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BACCALAUREATE SERMONS 
 
BACCALAUREATE 
 SERMONS 
 
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 PRESIDENT M. WOOLSEY STRYKER 
 
 TO THE GRADUATING CLASSES OF 
 
 HAMILTON COLLEGE, 1893-1905 
 
 flJtica, I5et» got* 
 
 WILLIAM T. SMITH & CO. 
 1305 
 
Copyrighted 1905 
 by M. Woolsey Stryker 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Page 
 
 I. SEEING THE UNSEEN, 9 
 
 II. THE INDISSOLUBLE LIFE, 23 
 
 III. RADICAL AND CONSERVATIVE, 35 
 
 IV. THE REVELATIONS OF RESERVE, 49 
 
 V. THE ABUNDANT LIFE, 61 
 
 VI. OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM, 68 
 
 VII. THE STATION OF OBEDIENCE, 81 
 
 VIII. THE BETTER WAY, 91 
 
 IX. SPECIALISM AND SYMPATHY, 99 
 
 X. SYMMETRY, 111 
 
 XI. PROBLEMS OF CHURCH AND COLLEGE, 119 
 C XII. THE GLORIFICATION OF SERVICE, 129 
 
 XIII. DEMOCRACY AND CHRISTIANITY, 136 
 
 722618 
 
SEEING THE UNSEEN 
 
 TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 18, 1893 
 
 He endured as seeing Him who is invisible. 
 
 Hebrews, 11:27. 
 
 The Letter to the Hebrews was both an argument and an 
 appeal. With its array of fact and its august consolations, 
 there blended an unfaltering and personal trust in God. 
 That confidence in and commitment to Him is of the very 
 essence of true religion. Religion is either the fulfilment of 
 a real relationship, or it is a fond dream. The spirit of con- 
 stancy is so sustained and illuminative thro this whole writ- 
 ing as to make it, concerning faith, the classical source both 
 of definition and instance. 
 
 Not in any special phase or exercise, but absolute and 
 generic, faith is affirmed as the basis of life and the warrant 
 of all rational hope. The book deals with the apparent 
 vicissitudes of an ever-moving process, and at the same time 
 with the consistency and constancy of Him who guides this, 
 — mutability and the Immutable. By broad retrospect it 
 would prepare men to recognize and meet ungrievingly the 
 disciplines of change. At the eleventh chapter the argument 
 proper culminates with the resonant citation of preeminent 
 believers. Certain of the venerable roll are named, souls of 
 altitude, and classes are summoned, of those who having 
 won their rest, make up the celestial part of that holy alli- 
 ance and comradeship in which all souls are one who love 
 and seek the will of God. 
 
 " Compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses " - — 
 they who were once the spectacle and who now are the spec- 
 tators — we have the tremendous appeal increased. The 
 clenching thought is that these veterans are to have their 
 work perfected in those things provided for later days and 
 riper faith. 
 
 9 
 
Fascinating and rewarding as the whole analysis and var- 
 ious aspect of this great epistle must be found, let us press 
 in toward that core-idea which rules it all. 
 
 What was that " wherein the elders had witness borne to 
 them"? What is the theorem upon which this chapter 
 moves? At the outset, it is given, — a definition which in- 
 spires our whole instinct of flight, and lifts our eyes past the 
 hills, beyond the path of the eagles, up the ways of the 
 angels ! " Now faith — (and there the writer leaves the 
 ground and takes the wings of the morning) — " faith is the 
 proving of things not seen " — the " assurance of things 
 hoped for." Faith is itself a proof, a conviction. This 
 eleventh chapter is that proposition amplified by instance. 
 It begins at the beginning (as Genesis and John begin) with 
 " the word of God." We know " that what is seen hath 
 not been made out of things which do appear," that is, 
 " that which we look upon did not come from phenomena. 9 ' 
 Spirit and life are behind objects. First-cause precedes 
 second causes. Word is back of world. The seen is the 
 result of the unseen. The Creation is that over and thro 
 which the Creator lives and moves, and the creature who 
 knows this and so lives joins the triumphs of those great 
 Hebrew men. 
 
 It is upon the thought that our text condenses, that this 
 roster of great and effectual men proceeds. At the point 
 where we station our meditation Moses is the immediate in- 
 stance. Out text analyzes his life and sums it. Unmatched 
 and solitary that life stands above all the lives of the old 
 Testament: forty years in Egypt, forty years in Midian, 
 forty in the Wilderness, — " endurance," all the way from 
 Nile side to Pisgah top! 
 
 Such enduring, under such burdens, borne by such a man, 
 must be accounted for! It must have "assurance" and 
 " proof " under it. And thus the writer to the Hebrews (and 
 so to all souls perplexed by ages of transition and mental dis- 
 turbance) utters this epitome of all that Moses was and did — 
 10 
 
strikes the chord in which all his life was one of displace- 
 ments. It was also one of submissions because of convictions. 
 He accepted the loneliness of leadership. He became therein 
 a type, at once of the sorrow and the grandeur of a prophetic 
 soul. He did not fear Egypt's king; for face to face he knew 
 the "blessed and only Potentate, eternal, immortal, invisible," 
 who made poor both the riches and the wrath of Pharoah. 
 
 This contrast is in our text, but the very Greek states 
 even more broadly the secret of faith — it is generic not per- 
 sonal — " tov yap aoparov <5> s 6 P s>v " — " as seeing the unseen, ' — 
 God, and all else secured in God — the ruler, and the whole 
 realm beyond present vision. We keep both the euphony 
 and the paradox of the holy page when we say that faith is 
 the sight of the unseen. That then for our theme. Tran- 
 scendental as the statement is, it announces the real wisdom 
 and the real life of the soul. All uplifted and uplifting souls 
 have endured as seeing the unseen. Would that this pene- 
 trative beam of truth might scatter the vagueness with 
 which we think of Faith! It is the vision of the invisible 
 — the " heavenly vision." This " conviction of things not 
 seen " is a test and organon. What the eye is to sense, that 
 confidence in God is to the soul! Sense is not the last of us, 
 we are hyper- physical — we are made to touch the impalpa- 
 ble, to hear the inaudible, to see the unsighted. 
 
 It is this idea of the soul's true function and self -prophecy 
 that speaks in many another New Testament expression. 
 This very word dopara marks that other great statement 
 " the unseen things of Him are seen by the things made." 
 Nature is a telescope ! 
 
 Paul speaks of Christ as " The image of the unseen God." 
 
 "The things seen are for a while and the things unseen are 
 forever." 
 
 If we " have the eyes of our hearts enlightened " we shall 
 look for the reality that underlies all that is but apparent, 
 and find that — 
 
 " Earth 's crammed with Heaven." 
 
 11 
 
Faith is a " spirit of seeing," spiritual second sight. It is 
 logical. It reasons from the consistency of God. The child 
 clutches his father's hand in the night and so walks homeward 
 thro the dark, and " we go by faith, not by what we see." 
 It is faith to go out " not knowing whither," because we 
 know with Whom. 
 
 Faith is always this — confidence in and commitment to a 
 person. It is not guessing, arguing, taking chances, — it is 
 trusting someone who is trustworthy. Trust is more than a 
 persuasion from visible evidence, it is self-proving. It is not 
 merely one emotion or attitude out of many, it is a total and 
 vital connection with what lies beyond the boundary of the 
 five senses — "the masterlight of all our seeing"; — the 
 response of our life to His life who gave us ours — and who 
 made outer light the universal parable of the inner. Soul at 
 last can be satisfied only with soul. We " thirst for the 
 living God ", and surrendering to the compulsions of an irre- 
 sistible hope we find suddenly that faith guides reason. 
 Without it reason is not a safe leader, for it is not sane. 
 Certainty is more than sight, it is insight. All progress, all 
 skill, comes by trusting ourselves to that next step which is 
 ever just beyond present knowledge. It is not as a mere 
 optigraph of Heaven that these scriptures are holy; but 
 because they prompt that trust in a trustworthy God, 
 which is life eternal already begun. Nor is it only in man's 
 relation to God, but also in his relation to every other per- 
 son with whom he has to do, that faith is indispensable. In 
 all matters, ocular evidence is neither final nor chief. " With- 
 out faith it is impossible to please " anyone ! The soul 
 itself, and its impartiality, count in all convictions. Every- 
 where we have to reckon with what lies below the horizon. 
 In all things good faith is more than compulsion. There is no 
 sphere of thought or action in which it is rational to " dwell 
 only in things seen", to inspect only " the things before the 
 face." The apostle Peter uses the very word " myopy " 
 when he speaks of those who are spiritually " near-sighted," 
 
 12 
 
Everywhere the unseen presses for recognition. Whether 
 in the laboratory, or the garden, on the judge's bench, or 
 upon one's knees — reverence and expectancy toward the 
 " things not seen as yet " are indispensable to great result. 
 
 To go on from observation to classification, from conse- 
 quences to cause, from instance to rule, — all assortment and 
 all synthesis, — means faith. 
 
 The quest alike of the eager mind and of the longing heart 
 is for that ultimate unity in Whom power and pity meet. 
 We are not in fear of too much learning, but of too little! 
 The legal cannot be too exact: but that it maybe exact it 
 must be loyal. We are carefully to look down that at last 
 we may fervently look up ! Love is the way of prospect. 
 
 We are already in what we call " the other world ", for 
 God's realms are one. Only now we are withheld from the 
 upper light. We are shut within the shell of sense, and, 
 with sense, can see only its smooth and hard limitations: 
 but we have equipments for which those walls are too nar- 
 row, tho now in embryo we reckon that wings mean some- 
 thing, and with an act which stakes itself upon the conviction 
 of accessible tho as yet unperceived realities we use the beak 
 upon the fragile and temporary wall ! 
 
 We are sure that the vast is not a void, that derivative life 
 answers creative life, that longing is the clue whereby to 
 track love to its source, that conscience is a ' right line ' be- 
 tween man and his Maker, that " the spirit of man is the 
 candle of the Lord," that these things of sight are " a copy 
 and shadow of the heavenly things," — and so, the deep 
 within us calling to and answering the deep above us, we 
 make God's statutes our songs, pitch our pilgrim tents to- 
 ward the apocalypse, and rejoice in Him " Whom not having 
 seen we love." 
 
 But let us come to the fact that the perception of that 
 which is out of sight is not an exceptional but a normal 
 function. In every growing and advancing life men " hope 
 for that which they see not." All lofty imagination is of a 
 
 13 
 
kind with faith. Duty uses the same faculties and the same 
 methods that we use in all affairs, only the purpose is lifted 
 toward God and the scale prolongs into eternity. 
 
 The life of the spirit simply applies to the Being above, 
 that which every day relations apply to the beings about us. 
 Civilization rests upon faith. Society is Mosaic with that 
 which does, dares, and endures, " seeing the unseen." Faith, 
 as religious, is not different in essence, but in direction. Men 
 who renounce the service of the unseen God, serve their un- 
 seen fellows with this very faculty. Architecture works with 
 the same problems whether one builds a church spire or a 
 grain elevator, and certainty as to the external and as to the 
 eternal world is in either case a reasoning from the seen to 
 the unseen. There is no working theory, in physics or 
 psychics, that is not an illustration of faith. Assurance 
 of the undiscovered, all induction, all foresight, travels 
 Moses' way. Tell me, what other brilliant generalization 
 from particulars ever shot such light on man's mental or 
 moral path as the thought of the trustworthiness, the 
 fidelity, of the Creator — that the universe is a rational and 
 not a capricious result? 
 
 We eat, sleep, trade, by faith. You wrap money or love 
 in a letter, scratch a few marks on it, attach a stamp, put it 
 into the box at the nearest corner, and wait, with a thousand 
 " maybes " menacing, for your answer from Iceland or Cal- 
 cutta; all because you believe in the integrity and efficiency 
 of the post service. And is it credulity to believe Him "Whose 
 eyes outrun the morning and Who maketh spirits His mes- 
 sengers?" You cable a friend across the sea and get his 
 reply by a strand 3000 miles long; will you cavil at His word 
 " running very swiftly " Who said, " Before they call I will 
 answer and while they are yet speaking I will hear! " 
 
 Albany, and "51," the fastest and promptest train in the 
 world, is twelve minutes late by the board. Men walk watch 
 in hand, for they are assured of the Empire State Express. 
 
 14 
 
Ten minutes — eleven — and over the Hudson a film of smoke 
 wavers up, while as we watch, far this side the train curves 
 into sight and swings out over the bridge. All is haste. 
 Clang go the testing hammers along the wheels. Clank, 
 clank, answer the journal-boxes. Couplers and air-tubes 
 snap to their places, and we are behind " 893." Tom Der- 
 moid y, white-haired but keen of eye, is in the saddle there, 
 eight feet over the ties. He has given the cups their fill of 
 velvet oil, and alert and ready the creature waits, with 
 strange, deep-drawn sighs, the touch of the hand that will 
 hold it to its work. " 'Board I " and at the word the throttle 
 feels the touch, the mass of mechanism answers the mind 
 that commands it, and we are off. Six feet six, twenty feet 
 at every turn, the huge drivers respond to the steam. Up 
 the steep grade, the wheels biting the sanded track, swift 
 and more swiftly, past avenue and factory, and the pusher 
 is outsped. Away now into the West. Along the glistening 
 lines of Bessemer, down hill we go — 56, 55, 54 seconds to 
 the mile. Five times each second does that piston make and 
 recover its 24-inch stroke — a hundred tons of steel, with a 
 heart of flame, hurling itself toward the sunset! The sandy 
 plains swing backward, the Mohawk unwinds its silvery rib- 
 bon, the hills stand aside, and by orchard and quarry, thro 
 town and valley, in, out, swinging, sliding, leaping — it is 
 ever on! What a race! Curving as the river curves, the 
 train seems to cling convulsively to the rails over which it 
 rushes. Can that slender flange hold this awful centrifugal 
 force? How possible seems one mad plunge, with not a soul 
 left this side of eternity to tell what it was like! And, now 
 we think of it, is the engineer competent, cool, sober? Has 
 he good eyes? Are all the switches true? The semaphores 
 twitch to the horizontal: but that is for those who follow us. 
 How is it ahead! No pause. Our steed drinks upon the 
 gallop. Rocking with the storm of motion, Tom Dermody 
 peers into the distance and draws the bar a little wider. On ! 
 Here trailed the Iroquois. Here Herkimer struggled toward 
 
 15 
 
Fort Stanwix. Here went Kirkland thro the wilderness and 
 the winter. Could they rise up to look, what would they 
 conceive this thing to be — this blazing, screaming terror — 
 this tornado of iron? Behold adjustment, contrivance, fuel, 
 fire, force — nay more, it is an epitome of this strenuous and 
 Earth-subduing age — it is the transit of the Saxon ! Now 
 Deer field hills throw back the long shriek, sharper than any 
 savage cry of their wild days, and the complaining wheels 
 smother their riot pace under the touch of the same power 
 that compelled them to it. Slower, tho rebelling, slower, and 
 then — still. "Utica!" Ninety-five miles in 90 minutes! 
 On time! 
 
 And you submit yourself to that pace and peril, with its 
 multiplied chances of stupid switchmen, flaws in spike or 
 axle, imperfect inspection, a thousand risks to the mile, 
 trusting thus your life and other lives more precious to you, 
 because you have confidence in the management of the New 
 York Central. You will, I say, give yourself to all this 
 mechanism which you do not understand, and to the man- 
 agement with which you are unacquainted, and yet insist 
 that only * seeing is believing ' ! What credulous incred- 
 ulity is that which refuses to the Creator's control of His 
 own world that which it bestows upon the officials of a 
 railway ! 
 
