I want to speak briefly to you this morning about Mottoes and Memory…The mottoes are familiar to all of us: they are those upon the seal of the Academy, and we see them everywhere we look, from the great intaglio carving on the rear wall of the Assembly Hall stage to the tiny ones on our name tags. The mottoes are three in number, and, taken together, form a succinct expression of the spirit of Exeter.
First, “Finis Origine Pendet”: The end depends upon the beginning. It brings to mind old John Phillips’ charge to the instructors of the Academy to “learn them the Great End and Real Business of Living.” And it is certainly true that for us, our time at Exeter was a time of beginnings, a time for hopes and dreams, a time of challenge and encouragement.

Secondly, “Non Sibi”: Not for oneself. The instructors were to take care for “the minds and morals of the youth under their charge,” hoping to achieve that union of goodness and knowledge which would “form the noblest character, and lay the surest foundation of usefulness to mankind.” Our education was to be not solely for our own enjoyment, but that we might be committed and contributing members of our community...

Which brings us to the third motto, less well known perhaps because in a less familiar language, but there at the top of the seal, arching in capital Greek letters over the beehive and the rising sun: “Chariti Theou,”: By the grace of God. This is the ground of the whole
enterprise. Our beginning and our end are in God, who is the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last; by whose grace we were created, in whose grace we live, to whose grace we go…