Yale’s motto and John 8:32/ John Pierpont, Yale Class of 1804 家族

 John 8:32

31於是，耶穌對那些信他的猶太人說：「你們如果固守我的話，就確是我的門徒，

32也會認識真理，而真理必會使你們獲得自由。」

John 8:32New International Version (NIV)32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”John 8:32King James Version (KJV)32 And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

Motto	אורים ותמים (Hebrew) (Urim V'Thummim) Lux et veritas (Latin)
Motto in English	Light and truth

Yale Alumni Magazine 在 The Daily Snap 相簿中新增了 1 張相片。

When you roam the campus looking for a new picture every day, your eye might fall on an inscription you’d never really processed before, like this one on the side of Branford College at the bottom of a beautiful bow window facing Library Walk: “Thy light and truth shall set me free.” Sounds familiar . . . shades of Yale’s motto and John 8:32. But it’s not exactly either one.

When you get back to the office and start googling, it’s not long before you’re deep in a rabbit hole of surprising facts:


• The line is from an 1840 abolitionist poem called “The Fugitive Slave’s Apostrophe* to the North Star.”

Google 機械翻譯
該生產線是從1840年廢除死刑的詩叫“逃亡奴隸的撇號北星”。

*an exclamatory passage in a speech or poem addressed to a person (typically one who is dead or absent) or thing (typically one that is personified).

• That poem’s author was John Pierpont, Yale Class of 1804, great-grandson of one of the ministers that founded Yale and a minister himself whose anti-slavery activism cost him his pulpit even in abolitionist Boston.

• Pierpont’s grandson would grow up to be the famous financier John Pierpont Morgan.

• And finally, Pierpont’s son James Lord Pierpont would, improbably, end up living in Savannah, Georgia, and serving in the Confederate cavalry in the Civil War. And, even more improbably, the younger Pierpont would make his mark on American culture by writing “Jingle Bells” in 1857.

That’s a long way to go from eight words beneath a window. But given Yale’s fraught relationship with its role in slavery, you might remember when you pass by those words that they immortalize a Yale man’s zeal for the abolitionist cause.