 But turn to the market. What is credit, national or inter- 
 national, but trust in that " which no man hath seen or can 
 see"? Certifications, vouchers, endorsements, bonds, — are 
 these * sight'? What is ' security ' but personality? What 
 were our banks, our whole system of exchange, the United 
 States Treasury itself, without confidence in common con- 
 science ? 
 
 I say faith is the world's clearing house. Financial infi- 
 delity breeds palsy. What is panic but doubt scaring itself 
 into worse doubt? When but a percentage of unbelief dif- 
 fuses thro the world of trade, haggard calamity peers in at a 
 thousand doors. What if all faith were destroyed! That 
 
 16 
 
were such a catastrophe as if the world were suddenly 
 arrested in its turning and all things upon it snapped into 
 bottomless chaos. 
 
 When relief comes after a stringent or a barren market it 
 is not because there is more money, but because there is less 
 commercial agnosticism! And here remember that business 
 credit is what it is by a diffused Christianity. The banks 
 of the world are not in pagan lands. By this river all things 
 flourish. No more than I would starve while holding a cer- 
 tified cheque upon the Chemical Bank, no more will I fail to 
 use what I have every reason to think bears the very signa- 
 ture of God. 
 
 It is by faith, social, domestic, financial, scholarly, scien- 
 tific, — as well as religious, — that we live. Faithlessness is 
 barbarism. It is also treason, for how can one be a patriot 
 and at the same time a cynic? 
 
 This sixth sense is good sense and none other. Indigent 
 indeed is he who has it not. As the vestal of God, Nature 
 lights our way. It is not by observing the lantern, but the 
 way it lightens, that we get us home. He who cares only 
 for objects, and not for the subject of them all, consents to 
 mere optical illusion. 
 
 But I speak of the endurance which the sight of the 
 unseen teaches and inspires. It is this that measures power 
 for daring and for waiting. The size of your faith is the 
 size of your manhood. The believers are the doers. Faith 
 is no idler's possession. It is a high exercise of power. It 
 bids keenly for action. It is an energy of the whole nature. 
 It propels and compels. It leads, and is heroic. 
 
 That Roman was a stalwart believer in his city who 
 bought up the land on which the Carthaginian army was 
 camped ! 
 
 " There is no unbelief; 
 Whoever plants a seed beneath the sod, 
 And waits to see it push away the clod, 
 
 He trusts in God. 
 
 17 
 
Whoever says, when clouds are in the sky, 
 1 Be patient, heart, light breaketh by and by,' 
 
 Trusts the Most High. • 
 
 Whoever lieth on his couch to sleep, 
 Content to lock his sense in slumber deep, 
 Knows God will keep. 
 
 Whoever says ' Tomorrow,' ' The unknown,' 
 ' The future,' trusts that Power alone 
 He dares disown. 
 
 The heart that looks on when the eyelids close, 
 And dares to live when life has only woes, 
 God's comfort knows. 
 
 There is no unbelief ; 
 And day by day, and night, unconsciously, 
 The heart lives by that faith the lips deny ; 
 
 God knoweth why." 
 
 It was this sight of the unseen that sent Columbus over 
 the sea, that kept Washington in heart as he manoeuvered 
 his footsore regiments across the Jerseys; and there was 
 never a discoverer, a commander, a liberator, an inventor, an 
 author, who was not strong in faith, if strong at all. It is 
 this presentative faculty that has led to all the realized mar- 
 vels of physical science. The heroism alike of the inventor, 
 the discoverer, the martyr, is faith teaching endurance. To 
 imagine is to pursue. 
 
 Leverrier predicted and placed Neptune, with its orbit of 
 165 years, because he believed in gravitation. And faith is 
 no more audacious, is just as exact, as scientific, when it 
 trusts His consistent goodness Whom all events obey as 
 firmly as the battalions of the stars march West. 
 
 Science is Faith plus Investigation. Religion is Faith plus 
 Service. The sciences, of sense or of the soul, are both com- 
 pelled to use the same implement. " The believer in the 
 unseen atom should be the last to ridicule belief in the 
 unseen God." The unseen is at once the problem and the 
 power of all search. 
 
 18 
 
You are more than all of your senses. It is soul that 
 quivers, exults, moans, rejoices. Your senses are but post- 
 men handing you what they do not read, — - electric trans- 
 mitters, if you please, but only mechanical. Back of these 
 personal being sits, listening as blind Milton listened while 
 his daughters pronounced to him the Greek they did not 
 comprehend. Look ! Yonder is Beethoven, old and stone 
 deaf. He weaves passion, pain and peace into strange, 
 immortal harmonies. He forges music into light. He is 
 rapt as a Sibyl: but the voice of the oracle is all within. He 
 can not hear his own harpsichord ! His soul plays on, and 
 on, shreds of the symphonies of Heaven, and he endured as 
 hearing the unheard ! 
 
 These are souls that open their windows to the day. They 
 are horizoned by beckoning hands. Strength to meet and to 
 master the emergencies of life can only come from the guid- 
 ance of God, and this can only come by that choice which 
 makes Him the first in our hearts. Decision wonderfully 
 clears the mind. God reveals Himself to those who surrender 
 to His guardianship. We but shift our doubts from one 
 hand to the other so long as we forget that in everything com- 
 mitment seals conviction. Self-will shuts the door from self- 
 knowledge. Sensualism staggers into the clutch of scoffing. 
 Mighty faith comes only to mighty devotedness. None can 
 teach you his faith, nor give it. You must buy for yourselves 
 and pay God's price. The deepest is incommunicable save 
 from above. 
 
 " How can he give his neighbor the real ground, 
 His own conviction?" 
 
 A bystander perceives only the absurdity of a telephone 
 dialog, because his ear does not catch the responding voice. 
 Only the axis of a telescope or a tunnel is the line of vision. 
 When Titus took Jerusalem and penetrated to the Holy of 
 Holies he saw nothing. The Shekinah was not for him. We 
 abide in the truth in so far as there is truth in us. Belief 
 and life are something more than showing that faith toward 
 
 19 
 
God has rational analogies. The certainty that vanquishes 
 objection's not argument, but commitment. The blessing 
 of Him that dwelt in the burning bush awaits all who will 
 turn aside to see. Self -giving is the price of all high com- 
 panionships. Hastening into the sweet fulfilments or the 
 terrible surprises of the unseen, (one, or the other, they shall 
 be to us each) we may well quit all else for that which alone 
 has " the powers of the world to come." This is dynamic. 
 A sense of the security of righteousness, of the stability of 
 God, can only come by a surrender absolute to the Father 
 of our Spirits. That life of Moses, stupendous with strug- 
 gle, danger, disappointment, was crowned with a testimony 
 which was also autobiography, — " The Eternal God is thy 
 refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms." The shell 
 will shatter at last! 
 
 " Wings! wings! 
 To touch the hem of the veil that swings, 
 As moved by the breath of God, between 
 The world of sense and the world unseen ; 
 To swoon where the mystic folds divide, 
 And wake, a child on the other side; 
 To wake and wonder if it be so, 
 And weep for joy at the loss of wo; 
 To know the seeker is lost and found; 
 To find Love's being but not his bound; 
 Oh for the living that dying brings ! 
 Wings ! wings I 
 
 Class of 1893: 
 
 You will not ask me to forget that you are the first to 
 whom it is my duty to say these syllables of parting. I shall 
 always remember it. 
 
 I have longed to suggest a quickening and inspiring thing 
 to you, that should help you, under God, toward mastery, 
 first of yourselves and second of your circumstances. His 
 presence Who loved you and gave Himself for you, must 
 broaden and deepen my incompetent words. 
 20 
 
It is my last occasion with you. Other feet shall tread the 
 ways of our bright hill- top, — others shall answer the chapel 
 call : but, all together, I can never pray with you again, nor 
 talk with you over that open Bible. It is the last time. 
 Bear then with one more loving and fervent exhortation. In 
 the name of our good College, and by the memory of those 
 who with prayer and toil dedicated its unseen future to the 
 God of Wisdom; in the name of those graduate ranks of 
 staunch and reverent men that now are to receive you; in 
 the name of those who have taught you here with genuine 
 solicitude for your noblest training, " seeking not yours but 
 you," than whom you may find more plausible friends, but 
 none sincerer; — nay, by your own responsibility to your 
 Saviour and your Judge; — I charge you, be men of second 
 sight ! While the visionaries who fix their affections on this 
 unsubstantial pageant of the senses chide you with absent- 
 mindedness, look you with the vision of the seer, on into 
 the world of ultimate realities, and put the facts of the soul 
 before the fancies of the senses. 
 
 Educate your spirit's vision by using it. Leave both the 
 upstarts who make little of life's most serious and unsilenc- 
 able questions, and the dastards who avoid them. Let God 
 print upon the inner wall of your very eyelids these words — 
 " as seeing the unseen," and when sense all fails, when 
 you curtain your eyes in that swift prayer for light which 
 each of you must sometime pray, when ail is dark but duty, 
 then remember the kingdom of the invisible, 
 
 " nor bate a jot 
 Of heart or hope: but still bear up, and steer 
 Right onward." 
 
 You have mistakes but also bright successes behind you: 
 yet neither way are they final. You may offset the mistakes. 
 You must surpass the successes. To answer the time that 
 with a bugle call challenges constancy of soul and the 
 heroisms of a spiritual philosophy, you must hold fast Him 
 who today is so near to you. May the light of the knowl- 
 
 21 
 
edge of the glory of God shine in your hearts in the face of 
 Jesus Christ! He is your soul's Lord, your Master, your 
 Example, your Redeemer. Seize His loving hand! He will 
 stand by you in the furnace of temptation, in the prison of 
 afflictions, in the solitude of responsibility. You shall come 
 more and more intimately to know Him, and more and 
 more deeply as the rough years move, shall you feel that His 
 tender promise is for you, " Yet a little while and ye 
 
 SHALL SEE Me." 
 
 22 
 
THE INDISSOLUBLE LIFE 
 
 TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 24, 1894 
 
 "Not after the law of a carnal commandment, but after the power of an endless 
 life." Hebrews 7:16. 
 
 It is necessary to see what these words mean in their con- 
 nection, and from that force to go toward the great idea into 
 which they open, and which the local application illustrates. 
 
 The line stands in a paragraph whose purpose it is to 
 show the supreme priesthood of Jesus Christ, that He is 
 beyond and above the Levitical succession, that He is after 
 the order of the great king-priest to whom even Abraham 
 gave tithes, accepting his blessing as of a better than him- 
 self; — that Christ's priesthood, single, complete, unchange- 
 able, is the fulfilment and ideal which no high-priest of 
 Israel had ever attained — offering one final sacrifice, without 
 infirmity and perfected for evermore. 
 
 And this paragraph (and chapter), which, however far 
 away it may seem to us, came close to the daily thinking of 
 the Hebrews who first read it, is part of a minute and 
 patient and at last triumphant and rapturous argument, to 
 show the devout Jews who in those apostolic days had 
 accepted the true Messiah, that all they had loved and lived 
 in of rubric and rite was not now despised but transcended ; 
 — that they were not to be troubled because the venerable 
 things of their past were changed; for they were fulfiled, not 
 destroyed. 
 
 In the Christ, all which they had held so intimate as the 
 vessel and vehicle of a precious covenant and a common 
 worship, was not only made good, but made better. 
 
 The whole letter to these believing Israelites bases upon the 
 comparison between the old and the new. Contrasts, general 
 and special, are its whole structure. It is ruled by antithesis, 
 and argues a fortiori. 
 
 23 
 
Thus our text is an expression eminently characteristic of 
 the argument into which it enters. Christ's place and office 
 is not carnal, transient, legal: but mighty, quickening, 
 enduring. 
 
 Put compactly, here is a summary and a confronting — the 
 Old against the New. Law on the one side, life on the other. 
 The life does not deny the law, it surpasses it, taking a higher 
 outlook and a wider reach. Law works inward from without. 
 Life works outward from within. It is rim versus centre, — 
 exterior restraint versus interior constraint. 
 
 The word ' endless ' is much more exactly rendered, as in 
 the margin, by the word indissoluble — a life essentially and 
 uninterruptedly one in all its parts. 
 
 The old dispensation which led up to the fullness and the 
 fulfilment is set forth as rudimentary and preliminary. It is 
 pedagogical. It is mechanical, not dynamic; and so, a 
 moment later, our writer says, " for there is a disannulling of 
 a foregoing commandment because of its weakness and 
 unprofitableness (for the law made nothing perfect), and a 
 bringing in thereupon of a better hope, thro which we draw 
 nigh unto God." 
 
 I urge that this contrast between the temporary scope of 
 that special commandment and the boundless scope of that 
 supreme life, bases upon and illustrates a general truth of 
 high importance. The contrast is representative of the per- 
 manent conditions that divide punctiliousness from power, 
 the narrowness of legality from the abundance of life. 
 
 In all the things which we are saying the chief point is this, 
 that there is all the difference between the artificiality of 
 commandment and the spontaneity of life, that there is 
 between Aaron and Christ. 
 
 The law of all commandment is the law of criticism and 
 repression, the power of all life is the law of appreciation and 
 expansion. 
 
 The destructive opposes the constructive because it is per 
 se inhibitive and cannot be creative. All precepts are good 
 
 24 
 
only as they lead to principles. The literal rule is but a 
 means to the end, right living. 
 
 Law measures imperfection — life alone can repair and re- 
 place. Law may introduce, but it never can complete. 
 
 The Bible is not only a history but it also gives a philoso- 
 phy of history, and it shows the degrees by which carnal rule 
 is led on to spiritual power. The whole climate of Hebrews 
 is changed from that of Leviticus. This was God's way — 
 always is His way. While at first life so far as it can be is 
 stated in the terms of law, at last law is to be transfigured in 
 the terms of life. 
 
 Painters and sculptors know rules and work with them: 
 but what knowledge of their rules alone could make a Ru- 
 bens or a Thorwaldsen ! The Idylls of the King are grammar 
 plus Tennyson! A Lamia is prosody plus Keats! The Get- 
 tysburg speech was history plus Lincoln! 
 
 By law we learn to avoid death; but it is by the contact 
 of the inspiration of a superior life that we learn to live. 
 
 And these two dispensations, of law and of life, furnish 
 forth two realms, an upper and a lower, in one of which we 
 must all dwell. The upper includes the lower — life is not 
 extra legal, but super legal. He who denies or despises law 
 has not learned it, and must, if he would ever go up, go 
 down again to the first principles and rudiments; but law 
 cannot say the last word. For instance, marriage is a con- 
 tract. That is a sorry marriage which forgets its contract, 
 — that is also a sorry marriage which is only a contract. 
 Carnal commandment must be underneath, but it must be 
 underneath, — the "power of an indissoluble life." 
 
 We may choose, and we must, whether we will live posi- 
 tively or negatively. I mean, whether we shall be actively or 
 passively good, whether we shall have that timid and 
 hand-to-mouth behavior which is mainly concerned not to 
 make mistakes, or that vital eagerness which is far more con- 
 cerned to avoid making nothing! A man may be negatively 
 good, in the sense that he does no mischief. Such an one 
 
 25 
 
idolizes caution until it becomes impotence. His keeping of 
 law is as if one for fear of going wrong were to lash himself 
 to the sign-post at a four-corners; or as if a soldier were to 
 save his powder for fear his gun might burst; or as if a sick 
 man to assure himself against an error by the pharmacist 
 were to swallow the prescription! 
 
