My text is a double one—part conventional and biblical, part unconventional and from a different source.

First, St. John, chapter 10, verse 10:  I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. Second, these words: What more could be needed to show that Portsmouth Grammar School is no run-of-the-mill teaching factory, no youth-stunting mechanism, certainly not an institution where youth grows old and spectre-thin and dies?—being the concluding words of the Editorial of The Portmuthian for the Spring Term of this year.

Perhaps it is the first time any hard-working editor of the School magazine has provided a text for a sermon from this pulpit;and yet, when you come to think of it, the thoughts of the old man writing in perhaps the year 100, and those of the schoolboy editor some four months ago are not so very far apart: for both are concerned with life—life in all its variety and abundance. I have never quite decided what is the place of personal reminiscence in sermons. Clearly, a preacher who indulged in this too frequently would earn a reputation as a self-centred egotist. Yet men far greater than you or I have not hesitated to speak of their own lives. There is plenty about what happened to Paul on the road to Damascus in Acts of the Apostles; one can hardly doubt that in his preaching up and down the length and breadth of England John Wesley made reference from time to time to that strange warming of the heart which came upon him at a quarter to nine on May 24th, 1738, at a meeting in Aldersgate Street. So perhaps this is a privileged occasion, and I may be allowed to let a memory or two arise out of the varied experiences of the past quarter of a century.

One of the very first tasks I was required to perform as a member of the Staff of this School—and the date would be I suppose some time in the last week of September 1938—was to take my form out of School and proceed to a furniture repository in Penny Street, now destroyed. There I presided at a long trestle table in the gaunt, depressing warehouse, and instructed the boys sitting down the table in a task even more distasteful that the building itself. "You take the metal canister in the left hand, and stretch the mouthpiece over it with the right, finally securing it with the strip of adhesive tape, to make a good join." And so one more ugly, but potentially necessary civilian gas-mask came into existence. There we sat for hours, carrying out this repeated mechanical process. The adults among us found it gloomy and ominous, but perhaps our pupils did not mind it so much, since it compared favourably with Latin or maths!

That was my first task at Portsmouth Grammar School. This sermon is the last. And between lie years of wide experience -satisfying and frustrating, happy and sad, tedious and stimulating - as varied indeed as life itself. And what, out of all this welter of memories is the overall and abiding impression left on one's mind? I think I would say that it was an impression of never-ending adaptation and growth. I suppose this is most easily illustrated by considerations of bricks and mortar, since they are most easily observed and measured. Certainly, since I joined the School there has been steady and notable development in these respects. Future pupils of the School, proceeding from end to end of it on their academic business, will have to walk further than any pupils have had to do since William Smith (whose memory we honour today) first founded it.

And with all this has gone a steady increase in numbers, broken only by the set-back of the war years. Yet - lest we should preen ourselves unduly - let us reflect for a moment on this concept of growth. In the context of the life of a school, or the development of a healthy individual, it is a cheerful and encouraging word. But how different it can be in the context of medicine and surgery. For growth in terms of medicine can be malign and destructive; and in matters of the mind and the spirit, too, one can grow into evil habits and practices as well as into good. Growth in itself is neither good nor bad: the quality of the growing is what matters in the end. In my particular niche in the life of this great School, I have found myself watching, and having some part in the growth of individuals in ways which lie rather outside the mainstream of the School's life. At the font in this cathedral I have baptised boys who for some reason had not received baptism in infancy; I have presented boys to the Bishop for Confirmation. I have had the pleasure of conducting the weddings of Old Boys, and of baptising their children. I have conducted burial or memorial services over boys who have passed to the nearer presence of God early in life.

And experiences like these, you know, stretching literally from the cradle to the grave, make you think—they make you think about aims and purposes of life. What is the life of an individual or of a school driving at? You may willingly agree with the magazine editor's opinion that it is not a run-of-the-mill teaching factory . . .but what is it? And from this pulpit I would want to give the answer expressed in a phrase of Keats - "a vale of soul-making." It is a community in which you are given the opportunity to make up your soul; an arena in which you make moral choices - choosing between life and death, good and evil, the blessing and the curse. Nothing you do in school - no success at work or games - is as important as these choices. The other successes and failures will pass away: these are of the very stuff of life. Their consequences are eternal. And I would add this: these moral choices are not a bit less important because you live in a scientific age. The discoveries and inventions of science are indeed marvellous; but for the most part they don't even touch the essential stuff of life. Perhaps a man may land on the moon within the next ten years - but whoever does so will still take his self with him - that essential, eternal self, the product of his choices throughout the years; and when he sets foot again upon his mother earth he will still have to live with that self - still have to go on making his choices to the end of his days. Nothing can relieve him of the responsibility - not even being the first man in the moon.

I remember reading an article by the Professor of Applied Electronic Physics in the University of London. He revealed a remarkable fact about three of the most important modern inventors - Rudolph Diesel, Edwin Armstrong (inventor of the super heterodyne and frequency modulation) and W. H. Carothers (the inventor of nylon.) These three great men had one thing in  common: each of them ended his life by suicide. The fact that they were great scientists did not, of itself, make it any easier for them to make up their souls.

And so - a final suggestion to end with: don't think because you live in a scientific age, that religion is finished. Don't think that to join a Christian church and give it your loyal support is a thing irrelevant to the twentieth century. Don't think that to say your prayers naturally, honestly and meaning what you say, is a thing below the dignity of a twentieth century scientific man. You couldn't make a greater mistake. Looking back over the years I am all too conscious of the many times when I have chosen death rather than life - a curse instead of a blessing. Yet one thing I am sure of: that I should have made many, many more wrong choices if in those years I had not, by the grace of God, become embodied in the fellowship of a Christian church, and learned the habit of saying my prayers.

By next September most of you will be in School again. Some will have gone to a university, some to a job. But wherever you may be, you will still be making those moral choices which bring you death or life, blessing or curse. And those of you who are still in School will also be collectively deciding whether Portsmouth Grammar School is to be a mechanical teaching factory, a youth - stunting mechanism, or a place where youth spiritually dies, or whether it is to be a Christian School, not in name only, but in deed and truth, of which the School Prayer speaks.

I come to the end of my last task as a member of the Staff. My final words are what I would always have wished to say from this pulpit, or indeed elsewhere: seek the guidance of Christ in prayer, worship Him in the fellowship of His Church, for He came that you might have life and that you might have it more abundantly. 

(With thanks to Bernie Renyard for the wedding photo from 1965)