meeting was at my house. He said he would if Jack Clark would lead. He knew that what God did for Jack Clark He could do for him. There was about twenty-four there and I led and that night Whitney Todd, my chum, was converted. He lives right in Yalesville now and is foreman of a shop. He’s got his wife and children with him, and he’s always got his hand out to the man that’s down. So you see you cannot trace what Yale Hope Mission’s done by what you see lying around. Not till the books of Heaven are opened will you know what Bill Borden done by opening Yale Hope Mission....
He was great at individual work. As a talker, he’d hasten through his address and get to work with the men, always aiming to get close to the man he was talking with―always with his hand on his shoulder. He didn’t believe in talking over people’s heads, but tried to land right on his man and bring his thoughts right home. He would interest you quicker than the ordinary man, because he had a more sympathetic way to start in. He seemed to reach out and win you. I watched him from night to night, and always, as soon as the invitation was given to come forward, he would be off the platform and right down among the men, and he’d urge them to accept a better life. He was always sympathetic, and he never went at a man in the same way twice. He had a habit of putting his hand on a man’s shoulder, and they’d most always break down when he spoke to them.
I never knew a feller just like Bill. I’d like to get a hold of one of his pictures. Seems to me if I saw one I’d ‘most try to steal it. I never knew a feller like him. He was a gentleman in every sense of the word, and a Christian through and through. That was first and last in his life. He enjoyed life, and people who came in contact with him, seeing his happy spirit, would say, “Why, life is worth living after all.”
Why, the way he came amongst us, you would never think he was a man of wealth, and he always dressed so plain. He had a peculiar way, very interesting to me. He wouldn’t tell you anything about himself, but he had a way of making you talk and tell things. It seemed to be his whole object, to know how I was and about my life so as he could help. It couldn’t seem possible a man could be so humble and yet so great. He could talk to anyone, didn’t matter who they was. And he’d get down with his arms round the poor burly bum and hug him up.
Never knowed his like in this world. I know he must have done for hundreds just what he done for me. He was always trying to study into the lives of men, to see how they’d work out and how he could help ‘em.
It was Professor Henry Wright who said, “It is my firm conviction that the Yale Hope Mission has done more to convince all classes of men at Yale of the power and practicability of Christianity to regenerate individuals and communities than any other force in the University.”