 Keeping law means more than eluding penalty. He is still 
 coarse and carnal who does not perceive that sin and the 
 consent thereto is the thing law indicates that seeing its 
 naked abominableness, the soul may cry out for His help 
 Who has the power of the indissoluble life, in Whom "the law 
 of the spirit of life makes free from the law of sin and death." 
 The differentiation of negative from positive goodness may 
 be noted in contrasting the altitudes of the Siniatic Law and 
 the teaching on the Mount, desert Arabia with fertile Gali- 
 lee. Here we get right at the idea — the two ways of one 
 God: but this introductory, that complete. We may not 
 refuse either way, and we must be sure that the primer of 
 a particular command is mastered and not skipped. Neither 
 is it the end. It is much to avoid concrete evil, and so the 
 ten words go on — " Thou shall not " — it is goodness by 
 exclusion. It is safe: but when Christ comes to translate 
 precept into spirit, He gives goodness by inclusion, which is 
 strength. He blesses the humble, suffering, restrained, eager 
 for right, merciful, pure, pacific; in other words, He chooses 
 and extols the life that begins within. In summing the law 
 of Moses into two commandments, He made active love to 
 God and man the whole result. Christ states actual goodness 
 anew by showing how ten " thou shalt nots " equal two 
 " thou shalts." Positive goodness is less verbal and more 
 direct. Life advances by exchanging negatives for affirm- 
 atives. By mastering rules we grow into relations, using the 
 go-cart that we may walk without it. When the mechanical 
 has become the natural, when effort has become spontaneity, 
 when the crudeness of intention has become the second-na- 
 ture of intuition, when one has learned to absorb the principle 
 
 26 
 
that is the kernel of the rule, then the elocutionist has be- 
 come the orator, the disciple the apostle. One noble con- 
 formance is worth eight or ten avoidances. Much ' search- 
 ing of scripture' is a search for vetos; over-pruning and not 
 enough mulching. Doubtless too much of the education of 
 children says, Don't, don't — instead of Do, do. The pri- 
 mary lesson so long as needed (but no longer) must be to 
 stop from error; but to proceed in right is the path of life. 
 Preoccupation is protection — a higher interest supplants a 
 lower. When a child can be made to laugh it already has 
 quit crying. The way for a man to leave stinginess is to be- 
 gin generosity. Presently Scrooge is no longer himself! It 
 was because his goodness had been so far only negative 
 — keeping the " shalt nots " — that the young man to 
 whom Christ opened the positive and eternal life went away 
 frowning! Meaning not to do harm is much less than de- 
 termining to do good. The two words go deeper than the 
 ten, and so at first seem harder to keep: but when drudgery 
 has been overruled by vitality they prove easier. There is 
 all the difference that lies between a balloon and a bird, in- 
 flation and wings. 
 
 We never do anything right well until we do it uncon- 
 sciously. To be over-aware of self is to be awkward, or at 
 least artificial. The senses are to be exercised by use until 
 they cease to do ill by learning to do well. One must think 
 of the target, not of the arrow; of the bird, not of the gun; of 
 the listener, not of the song; of the soul, not of the sermon. 
 Negative goodness is prim and timid, too self-concerned to 
 dare aggression. It guards its rear instead of advancing its 
 front. It adopts the tactics of McClellan rather than of 
 Sheridan! And still the philosophy of making the provisional 
 seem to be the permanent treats symptoms instead of deal- 
 ing positively and radically with causes. Tonic is better 
 than lancet. Build up the system and the disturber quits. 
 Get health in and sickness goes out. Health does not recol- 
 lect the body. It is when life loses its hold and power that 
 
 27 
 
the patient has to fall back upon carnal commandment. A 
 great deal of our religious living is at a dying rate, or at least 
 feeble and sickly, because it forgets that the way to fight 
 asphyxia is not by vacuum but by quantity of fresh air. 
 There is a style of piety that is mainly pathological, speak- 
 ing with the accent of invalidism, measuring mournful doses 
 and adjusting hot-water bags. The power of the Living-One 
 still as of old summons chronic debility and selfish neuras- 
 thenia out of itself, " Arise, take up thy bed, walk "! 
 
 It is the expulsive and propulsive dynamic of what is posi- 
 tive that " gives power to the feeble, and to them that have 
 no might increases strength." The locomotive gets up steam 
 by going — the more speed the more draft. To warm a room 
 one must close the window: but he must also light the fire; 
 for to raise the temperature the stove is far more necessary 
 than the thermometer. To get darkness out one does not 
 use a broom but a lamp. Enter truth, exeunt lies. Enter 
 liberty, exit bondage. Power is in the ratio of displacement. 
 " Fire makes room for itself," say the Japanese. While 
 dupes consent, tyrants rule them, — not longer. The Czar 
 will experience Siberia just as soon as freedom shatters rotten 
 beaurocracy. There will be a different Russia when there 
 are different Russians. 
 
 America will have better cities just so soon as it has better 
 citizens. There will be a morally "Greater New York " when 
 there are greater New Yorkers, — no earlier. Bad men can 
 be kept out only by putting good men in. That spasmodic 
 reform which stops half-way is illustrated in Christ's parable 
 of the untenanted house. It was cleansed: but it was suf- 
 fered to stand empty, and so it became again the kennel of 
 demons. 
 
 Not doing is undoing. To rest in negations of wrong, rather 
 than to be zealous to affirm good, makes so big and fatal the 
 bulk of sins of omission. " Ye did it not " may be the irre- 
 vocable sentence ! He who is either so irresolute or so proud 
 as never to risk a mistake will never do anything. The 
 
talent wrapped in a napkin and hid in a hole hurt no one : 
 but it helped no one. No servant will enter into the joy of 
 his Lord by proving that he never did much ill. 
 
 The really upright life must be downright, — willing to 
 blunder on, to stumble forward, to fall up. Real virtue is 
 active, overt. It does and moves. It is measured by its 
 momentum. A good citizen is not merely one who^keeps 
 out of the criminal court. It is of course something not to 
 go to state's prison: but that cannot be the sum of patriot- 
 ism. Certainly I hope that none of you will ever be hung: 
 but I really hope more for you than that! A Christian is 
 other than merely one who does not flagrantly violate the 
 moral law. All the sanctions of respectability, ad infinitum 
 or ad nauseam, cannot make a life of perpetuity. Absti- 
 nences from evil are worth while, so far: but it is not the ill 
 we let go but the good we hold fast that sizes us. 
 
 The whole Jewish system established at once the value 
 and the weakness of commandment. It was indispensable as 
 an introduction; altogether deficient as a conclusion. It was 
 the preceptor of adolescence — a " tutor until the time ap- 
 pointed." The grandeur of Judaism was its original advance 
 into precept; its decadence and stultification was in its re- 
 fusal to see how law was intended to lead on to and into life. 
 Coming to worship carnal rule it at last rejected the vital 
 and perpetual newness of its great Consummator. It learned 
 the letter of exclusiveness and refused the Spirit of inclusive- 
 ness. It put the trellis for the vine. Thus it elevated the 
 scribe above the prophet and dwindled to a retrospect. The 
 Jews of our Lord s time had become high-protectionists in 
 religion, and to exalt privileges denied stewardship, ignoring 
 or hating all non-Jews. The Son of Man announcing the 
 ripeness of a changed order, breaking down the partitions of 
 severalty, declaring that the special could only be fulfilled in 
 the universal, arraying the positive against the negative life, 
 endured the inevitable contradiction of parchment and phy- 
 lactery and signed the charter and covenant of emancipation 
 
 29 
 
from these with the sign of the cross! The monastic spirit 
 repeated the mistake of moribund Judaism, and in turn its 
 carnal and perfunctory system went down before the power 
 of wholeness of life. For it is the way of life to transcend 
 circumstance not by caution but by character, not merely 
 to quote a maxim and do a task, but to inspire an ideal and 
 incarnate its joy. This is the freedom of the soul which per- 
 ceives the spiritual goal of instances and rubric, and (never 
 disdaining their concrete value) holds them always as non- 
 finalities. So does the flood-tide first follow, then fill, and 
 then with its broad sway cover, the little indentations of its 
 estuaries. Then the boats go wide and free that at low-ebb 
 must strictly heed the channel. 
 
 Ramadan, or Lent, or Sunday, — think how these are 
 kept merely by abstention, instead of by a typical and sac- 
 ramental substitution of works of love and mercy. If the 
 Lord's day were once used by the alleged followers of Christ 
 in His way, in helping the hungry and heartening the dis- 
 tressed, — even if sleek congregations upon cushioned seats 
 sang fewer lyrics in good-natured praise of the cross, — had 
 less entertainment in the way of 'sacred rhetoric' with all 
 the week for anti-climax — that were to keep the day holy. 
 Long ago Isaiah described the fast God has chosen. 
 
 The way we keep the fourth commandment is a speci- 
 men of our conception of the others — not doing this and 
 that. It irritates our self-complacency to be told that clean 
 linen and general inertia are only negative virtues and that 
 it is the fulness of the law to "do good on the Sabbath." We 
 are semi-Jewish yet in our Christianity ! It is vain for us 
 to hope to understand Christ by mere ceremony and rite. 
 He is the pattern of an affirmative and constructive life. 
 The old priesthood offered something else: but He offered 
 Himself. That offering of self is our only availing answer 
 to His call Who said that the way to find life is to lose it. 
 He does not now preach economy: but great investment ! It 
 is the engineer's business to burn coal, not to save it ! 
 30 
 
This whole and indissoluble book is a book of positive 
 and so of profound theories of life. It offers to supplant 
 the vagueness and barrenness of mere negations by invinci- 
 ble realities. It gives us law as a base of operations. It 
 teaches us to answer the allegations of doubt by the power 
 of Christ. We are to put off the old man by putting on the 
 new, to cease to do evil by learning to do well. Might of 
 spirit does not come by carnal measurements. Doubt dies 
 by deed. It is answered by fidelities, not disputations. It 
 is not what we controvert, but what we demonstrate, that 
 tells. No party and no person is long tolerated whose only 
 outfit is a grievance. Non credo makes few converts. Trust 
 alone can vanquish distrust and "overcome evil with good." 
 The distinction of all conquering greatness is its displacement 
 of shabby apologizing by daring aggressions. It is in this 
 direction that Phillips Brooks so wisely noted, "how many 
 more resolutions to do right are kept than resolutions not 
 to do wrong." Better be strenuous for one truth than 
 against ten lies ! In chess or in war defensive tactics may 
 postpone defeat, but only offensive tactics win the game. 
 
 When in Rio harbor our Admiral manned the guns of the 
 Detroit and said, / will act — he defended American non- 
 combatants and British too, and all Saxons said Amen! 
 Do your duty and take the risks. To live is much more 
 than merely not to die ! 
 
 " HERE LIES ONE WHO NEVER DID MUCH HARM." 
 
 Who wants that for his epitaph ? But if mortuary mar- 
 ble were less diplomatic how often this negative legend 
 would summarize a nominal life ! Webster on his last 
 couch said, " I still live." Someone attempted to repeat his 
 word, and got so near as to make it, "J ain't dead yet." 
 There is a difference! 
 
 Abandon is the dynamic before which prudentialities 
 shrivel. Personal will alone can rouse the wills of others. 
 
 At the siege of Port Hudson, in May '63, when the invest- 
 
 31 
 
ment had been made complete and the lines were almost 
 within talking distance, the Rebels had at one point erected 
 a powerful redoubt, crowned with rifled cannon and crowded 
 with sharpshooters. The Federal soldiers dubbed the spot 
 Fort Infernal. It silenced the works in its immediate front 
 and made the trenches deadly. Its vomit of iron seemed as 
 if set with a hair-trigger. On the evening of July 6th Gen- 
 eral Banks sent for the officers commanding the opposed 
 Union front. He sharply criticised the apparent inaction of 
 the assailants, and to the reply of Col. Berrien that half his 
 guns were dismounted and the redoubt impregnable, the 
 General gave orders that at nine the next morning, at what- 
 ever cost of life, the battery should be stormed. " It shall 
 be done," replied the Colonel, his bronzed cheek burning 
 under the implied rebuke as he saluted and turned away 
 to consult with his subordinate officers. With one voice 
 they pronounced the attack hopeless and declared that the 
 men would not obey a command that meant the annihila- 
 tion of their columns. Sternly the Colonel answered them 
 all: "Gentlemen, the attack will be made if I make it 
 alone!" 
 
 At half-past eight of the 7th of July, the troops mustered 
 close in the trenches stood gloomy and unresponsive to the 
 words of their commander, as with a few words to each 
 company he inspected the line. Watch in hand he waited 
 the moment, and as the finger marked nine, with sword in 
 hand he leaped to the parapet. " Forward ! " A tremor 
 fluttered down the front: but they remained irresolute — 
 and there their Colonel, the lead hornets swarming about 
 him. "Forward! Charge!" Heads went down, dark 
 shame flushed the faces, yet they stayed. " Cover your 
 carcasses, cowards — / will storm the battery!" About 
 face and alone! Twelve steps, and over the breastworks 
 went Color-sergeant Whittaker, and there were two! A sword, 
 a flag, and the cannon gouging the earth about them to left, 
 to right, the sleet of death pitiless ! Madmen, shoulder to 
 
 32 
 
shoulder! The fire slackened, heads peered over parapet 
 and bastion, gazing at the two. Then the significance of it 
 dawned on the beholders, and alike from Unionists and 
 Rebels there went up a wild Saxon cheer. It was life! Out 
 of the trenches and over the earthworks came the regiment, 
 wild with the passion to do — tho doing were dying. On 
 and over and in! Steel to steel, soul to soul, — they would 
 have stormed Hell! 
 
 No one remembered how, but it was done, and as the 
 grimy remnant gathered about the shredded flag struck into 
 the parapet, they heard the faint voice of their wounded 
 Colonel: " Well, boys, you came, after all! " 
 
 Fort Infernal had fallen, and with it Port Hudson. 
 
 Men of the Class of '94 : 
 
 You stand here now with sealed orders as to where you 
 are to live and labor : but the whereby and whereunto, this 
 text taken to heart makes an open secret. " Kai-a Swafuv £a^ 5 
 aKaraXvTov " — Power, Life, Indivisibility — what words are 
 these to heed as you go! Carrying love in your hearts for 
 the fair Mother who has done more for you than you now 
 can guess, may you vindicate and honor her by your positive 
 deeds. Acta non verba 1 In the ever-growing library of 
 memory cherish these four volumes, today nearing the last 
 paragraph, and of which the whole sum is this : " Quit you 
 like men, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His 
 might." " If your virtues do not go forth of you, 't were 
 all alike as if you had them not." Submit your souls to 
 Him Who can evoke your latent capabilities as the miracle 
 of irrigation makes the Arizona deserts into gardens. 
 
 Let fidelity to your inmost natures add your lives to that 
 phalanx of light which is turning the battle to the gates. 
 
 The sixteen year old boy who against a field of expert 
 men won recently a great bicycle race, said a thing worth 
 remembering. He was eagerly questioned as to how he did 
 it. "I took the best gait that I thought I could maintain 
 
 33 
 
for the twenty miles, and kept it up just the same from 
 start to finish. I did not look at any one, but just held my 
 eyes on the ground ahead of my wheel and kept up my 
 gait." There were famous sprinters competing with him, 
 but he did not sprint. They were watching others to see 
 what they were doing, but he watched none but himself. 
 That is the moral route by which souls reach the goal! 
 
