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Richard Cary Morse (1841-1926)
Richard Cary Morse, grandson of Jedidiah Morse and nephew to Samuel F. B. Morse, graduated from Yale in 1862 without any firm sense of what he should do with himself.
Family members encouraged Richard to take a position on the staff of The New York Observer, a weekly newspaper the Morse clan had run for several decades. One of Richard’s first assignments for the paper was to cover a New York convention of the infant YMCA, a Christian youth ministry just beginning to take off in the United States.
Richard’s article so impressed YMCA leader Robert McBurney that he asked him to sign on to the ministry’s staff. In 1872 Morse became first General Secretary of the YMCA in charge of the group’s international operations. He continued to wholeheartedly serve Christ till his death in 1926.
One desire of Morse’s heart was to strengthen spiritual life at Yale, and he suggested to students that they themselves should take up the burden of campus ministry. Morse’s plea at first landed on deaf ears. But D. L. Moody’s visit to New Haven in 1878 led to many conversions at Yale, and some of those converted were then ready to heed Morse.
Student initiatives led to the founding of Dwight Hall, the first collegiate YMCA in the United States. Above the entrance of the first Dwight Hall building was the inscription in Greek “One is your master, even the Christ.”(Matthew 23:10)
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