While today we’ve honored the 15 years since the passing of William F. Buckley Jr. from this world, it is worthwhile to note the words that launched his 60 years fighting the good fight.

From God & Man at Yale, we begin at the, well, the beginning.

Buckley writes:

In evaluating the role of Christianity and religion at Yale, I have not in mind the ideal that the University should be composed of a company of scholars exclusively or even primarily concerned with spreading the Word of the Lord. I do not feel that Yale should treat her students as potential candidates for divinity school. It has been said that there are those who “want to make a damned seminary” out of Yale. There may be some who do, but I do not count myself among these.

But we can, without going that far, raise the question whether Yale fortifies or shatters the average student’s respect for Christianity. There are, of course, some students who will emerge stronger Christians from any institution, and others who will reject religion wherever they are sent. But if the atmosphere of a college is overwhelmingly secular, if the influential members of the faculty tend to discourage religious inclinations, or to persuade the student that Christianity is nothing more than “ghost-fear,” or “twentieth-century witchcraft,” university policy quite properly becomes a matter of concern to those parents and alumni who deem active Christian faith a powerful force for good and for personal happiness.

Wry amusement is elicited from reading contemporaneous criticisms of God & Man (such as in the Atlantic). Buckley would be, unfortunately, proved correct concerning the secular direction of American universities and the spiritual void that has led to so many of the paranoias and psychopathies of our day.

After beginning his career with arguably the most crucial question — “For whom do we learn?” — Bill would spend the ensuing decades ceaselessly pursuing enlightenment and then graciously and wittily sharing his discoveries with the world, plumbing God’s storehouses of experience, rhetoric, and linguistics.

I especially love Buckley’s recollection of the words shared with him by the rapidly dying Charles Pinckney Luckey, the pastor of Middlebury Congregational Church:

Ultimately and finally the Christian has to always view life as a gift from God, and every precious drop of life was not earned but was a grace, lovingly bestowed upon the individual by his Creator and so it is not his to pick up and smash.

Life, that wondrous gift.