 God free you from sordid seductions, from base appetite, 
 from the paltry ambitions of the many, and number all of 
 you with the glorious few who refuse the sham goodness of 
 conventionality for the tasks and triumphs of the more ex- 
 cellent way. God fulfill for you every desire of goodness 
 and every work of faith with power. May your souls realize 
 themselves in service, " Like perfect music unto perfect 
 words," — and so may you attain the crown of life! 
 
 34 
 
RADICAL AND CONSERVATIVE 
 
 TO THE GRADUATING CLASS. JUNE 23, 1895 
 
 Every scribe who hath been made a disciple unto the kingdom of Heaven, is like 
 unto a man that is a householder, who bringeth forth out of his treasure 
 things new and old. Matthew 13 :52. 
 
 Right upon the utterance of several notable parables, 
 Christ turned to His disciples, asking them: "Have ye 
 understood ? " And at once to that close question He 
 added the words which illustrate how much He meant by 
 really understanding. Therein He described the width and 
 abundance of His own instructions, and so showed what in 
 his degree every true teacher must be. 
 
 He would have all disciples learn to be such teachers, 
 bringing them by expectant and eager attention to the sweep 
 and search of His word and work, into the open secret of 
 His method and His purpose. He teaches, as also He rules, 
 by the way both of continuity and of increase. To Him, 
 and in Him, time and its tenses are not fragmentary, and 
 truth is a unit both constant and augmenting. 
 
 All that this keeper of His house brings forth, (throws 
 forth — swiftly, determinedly) — out of His abundant the- 
 saurus, or treasury, is precious. There is no rubbish there, 
 no moth-fret nor rust. Thence we are to accept and adopt 
 " things new and old." What we now affirm and urge is 
 the equal oldness and newness of the teachings of Christ. 
 He certainly made good this declaration in both argument 
 and accent. 
 
 The words of this Instructor of time were as emphatic 
 and sedate as Mt. Horeb, and as fresh as the balsamed 
 winds that blew out of Gilead to ruffle the mirror of the 
 Galilee; as old as the light and as new as the morning. 
 
 So it came that they who had found the soul and substance 
 of elder revelation, welcomed gladly His authentic message, 
 
 35 
 
and that unsophisticated every-day men trusted Him as an 
 authoritative interpreter of those primary problems which 
 lie near to plain hearts. So also those who could only value 
 quotation marks, who had no insight of that which lay back 
 of ceremonial and rubric, who idolized idioms and had lost 
 the idea, failed to comprehend this Scribe of the Spirit and 
 the divine truth-kingdom* He announced. 
 
 Whoever, then, held to Christ Himself, and pressed past 
 the objections of unfaith and semi-faith, found Him deeper 
 than the oldest words of men, brighter than the newest. It 
 is the same now. 
 
 The whole story of that Wisdom Incarnate establishes our 
 text. It was the chord in which His entire testimony was set. 
 
 And I go on to say that our Lord's illumination of " things 
 new and old " was not an exception, but rather a specimen 
 of all the normal and constant self-manifestation of God. 
 
 The material of truth is changeless, its form is never twice 
 alike. Christ here asserts the variety in its unity. One 
 treasury, many things. Let us open wide our minds. This 
 heavenly and kingly Scribe is wiser than our half- sight, and 
 quietly rebukes that mental attitude which looks only in one 
 direction, whether that be backward or forward. For he 
 who but considers the East, equally with him who but con- 
 siders the West, ignores half of the total day. 
 
 Christ summons us to live under a whole sky. In Him 
 and in His words, and in those who best know and most re- 
 semble Him, the past and the present are held not in opposi- 
 tion but in sympathy. 
 
 The partial is the easier and the feebler. The sturdier 
 and more genial way loves to discover the combination, the 
 union, the vital identity of what has been done with what is 
 doing now. For, just as every June is both a result and a 
 cause, the child of an elder and the mother of a junior sum- 
 mer, so in all the spirit's life the past and the present are 
 blended in Him Who has " neither beginning of days nor end 
 of years." 
 
 36 
 
Man in his obstinate fallibility easily lapses into one or 
 the other of two equally incomplete frames of mind — living 
 on the one hand only in what is old, and on the other hand 
 only in what is new. 
 
 Each mistake is a mistake not only of one-sidedness but of 
 outsidedness — the mistake of identifying the eternal sub- 
 stance with its transient appearance, of preferring accident 
 above essence, fashion above fact. 
 
 These opposite moods are of course largely temperamental: 
 but it is the business of a rational soul to overcome predis- 
 position and bias, and to get rid of its stiffneckedness by 
 realizing that man's head is not set on a pedestal but on a 
 pivot ! 
 
 Some minds are eager for any change, and some are angry 
 at any. The one is born senile, and the other dies puerile. 
 Each of these classes has its own dislike, whether muttered 
 or mumb, to the under- thought, the wide comprehension of 
 our text. One secretly wishes that Christ had spoken only 
 " things old," and the other would have even from Him only 
 " things new." One frustrates truth of its eternal summits 
 of ozone and outlook, the other would ignore its permanent 
 foundation and base. But every mountain that has heights 
 has also depths. Altitude measures both ways. 
 
 The man who loves the old only as old, and the man who 
 seeks the new only as new — each thinks with but one brain- 
 lobe. He whose discipline is unto the wide kingdom of 
 Heaven, loves what is true whether it seems old or new, — 
 loves it because it is always both old and new. 
 
 There are two words which in current and somewhat 
 careless fashion are made the class-titles of these alternative 
 habits of mind, — the words Radical and Conservative. 
 Nothing can be more deplorable than to fall entirely under 
 either category, whichsoever it be; for either, by itself, is 
 segmental. 
 
 Conservative means preservative. Under this title range 
 all those who dread and repel change, who are angered by 
 
 37 
 
the unexpected and tormented by agitation. The Conser- 
 vative hoards decisions and loves only what is gradual and 
 guaranteed. Custom and continuity are his comfort, and he 
 is apt to look with a stony face upon the unconventional. 
 An ounce of caution is worth to him a ton of daring. Sud- 
 den and precipitous men, who would crowd all tenses into 
 the present, who delight in speed and scorn the steam-guage 
 and the escape- valve, who ( as Lowell said) " must see the 
 world saved before night," are his abhorrence, and these in 
 turn renounce the Conservative as impossible, coagulated, 
 obsolescent ! 
 
 But whether the Conservative is a dullard and dotard or 
 a seer and safeguard, rests upon his particular scope and 
 motive. For to test one time by all times, to resist swift- 
 ness in the interest of strength, to weigh secure axioms 
 against rash importunities — this is wisdom, and he who has 
 it saves the future, postponing the unripe today that he may 
 secure the bountiful tomorrow. The true Conservative 
 declines both green apples and rotten. The false Conserva- 
 tive, if he marches at all, marches backward. He is crabbed 
 and hard-shelled. He is an antiquary and medievalist. He 
 adores inertia and is an incorrigible temporizer. " His 
 strength is to sit still." His forte is negation. He worships 
 in a pantheon of mummies. To him the present is but a 
 pile of exhausted slag, and history is not a nursery but a 
 graveyard. He likes his manna pickled. Experience is 
 sacred to him as a means wherewith to rebuke hope. He 
 can only accept the prophecies that were long ago fulfilled 
 and the miracles that are memories. The best days are 
 past. He believes only memoriter, and maxims are his 
 finality. 
 
 The Radical is the man who would go to the root. The 
 tops of things do not satisfy him. His watchword is Thoro. 
 He is assertive, aggressive, intense, sweeping. He nails a 
 besom at his mast-head. He does not add precedents, and 
 he forswears formulas. He prefers any innovation rather 
 
 38 
 
than to endure mortmain. Yeast is his element. He rides 
 bare-backed revolution. He wields the iconoclast's hammer, 
 and loves axe and plow and the rubbish-searching flame. 
 
 Routine men, who adore yellow parchment and pale rub- 
 rications and chancery-tape and all that is canonical, resent 
 the Radical as an intruder, an impracticable, and a fanatic. 
 
 But whether the Radical is a sheer destroyer or a sublime 
 reformer depends upon whether he too is farsighted or near- 
 sighted, upon whether mere destruction or reconstruction is 
 his ultimate goal. There is a crude and cruel temper whose 
 whole passion it is not to extend boundaries but to trample 
 them, whose essence is lawless and anarchic. Upon what- 
 ever plane of theory of affairs, he who thinks hard without 
 thinking far, or moves fast but not firmly, is a danger and 
 may become a disaster. 
 
 No classification of men is ever exhaustively accurate. No 
 man falls exactly within a single category. But the instance 
 of the partisan who disdains experience, who renounces the 
 sequence of causes, whose prospect scorns retrospect, who 
 mistakes a fancy for a revelation, who thinks his dividend 
 can decree its own divisor, who falls with hysterical rapture 
 upon the neck of " each new-hatched, unfledged comrade," — 
 he will occur under a hundred names. He has his use as a 
 scourge and a warning — the false Radical, who does not go 
 to the root. 
 
 Of the radicalism of wild excess, clashing with the conser- 
 vatism of stupid lethargy, the France of just a century ago 
 was a sufficient instance, — the collision of two collossal 
 madnesses ! 
 
 This then remains; that either type of opinion and 
 method, prevailing in isolation, emphasizes one, and but one, 
 of the two necessary complementary phases of a full human 
 activity. Man is to look fore and aft. The best guns are 
 turreted and command both bow and stern. One can wisely 
 neglect neither the synthesis that groups time into unity — 
 " broadening down from precedent to precedent," — nor the 
 
 39 
 
analysis which subjects all phases, customs, statutes, consti- 
 tutions, to reinvestigation. 
 
 The wild Radical puts out his torch at midnight; the 
 blind Conservative shakes his torch in the face of the noon: 
 but he who has disclaimed infallibility goes, at whatever 
 hour, by the best light that hour offers. There they sit, in 
 senates or on thrones, robed in the livery of officialism or 
 brain-bound with hoops of gem- set gold, waiting, or mutter- 
 ing " nothing can be done," the " everlasting No," the non 
 possumus of imbecility. History puts them into its museums 
 of fossils. George III. may stand for a specimen, or you 
 may take the impotent indecision of James Buchanan. And 
 there too they rush, frantic, screaming that everything must 
 be done at once! — your Wilkes, Dantons, Garrisons. 
 
 But now and then an epoch advances which combines 
 both moods. It becomes crystalline and effective. The 
 scarce and ambidextrous man stands up to say, " Something 
 can be done now, if not everything, and what can be done, 
 shall be." With this man comes an era. In him the old 
 order changes, as the dried leaves fall before the outpushing 
 buds while their tree lives and expands. Seeing both possi- 
 ble harms, reckoning with both the obstacles and the helps, 
 enduring or daring but never shirking, this man waits with 
 a patience that is not delay, and works with a sureness that 
 is not haste. The really large one lays the axe to the root, 
 that he may conserve the truths blighted under the rank 
 shadow of a lie; and he also holds back impetuosity, "lest 
 with the tares it pull up the wheat also." 
 
 In writing upon the Long Parliament, Macaulay has a 
 terse and balanced paragraph upon this matter, and he con- 
 cludes: "In the sentiments of both classes there is some- 
 thing to approve. But, of both, the best specimens will be 
 found not far from the common frontier." 
 
 Truly it is not in the frigid zone nor the torrid, but in the 
 temperate, that the greatest events issue and endure. But, 
 that being said, it is not for the dawdlers and sybarites to 
 
 4a 
 
estimate the stern resolve of an Elijah fronting Jezebel, of 
 Elisabeth's son denouncing Herodias, of Savonarola, and 
 Beza, and Knox, and Sam Adams, and Phillips, and Sum- 
 ner. Time-servers cannot realize the indelible influences of 
 the commonwealth of Cromwell, nor can tuft-hunters per- 
 ceive that he was England's truest king. When such dep- 
 uty-sheriffs of Almighty God utter their summons let men 
 heed. " So shall He startle many nations." " Kings shall 
 shut their mouth at Him." These radicals are conservative 
 too, tho in a way no small calipers can measure. But in 
 a range far above these stand the calm, comprehensive souls, 
 who know how to work while waiting and wait while work- 
 ing, and their appealing eyes look past the hour and the event 
 for the verdict of God. Plato and Tacitus and the name- 
 less writer of the book of Job stand there. There are Angelo 
 and Kepler. There, silent, tender, time-abiding, upon a ped- 
 estal cut from the core of things, which no man manufac- 
 tured and no man can mar, Lincoln stands. The spherical 
 man is he who beyond the symbol seeks the essence, and who 
 will have that, cost how it may, and will at any cost keep it. 
 
 Supreme herein is He upon whose lips absolute righteous- 
 ness and everlasting peace kissed each other, and to Him — 
 whether we would dare or endure, pity or denounce, cut 
 down or build up, — to Him we turn for the complete ex- 
 ample of the symmetrical life, the life in which all the traits 
 of nobility are coordinate and entire, in which wisdom is not 
 cold nor zeal roiled. Whosoever would follow Him must be 
 a manifold man, Conservative and Radical in one. 
 
 Under the domain and dominion of Christ, the old and 
 the new, instead of warring, wed. Judgment replaces, and 
 enthusiasm restores. 
 
 The two terms we are discussing are not absolute, but rel- 
 ative. That is only a so-called conservatism, not really 
 such, which mistakes routine associations for the truth itself, 
 and identifies the treasure with the earthen vessel, preferring 
 an empty ark to a living Messiah. 
 
 41 
 
The true conserver is a Radical in desiring to keep the 
 real thing. The perennial second commandment is dearer 
 to him than any transient device. Form is to him the utility 
 and life alone is holy. He would preserve what is older than 
 all form in any form that will hold it, and would rather have 
 a quart of truth in a square cup than a pint of truth in a 
 round one. Christ was such. His balance was far super- 
 human. He whipped the traffickers from the temple, yet 
 predicted that temple's overthrow. He rebuked petrified 
 tradition while declaring, " I came not to destroy but to ful- 
 fill." To the Pharisees He seemed a rash leveller, to the 
 Herodians a futile moralist. His very disciples often wanted 
 to hasten or to restrain Him: but He would neither hurry 
 nor delay. 
 
 He came to * set men at variance,' to * kindle a fire,' to 
 ' send a sword,' to say, " every plant that My Father hath 
 not planted shall be rooted up," " he that is not for us is 
 against us " : but, and also, He considered the bruised reed- 
 pen, and the smouldering flax-wick, the little ones, the lost 
 sheep, and turning pride upside down He put in the beati- 
 tudes a premium upon what the world despises, and He 
 said, " he that is not against us is on our part." Evolution 
 and revolution wrought together. Positive yet patient, 
 daring yet cautious, never hedging and never hasting, He 
 was outwardly all that men did not expect and would not 
 comprehend, and inwardly all that they needed. While he 
 never snarled nor sneered, He never mitigated His meaning 
 nor receded from his program. 
 
 He affirmed principles and left them to work out their ap- 
 plications. He was too slow for some and too swift for others 
 — bi-partisanship scouted Him. He was so supreme that no 
 one measured Him. President Hyde well says: "The aver- 
 age good man is equally at war with the bad man who is 
 below him and the progressively good man who is above 
 him. The reformer and the criminal are about equally ob- 
 noxious to the man of average goodness and intelligence. 
 
 42 
 
The prophets and the betrayers are equally odious and pro- 
 miscuously stoned. The Saviour is crucified between two 
 thieves.' ' 
 
 Still the Church is but semi-christian in its emancipation 
 from what is seen and temporary. It still but begins to 
 know its mission as Christ's ideal of society. We fail to see 
 that the husk is precious only for the kernel's sake, and that 
 when the wheat is gone what is left is but straw and chaff. 
 The old is good while it covers the new; after that it is a 
 dry pod. 
 
 John the Baptist was one mighty Radical who illustrated 
 the law that they who wield sharp tools must feel them: but 
 that axe of his laid to the upas-tree of hollow words was the 
 reconstructive agent the time was most in need of, and his 
 lonely voice was the herald of Israel's King. 
 
 Every great preserver is called a deformer till he is gone. 
 Men are prone to garnish the sepulchres of their prophets 
 with epitaphs: but the prophets with epithets. The many 
 feel more secure when those who compel them to think are 
 under a good-sized slab! 
 
 It remains for us, if we would neither tear nor raffle this 
 seamless text, to hold to the fluidity of God's purpose and 
 providence, and to see the sacredness of all its conduits, 
 whether present or past. They are neither identical nor in- 
 dependent. Truth is perennial, and we hold what we have 
 of it both as the heirs of our parents and as the trustees of 
 our children. 
 
 That age is most important which does the most to em- 
 phasize what is of permanent importance. The wise man 
 perceives both what is permanent and what is progressive, 
 neither unduly preponderating. The new and the old do 
 not impeach one another. Origins, means, and ends — all 
 are coordinate. Revelation is a process by which what is 
 vital and seminal constantly adapts and enlarges its new ex- 
 pressions. Finality is death, and prejudice the rigor mortis. 
 
 * Providence unfolds the Book.' It is not a kaleidoscope 
 
 43 
 
for a toy, but a telescope for a tool, and it looks deeper than 
 any of us is aware. 
 
 Christ planted a thousand seeds that now are forests. 
 Under that Argus-eyed, Atlas-shouldered, Briareus-handed 
 Leader both the intensive and the extensive life find scope. 
 Under that calm and conquering dominion we are not to be 
 terrified at ideas that surpass and supersede our inherited 
 schemes. One could not, for instance, crowd our modern 
 and still tentative conception of missionary duty into the 
 ideals of the eighteenth century. 
 
 Slavery, feudalism, the serfdom of one sex, have felt the 
 touch of Christ's sceptre; and the cowardice of wealth, as 
 the envy of want — all usages without reason, are yet to own 
 His ever-germinal Kingdom. 
 
 We are to imitate fidelity, not fashions. As our forbears 
 did, so must we, — tell what we learn of God in our own 
 words! We must mint our own coin-current. We are not 
 invited to repeat the wile of the Gibeonites, and provide 
 ourselves with what is dry and mouldy! Miracles are not 
 repeated; greater ones are wrought. He who accustoms 
 himself to God's Spirit finds the old renewed in larger won- 
 ders. God's latency is all in all. He does not exhaust. 
 Life is incessant innovation. It is only when one stops go- 
 ing that his horizon and perspectives no longer change. 
 " Tempora non animum " — " They change their skies but 
 not their souls who traverse the ocean." New seas are 
 sailed under new stars. It is not the familiar scene but the 
 intimate companion that makes life's journey serene. If 
 you are scholars of the great Teacher, He will give you both 
 review lessons and advance, and outgrowing your garments 
 you will find that your apprehension of today will not fit 
 you tomorrow, certainly not the day after tomorrow. Lot's 
 wife for a parable ! 
 
 We are put into a day that forces us upon God. Much 
 does our Lord's word apply to our very time. It is a strong 
 detergent to " every disciple unto the kingdom of Heaven." 
 
 44 
 
The giant is out of the bottle! The era of analysis is not 
 accidental, it is providential. Man needed it. The Church 
 needed it. God awakens us from the " opiate of usage." It 
 is a revival. The ages in which the status is unchanged are 
 wintry ages. In scholarship, legislation, society, religion, 
 the motionless times are the moribund. Life must either be 
 moribund or more abundant! 
 
 A time like this of ours is deplored by those who dread 
 any change and adored by those who love all change: but, 
 if sane, we will neither neglect nor abuse its disciplines. We 
 may neither surrender to every challenge nor reject every 
 claim. Truth is not shaken by either assault or doubt. We 
 can do nothing against it. Magna et prevelabit — spite of 
 harsh attack or feeble defense. 
 
 Just as to a man walking too fast upon a city's crowded 
 sidewalk, every other man is too slow, and to a man walking 
 too slowly every other man is too fast, so the pace of the 
 world is a limitation which we can somewhat affect, but to 
 which, to affect it, we must somewhat conform. We are to 
 advance, if effectively, neither laggardly nor too fast. We 
 are to have new things and old, old things and new. The 
 web if unfolded will show that every true age has pressed 
 home new woof upon the old warp. We cannot do more than 
 to utter our own convictions, and we may not dare do less, 
 both aggressive and circumspect, neither timid nor tumid. 
 
 The processes of readjustment compel the processes of 
 restatement, and both these processes come often with 
 clamor and always with pain: but only those wring their 
 hands whose assurances are outside of God. There are 
 half-men, who only see one way, and there are ages domi- 
 nated by such men that are only half-ages : but whole men 
 and whole ages look both ways, and sailing by North Star or 
 Southern Cross are piloted by Him Who sees all and will 
 show all. Holding to Him the genuine soul will not shiver 
 nor shrink. 
 
 What we all need is less anxiety over precedent and more 
 
 45 
 
confidence in God. In the trust that history is prophecy, 
 that God is here, that He still steers the world, the deep 
 seers of our century have spoken. " In Memoriam " voices 
 it. Whit tier is the bard of " that great law which makes 
 the past time serve today." 
 
 " Whate'r of good the old time had 
 
 Is living still. * * * 
 God works in all things. All obey 
 His first propulsions from the night. 
 Ho, wake and watch! The world is grey 
 
 With morning light." 
 
 No, " this is not our rest," for body or mind. We are in 
 transitu. Our souls are under marching orders and lodge in 
 tents. 
 
 Then what this word of Christ should fix in us is, that 
 truth is eternally young. Revelation, nature, man, provi- 
 dence, yield perpetual increase. The encyclopedia of knowl- 
 edge must be supplemented with annual volumes. 
 
 Pondering the inexhaustibleness of the treasures of God 
 hid in Christ, richer, deeper, wider, with every practical test 
 of them, a truly reverent philosophy of the world as His 
 must take on continually grander proportions, and must 
 speak with ever- mightier convictions and ever-better argu- 
 ments. 
 
 No true science remains stationary. Geology, chemistry, 
 astronomy, biology, even history, — what changes of method 
 and result have these undergone in three generations! But 
 the objects have not changed, nor have the necessary mathe- 
 matics of thought wherewith we work. 
 
 World and event prove Christ the Interpreter of time and 
 eternity. The more He does the more He both confirms and 
 expands. His words are not Dead Seas, but wells of living 
 water. The " Heir of all things," His latest words are His 
 largest. Who shall debar His illimitable and crescent sway 
 upon Whom all converges and from Whom all radiates, the 
 old and the new blending in His integrity ? 
 
 46 
 
Men of the Class of '95 : 
 
 This ' commencement ' is an ending; but far more is it a 
 beginning. Poetic fitness, as well as convenience, long ago 
 transferred it from the autumn of the college year to the 
 summer. Your real curriculum is not behind you, but 
 before. 
 
 You are now to translate and parse that " Sunt quos 
 curriculo pulverem Olympicum Collegisse juvat" The 
 Olympic dust is yonder. The college has been but your 
 introduction to the ' collegisse." You are whirling up to 
 the line, and are all but ready for the word. Let me add my 
 voice to the sending cheer. 
 
 When you come panting and straining to the finish — 
 " the goal nicely-avoided by the glowing wheels, and the 
 noble palm " — the voices that shout " Well done! " will not 
 sound here ! In that eternal commencement, having "fin- 
 ished your course with joy," may it be true of you each and 
 all, in a far deeper sense than blithe Horace ever considered, 
 — " evehit ad Deos ! " Bethink yourselves that you are 
 charioteers — "a Olarpov to the universe and to angels." I 
 am sure that you would admonish the new-fledged Sopho- 
 mores here, who are kindly translating my little Latin to the 
 maidens beside them — (" junctaeque Nymphis gratiae 
 decentes " ) — to bestir themselves even already for that 
 third summer hence when they too shall gather taut the 
 reins for their life race. 
 
 Good-bys are always trite : but not the less are they solemn. 
 Already, to two of your company — to Frank Burrowes, 
 who died in September, '93, and to John R. Myers, jr., who 
 died in July, '94, — you have said the irrevocable farewell. 
 Forty-six men began the work of your class four years ago; 
 now twenty-nine complete the roll. Never, after this week, 
 will so many of you gather under one roof ! In groups you 
 will return to the hillside of your common love: but little by 
 little your ranks will gather closer, until, perhaps in 1955, 
 you will hold your last class meeting — of one ! He will 
 
 47 
 
come, the relic of you all. He will ride up the hill he cari 
 then no longer climb. He will, with some young guide not 
 to be born for thirty jyears yet, observe the stately new 
 buildings and people the old with you and your comrades 
 of the moss-grown nineteenth century. Perhaps he will say 
 a kindly word at the mound where one shall then be resting 
 who for three years, under whatever college vicissitudes, 
 was a good friend of '95. He will look out upon the lovely 
 slopes and beyond the curving hills, the boys will gather in 
 their caps and gowns and cheer, — 
 
 Boom Rah ! Boom Rah I Who is he ? 
 
 Vive La 1 Vive La I XCV I 
 — and then — he will go down into the valley ! 
 
 But between this and that day work lies — your real 
 standing is to be registered. It is a grand time to live ! 
 Live boldly ! We shall watch you from this signal station. 
 You will be welcomed back, with your honors new and old. 
 The white spire and its far-flashing point will guide you 
 from afar. The bell will greet you. The old well will bub- 
 ble for you. You will send along your boys for the nine- 
 teen-twenties. All good to you in the strenuous years upon 
 which you enter ! Be Christ's men ! Accept every one of 
 you His name and His guerdon of self-sacrifice; and grad- 
 uate at last, " having obtained the good degree," and all of 
 you with high honor ! 
 
 48 
 
THE REVELATIONS OF RESERVE 
 
 [TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 21, 1896 
 
 / have yet many things to say unto you; but ye can not bear them now. 
 
 — John 12:16. 
 
 This was said in that upper room and on that passion- 
 night when more tenderly and more fully than ever before 
 our Lord opened His heart to the eleven who loved Him. 
 He sought thus to prepare them for the experiences so new, 
 so near, and still so incomprehensible. But His words even 
 then were not so much an explanation as an embrace. We 
 are always furnished best for our next steps by personal love 
 to our Leader, rather than by vision of the way. 
 
 Too much foreknowledge would baffle and daunt us. Each 
 page of instruction has its back to the page beyond. God's 
 books are printed leaf by leaf — continuous sense and con- 
 stant surprise await each turn. Progress and reserve go to- 
 gether. Revelation, which is an unended and an endless pro- 
 cess, accommodates itself to immaturity by its hidings of 
 both grace and power. " By divers portions and in divers 
 manners " God prepared the way by the prophets and " in 
 the fulness of time " declared His Son. He developed His 
 meaning as rapidly as it could be at all accepted. And when 
 the Christ was made manifest, even to those nearest Him, 
 and to them because nearest, " He spake the Word as they 
 were able to bear it." Revelation were wasted were there 
 not readiness for it. Growth is the only method of God that 
 we know, and His omniscience waits upon human capacity 
 so that curiosity shall neither be tantalized or drowned. 
 Waiting is not delay, but preparation. The withholding is 
 full of tender promise. Just because all is not given at once 
 we are sure there will be more. What we can bear we shall 
 hear. Each testimony, to the end, is to be shown in " its 
 own times." God's motherliness meets our spiritual diges- 
 
 49 
 
tion with food convenient, and neither offering that which is 
 unripe nor that for which we are unready, makes distinction 
 between babe's milk and man's meat. Eye teeth come 
 earlier ; wisdom teeth later. We do not expect a " Clark 
 prize " exhibition from Freshmen ; but four years from now 
 we shall expect from you more than that. Because living is 
 learning, you will all outgrow yourselves many times before 
 Earth's school is over. 
 
 The guardian must await the competency of his ward, 
 and the heir must be under tutors and governors while his 
 nonage lasts. That possession without preparation may be 
 a mortal damage is shown by the many wrecks of those who 
 come into a great estate without experience of values and 
 with undisciplined wills. God graduates his demands to our 
 aptitudes, and that we may not be overborne He puts 
 primer before grammar, and syntax before prosody. He 
 guages the strain to match the muscle, and does not impose 
 upon adolescence either the reflections or the responsibilities 
 of full manhood. He does not expect the child to speak as 
 a man, nor the man to think as a child. 
 
 Christ's tuition in Galilee was a signal instance of divine 
 discipline. Nazareth was no great place; but there the boy 
 Jesus learned obedience, and so came to a stature of soul to 
 endure the gaze of a nation and the apparent ignominy of a 
 Roman cross! There He learned to teach men as they were 
 able to receive and to temper the light to the vision. 
 
 Or take this Book. How part led on to part! How its 
 story marches! What an " increasing purpose " it registers! 
 How the relative moves toward the absolute! By provisional 
 stages and by steady advances — from Exodus to Nehemiah 
 — it covers eleven hundred years. Then the "four cen- 
 turies of silence," then Bethlehem. Again from the Ascen- 
 sion sixty years more before the beloved disciple laid down 
 his pen, with " Many other things did Jesus which are not 
 written." It is a cumulative record, growing as now in 
 finest lithography the print takes new lines and tints from 
 
 50 
 
Successive stones* Each century added its own impression. 
 What a witness is this Book whose study has formed a 
 strong component part of your curriculum, to the manner as 
 well as the matter of providential truth! As literature it is 
 august, but as an evidence of God's pedagogic way it is 
 sublime. He has but an illiberal education who has not 
 been taught in these Scriptures the fundamental philosophy 
 of history. The evolution of redemption is the highest ap- 
 peal to the patience of hope, and the deepest assurance that 
 " of the increase of His government there shall be no end." 
 
 What a surrender it is to fail to recognize that the divine 
 is always the interhuman, and to estimate the times of the 
 Judges by the times of the Evangelists — to speak as if 
 Jacob could have understood Paul! Each age was an ad- 
 vance. Abraham was of one period, Moses of another; but 
 Moses, shepherd tho he was, could not have written the 
 Twenty-third Psalm. David could not have penned the 
 fifty- third chapter of Isaiah, nor the " Songs of Degrees." 
 Jeremiah could not have anticipated the Annunciation. 
 Unity throout, but of will, not wisdom. These holy men 
 spake as they were moved. The dates are not on the writ- 
 ings, but in them, God having ever provided " some better 
 things." Even Paul saw " in part." He did not dream of 
 the modern geography and of modern missions. He was not 
 shown the territorial reach, the new politics of all these 
 centuries, just as we now do not guess the new society that 
 Christ has in mind, nor the slow and stormy times thro 
 which it shall be brought in. But He who wove the facts 
 here set down, and who has overcome thus far, is the same 
 forever in saying: " I have yet many things to say unto you, 
 but ye cannot bear them now." 
 
 Level to the topmost comprehension of each time, meet- 
 ing each occasion, always opportune, weaving no anti-climax, 
 always with both dramatic unity and dramatic movement, 
 the providential truth is given, link by link, and the Word, 
 mortising each stone into the arch, perfects the whole by 
 
 51 
 
that which every part supplieth. The symmetry is vital, 
 not mechanical. With the divine oversight and control 
 there is no variableness. The embryo and the birth alike 
 are His. 
 
 Things that were inscrutable to the first disciples are 
 taught in our infant classes. Christ trusted them with ideas 
 as fast as He could, and as it was, they were in constant 
 amazement. He was wont to say, " If ye can hear it," — 
 " He that hath ears." How fast events moved from that 
 Passover to the Pentecost. What pregnant suspense and 
 with what unimagined issues! 
 
 After that cloud-burst of grace and on thro that genera- 
 tion there runs a steady crescendo of spiritual comprehen- 
 sion, the words being confirmed in signs following. Inspira- 
 tion accommodates itself to the soul as incarnation accom- 
 modated itself. Each is full, neither is final. Nothing is 
 final with God nor with His Christ. Still He says: " What 
 I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter." 
 
 For preparation is always more than prediction. The 
 training of the Twelve was a facsimile, in the small, of the 
 training of the Church, still uncompleted. 
 
 What silly questions they asked, what absurd requests 
 they made, and with what wisdom they were postponed. 
 The process is so natural that we do not realize what a dis- 
 tance they had traveled between the fifth chapter of Mat- 
 thew and the fifteenth chapter of the Acts. How the spirit- 
 ual landscape has widened before them! Their minds are 
 clearing, they become positive, convincing, their words seize 
 men for God. 
 
 The fifth book of the New Testament is a key and a bond. 
 What was reserved because before premature is now an open 
 secret. The epistles became both grand explanations and 
 tremendous prophecies. They reach back of Genesis and 
 beyond the Apocalypse. We see the fishermen become giants 
 and the purblind Pharisee of Tarsus opens his eyes upon the 
 vistas of eternity. The " progress of doctrine " in the New 
 52 
 
Testament is a symbol of its progress in the comprehensions 
 of men. Slowly men learn Christ, blinking as those unclos- 
 eted at noon. Fallow ages wait upon mortal dullness, so 
 patient is our God. 
 
 The seed grows, but it grows secretly, and culminations 
 are delayed until the world can bear them. God is always 
 ahead of the times. The men who strive to be abreast of 
 the colors are they who lead their generations. Who of you 
 will march there? 
 
 The evangelists were not stenographers. They gave but 
 a sketch of our Lord's deeds and words. They did not min- 
 ister even to a reverent curiosity. The Gospel will have 
 news for us in the life to come. Eighteen years of Christ's 
 life is condensed into three or four sentences. 
 
 And not even yet have we wrought His precepts to a tithe 
 of their logical conclusions. Still unguessed corollaries of 
 thought and duty lie in this treasure which our shafts have 
 so scantily mined. Which of us can imagine that he has 
 sighted the circumference of the Lord's prayer ? Thank 
 God if we have learned its centre ! 
 
 It is the attainment of each period that makes possible its 
 successor. None is independent, none is final, and God 
 alone is infallible. He who has guided, still guides. His 
 truth is perennial and becomes concrete in each generation. 
 The idolatry of any one cycle, equally with the neglect of 
 any, is disloyalty to the presidency of the Holy Ghost. As 
 long as man listens, God speaks. He has yet many things 
 to say, in English, that we could not bear now. Therefore, 
 our transcript of God's meaning, the statement of our 
 apprehensions of it, must ever widen. We must take obser- 
 vation each noon. One Sun, but many seas, many shores. 
 Providence is a biological science. Moral history is a grow- 
 ing volume. All is concentric, nay, Christocentric; but about 
 that centre each lengthening century describes an ampler 
 circle. Every life works with the equation of the spiral. 
 God's consummations are as gradual as they are resistless. 
 
 53 
 
Reserves and remainders await our strength. Timely reti- 
 cence subtends amazing yet all- consistent movement among 
 Earth's peoples. We can no more set the clock of Christen- 
 dom forward than we can turn it back. The new authority 
 that was to supplant Greece, new ideals, new sciences, new 
 arts — all these ( and that not by destruction but by ful- 
 filment ) were capsulate in the Gospel. Again and again 
 man has sung, and truly, 
 
 " We were the first that ever burst 
 Into that silent sea." 
 
 but the silent sea becomes a thorofare, the wilderness a gar- 
 den, the lone hill an observatory. 
 
 We would be nonplussed and stunned were the vision 
 opened to us too soon of what the world and man will be 
 like when the unfathomable petition is answered: "Thy 
 will be done on Earth, as it is in Heaven." 
 
 The latest edition is never the last. Each new evolution 
 of manifolded wisdom is " revised and enlarged." Veil after 
 veil is rent in twain, and still there are unexplored remainders 
 whose reservation is alluring. The Sun of righteousness is 
 not burnt out, and the harvests of today are the seed of 
 tomorrow. We have yet more to learn. As beginners, we 
 are prone to overrate our powers. We say, as Peter once 
 said it, " Why cannot we follow Thee now ? " We forget 
 the commentary of experience. We would force the mystery 
 and discount God ! 
 
 In our grasp of Christ's meaning for ourselves and for 
 mankind there must be a constant revision and recombina- 
 tion, along with a hearty appreciation of all new light. The 
 terms of physical science discredit today what once were its 
 undisputed formulas. In two generations it will, no doubt, 
 retire some of its present theories as now it abandons 
 " epicycles " and " phlogiston." 
 
 But the bigger knowledge can never make the idea of God 
 smaller. The Word will still fill the world. With whatever 
 54 
 
light is reflected in the mirror there will evermore shine there 
 one face ! The potencies of splendid and unimagined days are 
 in that " Arch-chemic Sun." " We have seen but a part of 
 His ways." The evangel that makes creature at one with 
 his Creator is a spectroscope, revealing the elemental unity of 
 all moral worlds, and for this world it will be found not only 
 to meet, but also be found to have made each new time. Its 
 applications to life exceed all that we have imagined. " Suf- 
 fer it to be so now " silences many of our shallow objections. 
 " The half is not told us." The interstitial stars in Christ's 
 sight gleam already. What could Galileo have done with 
 the Yerkes glass? But what will that be when the sugges- 
 tion of the eye of the fly is fully wrought out and compound 
 lenses gather at one point a cone of rays whose base diame- 
 ter is forty feet, not four? 
 
 We are still in the rudiments and see with kitten-sight! 
 And if our grasp of matter is still so primitive, need we 
 wonder that in the realm of purpose God still garments 
 Himself with unapproachable light? He tempers His won- 
 ders while He trains man up toward them, and amid all 
 Apocalypse " seals up the things which seven thunders 
 utter." In this open Bible there is that written of which 
 
 " Not Gabriel asks the reason why, 
 Nor God the reason gives." 
 
 Much is withheld against that day whereof the Master of 
 all hearts declared, " Ye shall ask Me no question." He 
 knows that the suspension of much of our curiosity in no 
 wise interferes with present obedience, and checks many an 
 impertinence of over-importunity with that recorded irony, 
 " Your time is always ready! " 
 
 When " difficulties vainly curious and doubts impossible 
 to be solved " excite us, we may well recite that touching 
 prayer of burly Sam Johnson, " against inquisitive and per- 
 plexing thoughts." It is a wise prayer for the wisest man, 
 and to the wisest, easiest. In every loving ear there sounds 
 
 55 
 
a constant whisper : " I have yet many things to say unto 
 you." If this great idea of gracious postponement has at 
 all fastened your attention, you have seen how it clarifies 
 both Scripture and life, and how it answers both fear and 
 hope. It affirms the continuity of Christ. It vitalizes all 
 present attainments. It shows how each broader and deeper 
 day " hath new needs and new helps for these." 
 
 It articulates all tenses and binds together the physical 
 unity of all worlds as a scene for the dramatic unity of all 
 events. It makes time only a mode of thought, and life 
 omnipresent. Crisis may introduce crisis, but omniscience 
 includes all issues. Queries to be solved, doubts to be re- 
 solved, duties to be done, trials to be borne — the Word 
 is nigh. We have read the Pilgrim's Progress as boys; we 
 shall understand it as men. The skies will deepen. 
 
 " What first we guessed as points, I now know stars." 
 You will arrive where you could no more return to your old 
 measures than the New York Central Railway could put its 
 business back upon a single track system! 
 
 You may blanch when Christ puts into your hand that 
 cup whereof you now think to say, " We are able to drink 
 it"; but you will not blench if you have learned that He 
 never asks of you more than you can bear. We have been 
 enabled to meet many things that seemed impossible; we 
 shall be again. Power shall rest upon us and He shall "de- 
 liver our souls in peace from the battle that is against us." 
 
 " My God, I would not long to see 
 My fate with curious eyes." 
 
 We want no palmistry save that of His wounded hand. 
 It is not the time table, but the engineer, that brings the 
 train thro. Devotion does not demand demonstration. 
 One can be a filial son yet not have read his father's will. 
 
 I have thus far elaborated an idea that, rightly held, com- 
 mands both modesty and hope, and in them each, deter- 
 mined courage. Diffidence toward our own knowledge as 
 
 56 
 
final and confidence in God's wisdom as infallible, is that 
 which sets forward the world and our own souls. This spirit 
 of outlook surpasses every yesterday and lives under a per- 
 petual dawn. The unhasting, unresting, evolution of God's 
 plan is " the master light of all our seeing." It is more 
 penetrative than any cathode ray. It saves us from indif- 
 ference and from irresolution. It applies old truth to the 
 new time, and with perennial revelation declares the world 
 to be a divine laboratory. The book written and history 
 yet writing, — the busy Spirit is alive in both. Withheld 
 completions, reserved revelations, suspended harmonies — 
 these make life more than logic, and prove Christ the 
 dateless Son of God. We are all the pupils of an inex- 
 haustible Teacher, finding 
 
 " * * progress, man's distinctive mark alone, 
 Not God's, and not the beasts'; God is, they are, 
 Man partly is and partly hopes to be." 
 
 The times and seasons of human affairs find here their in- 
 terpretation and forecast. Races and empires and authori- 
 ties and constitutions and suffrages write large the text 
 with which we have dealt. The Church, the State, custom 
 and statute, all that the society of man means and can 
 mean, are to demonstrate that Christ has " yet many things 
 to say." The signs of the times are a holy horoscope. 
 Awakened Japan; crude China; semi-barbaric Russia; hectic 
 France; imperious Germany; the two Englands — one the 
 England of Wyckliffe and Milton and Browning, the other 
 the England of miserly diplomacy whose robes are now 
 splotched with the wet blood of Armenia; two Americas — 
 the one leal to her high opportunity, the other mad for 
 money and thinking to tamper with the very standards of 
 honesty — all this collision of local advantage and of univer- 
 sal truth; Christ sits serene above the floods, and by all 
 changes and crises, collisions, catastrophes, utters His decree 
 and brings in His kingdom. Fight under that flag, ye who 
 are men! New courage shall discover a new world. 
 
 57 
 
This law of graded advance may well guide us in our con- 
 sideration of that which we await for the College of our love. 
 The constant uses and survives the transient. Whatever 
 has been good and is better, implies, begins, and assures the 
 best that is to be. Forms pass, but life indefeasible and 
 crescent, weaves its changing robe, transcending and surviv- 
 ing earlier measures. 1793 was our day of small things, as 
 all seminal days are outwardly small. They called the rude 
 frame building, for six years uncompleted, " Kirkland's 
 folly "; but our seer Samuel was a true futurist and builded 
 more than he foresaw or could foretell. His bones lie yon- 
 der in goodly and growing company, but the school is the 
 spiritual body wherein " he being dead, yet speaketh." The 
 little house there is a parable. That patriotic, reverent and 
 confident beginning lived. Because it lived it increased. It 
 shall live, and live there, drawing ever upon the elastic and 
 un was ting forces which speak alike in science and in psalm. 
 There reason and reverence shall go hand in hand. There, 
 long after our forms are dust, shall the kindly mother sit in 
 her bowered door and in her plain, unwavering loveliness 
 smile upon her children, rocking her dear, old-fashioned 
 cradle and holding tender converse with her returning family. 
 With beautiful, undimming eyes she shall survey the calm 
 valley, with its scenes that change with every upward step, 
 and that are never two days the same; she shall muse upon 
 the grey and violet hills, upon all the fugitive beauties of 
 the world and the shimmering skies beyond them, until 
 Earth's last sunset shall enfold her, and eternity's first 
 morning, with all its tremulous mystery of light, shall kiss 
 her tranquil and triumphant brow. Thro an adolescence not 
 without the ills of infancy, the Academy grew up to the es- 
 tate of the College, merging its name in that of its earlier 
 lover. But the hard-won charter of 1812 was a permission 
 rather than a pledge, a fond hope rather than an assurance. 
 The graduates of 1814 could now barely enter Sophomore, 
 and that under conditions. 
 
 58 
 
Along a devious channel, with many rifts and eddies and 
 shifting snags, the current has flowed, but wider, deeper, 
 past these years four-score and four. Many benevolent 
 tributaries and many unseen springs of prayer and sacrifice 
 have fed its increase, until now by its banks are stately trees, 
 whose roots its waters have sustained and whose interlaced 
 shadows waver upon its placid breadth. 
 
 Hamilton is not a gourd of yesterday, but a goodly vine 
 with fruitful boughs, and long tomorrows are to come. Sons 
 and grandsons and godsons are hers, and she is theirs to love 
 and to cherish. I speak to a throng of them today, and I 
 set home to them all the word of the providential and per- 
 petual Christ, " I have yet many things to say unto you ! " 
 I speak out boldly, as I ought to, to new friends and old, 
 and urge them to look upon this stubborn and stalwart work 
 of ours and to ask themselves where they can more wisely 
 bestow their substance, or in better hope of its persistent 
 benefit to the generations to be ? Who will come to the 
 kingdom for such a time as this and join their names in im- 
 mortal usefulness with those of Hamilton and Kirkland ? 
 
 Men of the Class of '96 : 
 
 Up, all of you ! Not for today only, but for tomorrow 
 and the days after. " Is not the Lord gone out before you ?" 
 Hear Christ ! Hear all He yet will say to you. The word 
 is nigh you. Obtuse to temptation and obstinately dutiful, 
 stand away from those who prefer to get thro life by the 
 dishonor system! Renounce, denounce, the worships of 
 Gain. Stand out from among the breed of idlers and snobs. 
 Accept the ordination of duty. 
 
 This impetuous and momentous time calls for resolute 
 and muscled character, brains unillusioned by partial ideas, 
 souls so sympathetic with globed and celestial truth as to be 
 superior to segmental and terrestial half-truths. Remember 
 every pathway and door, every leafy aisle^of quiet and 
 each dreaming vista of that good place up yonder, and carry 
 
 59 
 
a country heart into the whirl of crowds and the tumult of 
 cities. Be critics always and cynics never. Whatever may 
 go wrong, do you go right, and so the mildew of pessimism, 
 the canker of envy, and the dry-rot of selfishness shall not 
 come near your souls. Have such an idealism as thrilled in 
 those lines of Holmes that preserved the good ship Constitu- 
 tion — a sense of the past, of " our father's God," and of 
 His continuity, and His hand shall pilot you safe home to 
 port. Be learners to the last, for 
 
 " Since all things suffer change save God the Truth, 
 Man apprehends Him newly at each stage. 
 
 Whereat Earth's ladder drops, its service done, 
 And nothing shall prove twice what once was proved." 
 
 It is this that shall round the age of science into the age 
 of song. 
 
 Fare you all well ! My own good-by to you is one with 
 no unpleasant recollections and with many bright ones. I 
 have seen you grow. Grow on, and in the day of the goal 
 and the garland, when the pearly citadels of Heaven peal out 
 their welcome to all faithful disciples, may each of us be 
 there to hear, amid all lesser salutations, this: " I have yet 
 many things to say unto you ! " 
 
 00 
 
THE ABUNDANT LIFE 
 
 TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 20, 1897 
 J came that they may have life, and may have it abundantly. John 10:10 
 
 It is the privilege which my office confers to give to each 
 class, upon the threshold of its exit from this College, a last 
 word of instruction, and to make to them a final appeal in 
 the name of God. For the fifth time I attempt this duty. 
 It is altogether fitting that a college course which seeks to 
 bind and crown all its methods with the science of obliga- 
 tion, and which has ever recognized the hallowing motives 
 of a supreme allegiance, which has continually blended de- 
 votion with inculcation, which does not admit the arbitrary 
 division between the secular and the sacred, which teaches 
 that all the utilities of knowledge find their full significance 
 only in the rational and reverent acceptance of " man's chief 
 end," — that such a college course should culminate in a de- 
 vout meditation and in psalms of dedication and hope. 
 
 The Shepherd of all men declares in this our text that His 
 mission is to confer the abundant life. And I make it my 
 present errand to point you toward such a life and to its 
 standards and guarantees. Life is the thing — boundless as 
 its Lord and Giver — satisfying, infrustrable, immortal. 
 
 There are never lacking cynical and satirical lips to sneer 
 at the enthusiasm and eager confidence of graduating men; 
 but the pathetic courage and the ardent assurance of youth 
 is given continually to replace the nullity and numbness of 
 those whose own inferior accomplishment seduces them to 
 question the cause and abandon the fight. Mine be the 
 task rather to challenge the utmost resolution of youth, and 
 to summon its energy, undaunted by other failures and de- 
 sertions, to tie sword to wrist, enlisted for all the battle and 
 for the whole war. Self and failure menace you, but " the 
 law of the spirit of Life in Jesus Christ " shall make you 
 free and conquering. 
 
 61 
 
Modern laboratories have rendered us familiar with the 
 word Biology. It includes so much, that in the interests of 
 exactness its teachers are already insisting upon replacing 
 the term by its subdivisions. It has been used as a title for 
 the science of all the forms of all life; but that is Morphol- 
 ogy. Histology, Anatomy, Physiology are included under it. 
 
 Biology is, accurately, the Science of Life. Thus it is the 
 widest possible term for all vital fact, and it includes even 
 Theology. For God is Life. Gathering its subject-matter 
 all the way from Botany to Ethics, Biology comprehends far 
 more than the realm of appearance. It must take in Sociol- 
 ogy, as that takes in the relations not of men only, but of all 
 intelligent beings. Surely, if technical, this is not obscure, 
 and it affirms that life comprises all the relations of ani- 
 mate creatures, and their joint relation to the Creator. 
 Here at last is the ultimate unity. 
 
 Relation is not optional, but inevitable. It is not acci- 
 dental, it is articulated — an organism. Its implications are 
 commands. Therefore no arbitrarily partial relation, nor 
 any partiality toward a few of its features, can touch the 
 ends of being. Christ came to teach Biology — in its broad- 
 est sense, that ! He made it in His own person an induc- 
 tive science! He revealed its innermost secret and its out- 
 most abundance. 
 
 He renounced the anti-social spirit of self, and giving His 
 life a ransom of others, nailed to His cross the ordinances of 
 caste and clan. I do not shrink from saying that those two 
 cardinal maxims of Louis Blanc are just: " From each ac- 
 cording to his capacity, to each according to his need," and, 
 " The more a man can, the more he ought." I say that 
 these are just; for closely they paraphrase the word of the 
 Son of Man: " He that is chief among you, let him be the 
 servant of all." All the walls of artificial demarcation and 
 social cruelty preach that with a strident voice. Flatly the 
 original Gospel joins issue with that fictitious and fastidious 
 self-importance which praises ability at the expense of ser- 
 
 62 
 
viceability, and suffers patronizing to supplant sympathy. 
 The word Socialism need not scare us. Some kind we must 
 have, God's kind, or Satan's. 
 
 To gush and sentimentalize and dabble with human prob- 
 lems as a pretty fad and incidental diversion can never help 
 the struggling world. The squadrons of power that shall 
 ride gloriously to " let in the law " are not mounted upon 
 hobby-horses. The " sons and daughters that prophesy " 
 are not such as revel in merely theatrical statistics and sigh 
 over sorrows they never touched with a little finger: but are 
 such as are in earnest to get something done, even if they 
 have to do it themselves. 
 
 The school girl at Niagara exclaimed, " Isn't it cunning!" 
 Yes, it is cunning — don't fall in ! 
 
 Bishop Westcott somewhere writes : "Little thoughts do 
 not fit little duties. In the fulfillment of simple routine we 
 need, more than anywhere else, the quickening influence of 
 the highest motive." 
 
 The largest possible life must have the truest possible cen- 
 tre, and must live from that in its detail. A large life is ex- 
 pensive. It costs life — that, and no less. He who speaks 
 to us knew that, and paid the price. 
 
 "All the words of life " are in Him, and His ideas go to 
 the bottom of every social and personal question, with its 
 exactions and its rewards. The Christianity of Christ, 
 urging that life is more than its raiment, not resting upon a 
 consensus of scholars but upon the obedience of disciples, 
 cares nothing for conventional adulterations, and demands 
 that the interior thought shall be incarnated in the exterior 
 conduct. He showed a principle that worked, Who offers us 
 His own life only upon His own terms. One cannot spring 
 an arch from a single pier, and Christ cares naught for the 
 accurate theory that does not bend over to the solid expres- 
 sion of deed. 
 
 The abundant life has many outlets, but one source, as its 
 chemic, caloric, actinic rays proceed from the one Sun. 
 
 63 
 
Each whole life is a revised version of the Gospel. Great 
 expression waits upon great purpose. The Father does not 
 cast us off because we let go the best He could help us to: 
 but he helps us to the next best, even down to the smallest. 
 What is to hinder any one of you from being truly great ? 
 Nothing but your own refusal ! 
 
 The Master of history being in evidence, life is abundant 
 in its declining to put up with any second-rate. Saving may 
 be a virtue or a vice. 
 
 Refusal to waste upon what is unworthy implies ability to 
 give all for the pearl of price. Spend life we must, as we go; 
 the crucial question is — What for ? It is like the manna. 
 We may leave it — wasted. Use it — to live more. Keep 
 it — to rot. Today's usufruct of power withers if we at- 
 tempt to hold it for tomorrow. We may squander, or use, 
 today: we cannot save it over. 
 
 You have a personal capital, to turn over with interest or to 
 hide in a hole. What a man spends he has, what he keeps 
 spends him. Life, like money, is not a value except as it is 
 a medium of exchange. It is a measure of value. As he 
 hits the happy mean between a money-lover and a money- 
 waster who knows what a dollar is worth and what it is not 
 worth, so your supreme question is: " What shall I spend 
 life for, to make it get the most ? " 
 
 Save yourself for yourself, you lose yourself ! Spend your- 
 self with Christ and you gain His life, and with it yours. 
 This is the vital paradox. " Except a corn of wheat fall 
 into the ground and die it abide th alone." Natural law 
 answers spiritual. Life is reproduced by transmutation. It 
 is not a form, it is a self-conscious motion thro form. The 
 abundant life is that which most submits to the law of giv- 
 ing. We only have what we bestow. Selfishness then is 
 suicide. He lives largest who confers most. Living is loving, 
 and " love seeketh not her own." He who saves others, him- 
 self does not save. Only that which a man does not save 
 saves him. He revealed that, Who " by death destroyed the 
 
 04 
 
power of death ! " An eye rolled inward loses the light and 
 sees nothing. Self because so small a goal is futile and fatal. 
 It is " by its means defeated of its ends." Atrophy ! " A 
 man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things 
 which he possesseth." It is not how much, but whereunto ! 
 
 Receive a great and heavenly vision of the law of nobility 
 as the Supreme Man showed it, and you will see that the 
 abundant life has a motive that will hold taut as a cable in a 
 storm, and that sounds like a harp. This high thrift does not 
 heed the code of usage which asks what it must not do and 
 what it must give up — that is picayune and sordid : but rather 
 it turns from negative virtues to positive, ejects the lower 
 conception, and from the tyranny of verboten turns to the free- 
 dom of great permissions — " against which there is no law." 
 
 This is the assertion of the true, the only, the boundless 
 manhood. The young man who " went away " was he who 
 refused this abundance. He dared not take the best. 
 
 But there was one who dared, who at the parting of the 
 ways said, " Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do ? " and 
 then did what was showed him to the last ! It was he who 
 learned to write, " all things are yours." He accepted the 
 whole life. Not lazy, apologetic, tentative, procrastinating, 
 he lived constructively and found " all the fulness of God." 
 He found a life worth living. No carpet-knight this Paul ! 
 Within prison walls he could testify, " I have all, and 
 abound ! " This " little gleam of time between two eterni- 
 ties " furnished him a commanding outlook. "Things 
 present and things to come " stood in complete relation to 
 his total allegiance. 
 
 His transcendant faith knew none of the whimperings and 
 sarcasms which reveal the abject disappointment of low 
 motives. 
 
 Circe has potions for all who will take them — swine- 
 herdess that she is ! Stop your ears and sail by ! 
 
 All that is noblest is within reach of him who wills it. 
 
 " Man is one world, and hath another to attend him " — 
 
 65 
 
Angels minister to one whose masterful determination 
 refuses the beguilement of secondary things. 
 
 He lives most, not who lives longest, but who lives deepest, 
 broadest, hardest — who increases his resultant sum by 
 shortening each process. Time is a different thing to each 
 man; for to each it is measured by what he makes it con- 
 tain. Ten years of one man's time may equal thirty of 
 another's. Stephen lived more than Methuselah ! 
 
 To open your being to the big thoughts, to the wide sym- 
 pathies, to the determinative, aggressive and dominant 
 activities — that is to " abound exceedingly." Who meas- 
 ures the life of Lincoln by its mere years ? 
 
 Live your own lives; borrow no leave to be; dare the 
 heights of duty. It is a tremulous and tremendous time in 
 which your days are cast. It needs leaders and will scorn 
 laggards. Church and State, the whole complex of society 
 cries out, "Whom shall we send, and who will go for us ? 
 Only the most obdurate goodness can handle the tools of 
 manhood. Humanity comes to its noon. It is nothing to 
 meet the mob of opinions with blank cartridges when the 
 very standards of personal truth are roughly assaulted. We 
 inherit and we must match the inkstand of Luther, the tele- 
 scope of Galileo, Latimer's candle, Beza's anvil, the axe of 
 John the Baptist, the pen of Lincoln. You are summoned 
 to be so much what you may be, that a good politician can 
 no longer be described as " a man that will stay bought," 
 that law shall become less " the science of evading justice," 
 that religion shall seem less " a straddling of two worlds ! " 
 A business man and dear friend of mine wrote me a few days 
 since: " Ability is plenty and smartness overabundant : but 
 blank, square honesty is, oh, how scarce." Honest with 
 yourselves, your fellow men, your God, may you make it 
 less scarce. 
 
 Men of the Class of '97 : 
 
 Toil the toils of men until your days are done ! Give 
 
 66 
 
your very best and every best to the tasks to which you go. 
 Run with the pacemakers and help to break the records. 
 
 Never forget the dreams and aspirations of the youthful 
 days when you were college boys becoming God's men. 
 Never forget that old campus, veiled in the meshes of May 
 moonlight or scarfed in the soft draperies of the Indian sum- 
 mer. Cry still the cry of the winter sled way — " Road ! 
 Road ! " Men will ever give the path to momentum. 
 Crowds gather at the exhibitions of that wonderful modern 
 invention, the biograph, because all sense of motion is exhil- 
 arating. Be real, and beyond all simulation you shall attract 
 men by a better impulse than curiosity. In life as in par- 
 liamentary law, to do anything some one must make a 
 motion. If you are to carry anything in this world's quorum 
 you must get the floor. As time slips in small change from 
 your purses, cherish with gratitude the memory of these 
 crystal days, and when your war is fully on recall each item 
 of tactics and equipment here taught and taken. Your 
 record is one of honor, of faithful, scholarly toil, of order and 
 loyalty. We who stay on will drink your health at the old 
 well, and name with pride a class whose life was not meas- 
 ured by quantity but by quality. I saw you enter, I shout 
 you Godspeed as you depart. You came to us when much 
 was but an eager hope that now merges toward assurance. 
 From all your future stations send us back your greetings — 
 nay, bring them, often. Faces will change — your comrades 
 and more slowly your instructors — but surely all of them 
 will pass. Hamilton will always be your own — " to have 
 and to hold, to love and to cherish." Wear with honor those 
 historic colors which Kirkland wore at Fort Stanwix while 
 over Oneida's virgin fortress waved the first stars and stripes. 
 By and by, oh that it might be mine once more to call your 
 roll and no man absent, having passed between the piers of 
 the rainbow and obtaining all of us " an abundant entrance 
 into the eternal kingdom." Good-by ! Nay, — Au revoir I 
 
 67 
 
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM 
 
 TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 26, 1898 
 
 We know that to them that love God all things work together for good. 
 
 Romans 8:28. 
 
 Again the summer and the final days of the college life of 
 a class. Once more the greetings and the good-bys. Swift 
 hours — romantic and pathetic, sweet and sad. A happy 
 dream, " which is not all a dream," is for you to whom this 
 occasion chiefly belongs, well-nigh spent. 
 
 " Something beautiful is vanished, 
 
 And we sigh for it in vain; 
 We behold it everywhere, 
 On the earth and in the air, 
 
 But it it never comes again." 
 
 Now we clear a little space where yesterday salutes to- 
 morrow. After our good old custom we make one more 
 Sunday hour, and in it may your hearts preach to you in 
 better than my words. My part is but a prompter's part. 
 Listen to your own searching thoughts and grasp that warm, 
 invisible hand which is not far from every one of you. 
 
 Simple and vast, our text, with its dozen monosyllables, 
 twists together innumerable strands of suggestions and 
 tethers us to all that is brave and enduring. It has many 
 implications. Fixed in the web of its great chapter it traces 
 the inseparability of God's children from God's love, and 
 introduces that climax in which, challenging peril and pain, 
 time and eternity, death and demons, faith soars from the 
 depths of weakness to the bosom of God. It leaps into the 
 invincible sureties of that covenant whose chain of salvation 
 binds loyalty with eternity. Purpose and power have forged 
 it, and there is no link missing. Plan, pledge, providence, 
 make inviolable sequence from the dateless foreknowledge to 
 
 68 
 
the utmost glory. " If God be for us, who can be against us!" 
 Or, verbally, and apart from the woven argument, here is 
 the dignity and universality of the law of labor. In a sys- 
 tem where " all things work," the idler, whatsoever else 
 he be, is the moral pauper ! 
 
 Or, higher yet, it declares the harmonious energy, the 
 common consent, of all that is and moves under the juris- 
 diction of the Maker. Force answers mind. Wise ends wait 
 upon all evolution. Change knows no chance. In the whirl 
 of the Earth upon its soft spindles, all object is obedient. 
 In " the ordered music of the marching orbs " there is no 
 schism. The beauty and the blessing of conformity to 
 supreme law is written upon atom and star. Only in a 
 seceded will is there dissonance and pain. But, not tarrying, 
 tho touching these wealths of duty and power, the text 
 widens its wings for a realm where parable and enigma are 
 translated into open vision. It is not a theorem but an 
 axiom. It turns the light of intuition upon all else. Query 
 and vicissitude melt into recognition. JVe know ! 
 
 I single this aphorism, this total truth, and holding it up 
 in its purity and fullness, luminous and lovely, I bid you see 
 how far and revealingly it shines. This it declares — that 
 all blessing lies in that relation to God which we call love. 
 Intuition does not measure itself by the three steps of logic. 
 It flies. It is super-rational. The conviction that God is 
 trustworthy, that life, as Hugo says, " is not a cul-de-sac, 
 but an avenue," that the soul is not a conundrum, but an 
 answer, that law is not fickle nor expectancy vain, this sur- 
 rounds and sustains the sciences which compass things with 
 that nearer phenomenon of the heart which we call religion. 
 The only working theory either of physics or of prayer is 
 that which postulates a love which cannot lie. The moral 
 fidelity of God fits all these curious and intricate locks of 
 object and event, and cannot be accidental. Fitness is par- 
 cel to purpose. Type tossed into the air do not fall into 
 a book — not into a primer, far less into an organum. The 
 
facts that so " work together " reveal an omniscient and all- 
 controlling Mind. Consequence is consent. Only perversity 
 refuses the certainty that an intelligent heart rules the 
 world. This clue alone fits all these multiplex wards. The 
 rule that solves ten thousand problems proves and counter- 
 proves its trustworthiness by the answers. The integrity of 
 God is a solvent, where all else blunders and fails. It is 
 centripetal thro all abysses and meets wonder with a wisdom 
 " forever telling, yet untold ! " 
 
 It is our birthright to read moral issues into all that now 
 seems precarious and postponing. We are made to expect 
 a crisis and culmination — a " far-off, divine event " toward 
 which, with its distribution and its retribution, " the whole 
 creation moves." The groaning and travailing prophesies a 
 " song of deliverance," else were goodness a myth and rea- 
 son forsworn. This is the base-line of moral certainty by 
 which we measure, past the furrows of darkness, to the 
 coasts and crests of light. This is the seership that war- 
 rants the apostle. If God loves and lives, if man loves, it 
 must be ! Between these two pencils, brought point to 
 point, leaps the convincing light. It is the shechinah. In 
 the glowing consent of fact to purpose He is announced 
 whose " life is the light of men." Each ray shows a path of 
 the shortest distance, and the first beam of His dawn in the 
 soul is a herald of the million-arrowed noon. That little 
 child whom Christ ever sets in the midst of our arguments 
 has learned nothing of the physics or the chemistry of light: 
 but, with no theory of the eye, sees, and knows that he sees. 
 Why should we quibble over the perceptions of our souls, or 
 tamper with the great verity they corroborate ? Let the 
 rapturous overtones flood the inmost soul — their music is 
 their truth ! 
 
 Impiety may scout subjective evidence and resent the love 
 it resists: but let us rather refuse the insanity of faithless- 
 ness, which leaps the orbit where loving obedience answers 
 loving law, and let us bow down, — 
 70 
 
" Like lily flower, that to and fro 
 Is tossed upon the waters wide, 
 Uncaring for the changeful tide ; 
 Its root is firm below." 
 
 That Living One Who from the black ooze evokes the lily, 
 will gauge the frail stem of circumstance that, unhurt, all 
 white and fragrant hearts may float just atop. 
 
 So fuelled with human experience, but lit with sacred fire, 
 our text blazes in the apostle's hand like a beacon cresset. 
 His splendid soul is in its flame ! 
 
 " To them that love God all things work together for 
 good." No heart-deep cry for deliverance from evil will be 
 unanswered. In His own time, but surely at the last, God 
 will " do good to them that be good." 
 
 This pledge of ultimate succor sets out the conditions and 
 the methods of the supreme blessing. Question of all ques- 
 tions — Do you love God ? Not, do you admire, respect, 
 study: but, do you love ? Opinion and action are not final. 
 Unless you love Him He could not bless you. The very law 
 of love excludes the unloving ! Not to love is the " law of 
 sin and death." You baffle yourself, and all sweet bells are 
 " jangled, out of tune and harsh." Harmony is the base of 
 music, and music, too, is at last love's parable. The infinite 
 Yes stands over against the " everlasting No." 
 
 Now, for comparison, put in turn, by our text, two other 
 views of the meaning of human life — philosophies which, 
 while polar opposites, exclude, each of them, the spirit's true 
 relation to God. Contradictions they are of each other, but 
 contradiction each is, of free choice and of accountability, 
 with all the gravity and grandeur of these. 
 
 Optimism — Pessimism. These tri-syllables, now so much 
 popularized and even devitalized, are school-terms for 
 theories which in literature are as old as the book of Job, 
 and which in life are answered by a thousand adages. 
 
 Optimism declares that all is for the best. Taken right- 
 eously, it is a majestic truth. But crude optimism alleges 
 
 71 
 
that " all is for the best " for everyone, and irrespective of 
 the individual right or wrong ! — that all currents set to the 
 Hesperides. In the realms of a holy God this raw opiate is 
 a most stupendous and stupid vagary. Betterment there 
 can not be unless good is the standard: but goodness and 
 goods are not to be confused. Things, apart from the direc- 
 tion of a heart-discriminating God, are but a basket of ser- 
 pents twisting and sliddering upon themselves ! 
 
 Plain men use few elaborate or analytical terms: but all 
 men think much alike, and in colloquial speach optimism 
 says, " Everything will come out all right." It is a specious 
 laissez-faire notion. Right will be the victor: but only the 
 righteous will share its victory. Having well dined, it is 
 easy to wash one's hands " in imperceptible water," and to 
 set forth this bland self -leniency : but it is as cruel to 
 human misery as it is untrue to God's words, and the 
 wounds of life requite it as an irony with quick, bleeding 
 protests. That men may drift up the torrent ! — that the 
 sharp thorns of disobedience shall somehow bear the vintage 
 of the King ! — that, all of themselves, these cursed condi- 
 tions shall become paradise ! — that the abnormal is to glide 
 into order, and that sowing to the flesh is to reap the fruits 
 of the Spirit ! It proposes alchemy, and is a credulity with- 
 out instance or guarantee. No ! " The very good figs and 
 the very bad figs " are separated. Like yields like. What- 
 soever a man soweth, that shall he also reap ! " 
 
 Apart from the intervention of God in Christ, human 
 affairs are as dry of consolation as the breasts of the Sphinx. 
 The plaint is everywhere : " I am pained so that I can not 
 hear. I am dismayed so that I can not see. My heart 
 panteth. Horror hath affrighted me. The twilight that I 
 desired hath been turned into trembling." 
 
 If from things only, without moral force or fulcrum, we 
 have hope, we are of all men most miserable ! No misan- 
 thropy could devise worse than to feed the heart with such 
 ashes. " A lie in its right hand," the sleek complacency of 
 72 
 
optimism ill suits this woful world, with its delusion that 
 the crackling wreck will mend itself ! Between font and 
 funeral there comes too much that tasks and tortures the 
 soul of man for him to fall in with this irony. Love, as it 
 cries over the cradle or the coffin, asks something more than 
 an epicurean formula. Hunger can not eat a bill of fare. 
 The soul wants better than laudanum. Prayer (and all 
 men sometimes pray,) petitions an intervention which this 
 clumsy optimism disdains. Progress in knowledge alone is 
 but more light upon the interior of a crypt. An errant race 
 has no " upward trend " save when the superhuman Gospel 
 heals its ways. The progress of man, all by himself, is 
 quicksand progress — each struggle a worse entanglement. 
 Nothing gravitates up ! Detachment from God is at cross- 
 purposes with all things. It is under centrifugal law. This 
 spurious and hypnotizing theory, ignoring the nature of sin, 
 bites off the immutable conditions of redemption and offers 
 no evidence for its astounding carte blanche. Misery knows 
 that if mere force is installed in place of divine love and in- 
 tervention, there is left only a universe of grinding cog- 
 wheels and groaning victims: for sin has fallen afoul of law, 
 and broken law crushes. Put a merely philosophical optim- 
 ism upon the rack of fact, and she must recant her perjury 
 with gnashing teeth ! O soul — wait thou upon only God; 
 for thine expectation is from Him ! 
 
 Give the floor to pessimism. It holds this world to be 
 superlatively evil, the worst world possible, without hope 
 and without God. Put to its ultimatum, it proclaims life to 
 be the supreme disaster and the dream of betterment or of 
 salvation to be its chief curse. Professing to perceive man 
 an orphan by birth, it reviles blessedness as an ideal that 
 can only intensify despair. Malevolence is supreme, but 
 impersonal, and therefore inaccessible even to blasphemy. 
 Its present is but an artistic hell, horizoned with cast iron, 
 beauty but the grimace of an elaborate scheme of torture, 
 music a refined cruelty, love hypocrisy, and all its men and 
 
 73 
 
women either fiends or fools. "Who will show us any 
 good ! " This terrific interpretation is not always carried to 
 its conclusions; but it is not scarce. Shakespere translated 
 it thro Hamlet: 
 
 " How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable 
 Seem to me all the uses of this world." 
 
 And thro Macbeth : 
 
 " Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player 
 That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, 
 And then is heard no more. It is a tale 
 Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
 Signifying nothing.'* 
 
 But mark that these are the cries on the one hand of a 
 querulous reason, on the other of a murderous will. 
 
 Tragedy is truer to appearance than comedy, and to say 
 No hope, is more intelligible than to say, No fear ! But 
 while pessimism tears away the tissue garlands of optimism, 
 it too is both superficial and arbitrary. It extinguishes "the 
 candle of the Lord " and then glares into the surrounding 
 dark. Its angry and acrid pride denies Love's answer, and 
 then, self-thwarted, it snarls that all things work together 
 for evil ! It is the morbid and unmanly covert of an un- 
 submissive will, and tantalized by its own fro ward choice 
 its melancholy is its accusation. The curious affinity of 
 these two opposite theories appears in the readiness with 
 which epicureanism embraces cynicism, and credulity reacts 
 into abject hate. Incorrigible self-seeking — " by its means 
 defeated of its ends " — turns finally to sneering suicide ! If 
 there is no loving and lifting God, then Swift and Byron and 
 Schopenhauer and Haeckel are sufficient, and then the pa- 
 ganism of the later Locksley Hall may well usher in the era 
 of lawlessness with pandemoniac yells, while all the civiliza- 
 tion the affirmation of Christ has wrought expires in con- 
 vulsions whose dust darkens the Sun with sackcloth ! An 
 optimism that forgets God leads into the hand of pessimism, 
 
 74 
 
and both reject the planetary orbit for the cometary — 
 " wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of 
 darkness forever." 
 
 But for us who believe in a holy God, neither the pan- 
 theistic sadness of Buddha nor the unethical audacity of 
 Mohammed. Our text for a lamp, we may be aware of the 
 anarchy of self, poppied or thorn-set, base and brutal in 
 either issue. Love is the third alternative. Its denial is the 
 strong delusion. Our spirits, made to find mere sense so 
 disappointing, are the pledge of some better things. 
 
 The very shadows of evil witness to the brilliant light. 
 The splendid grief is counterproof that husks and swine are 
 not our proper portion. A world where a cross utters love 
 is not forsaken. The Devil is not God. 
 
 Letting circumstance exclude attribute, one of these ca- 
 prices dreams of Utopia and thinks Heaven could be no 
 better; the other stares at pain and thinks Hell could be no 
 worse. But both are partial and fallacious, busy with goods 
 and ignoring good, or busy with evils and forgetting evil. 
 Whether generalizing from a full stomach or from a fierce 
 will, each finds its bane in the idolatry of the present tense. 
 But, neither blinding its eyes nor tearing off its eyelids, the 
 Christian theory of this world spans both the depths and the 
 heights. It sees that both fortune and misfortune are but 
 half-truths. To that bar where conscious responsibility 
 knows that " it can, because it ought," it summons the as- 
 sumptions of fatalism and the contributory negligence of 
 indifferentism. It meets misery with the dilemma of mercy, 
 and upon the canvas which philosophy has but primed it 
 sets the at once darker and more dazzling revelations of guilt 
 and of grace. Death bluntly interrupts these merely mun- 
 dane reasonings, whether fanciful or frantic; but in this 
 abrupt world, " over whose acres walked those blessed feet," 
 there is at large a more excellent answer. A song is tuned in 
 the night, and our text, at once pledge and plea, flows into that 
 matchless apostrophe, — " neither death nor life, nor things 
 
 75 
 
present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, shall be able 
 to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ! " 
 
 Christian truth admits the worst and offers the best, and 
 discriminating between penitence and chagrin, as also 
 between temerity and peace, it reconciles sorrow and aspira- 
 tion by the cross. There is a great Deliverer, Who consents 
 neither to credulity nor to incredulity, neither to presump- 
 tion nor to despair. 
 
 Pessimists only as to intrinsic evil, optimists only as to 
 spiritual good, we face the wo which this Epistle to the 
 Romans considers at its outset, so as to come to the suffi- 
 ciency of that faith which in its eighth chapter bursts every 
 barrier of space and time: "God hath included all under 
 sin, that He might have mercy upon all. 
 
 Sciences, arts, letters, laws, discoveries, conquests, battles, 
 treaties, have not removed the curse of human sin nor its 
 attendant pains. They have but patched the old garment. 
 All politico-social devices are but temporary expedients, and 
 in so far as they filch the conclusions of Christianity, to the 
 neglect of its premises, they but wash the old wallow and 
 gilt the dry-rot. 
 
 Truth and falsehood are compacting, each after its own 
 kind. The momentum of the beautiful and the base steadily 
 increases. Each has its own axis of crystallization. The 
 tares and the wheat grow to the harvest. The turbid world 
 clears at the top, while at the bottom the sediment gathers 
 thicker. Supernal and infernal forces more thoroly under- 
 stand their antagonisms and compact their arrays. "' The 
 morning cometh and also the night." 
 
 The augmenting scrolls of history are written in moral 
 characters, and our text's truth is the key to all their cipher. 
 Two sets of interpretation there are; for there are two classes 
 of interpreters: but true love is certified that nothing can be 
 permanently good for the evil, nor evil for the good. No 
 perverse subterfuge, nor fear at this present complexity can 
 delay the " Anathema " or the " Maranatha." These stand 
 
 76 
 
over against one another in " the King's writing, which no 
 
 man can reverse." 
 
 It is cowardly to refuse the costs and the conquests of 
 personal fidelity. The cross of the divine Victor is atop of 
 this grieving world. The great Samaritan is on his journey- 
 ing. Of the Slough of Despond Bunyan wrote: " Even thro 
 the very midst there are certain good substantial steps." 
 To the loving, " love never faileth." Its warm current thro 
 the commotions of time can no more be denied its way than 
 storms can displace the gulf stream ! 
 
 Neither petulance then, nor flatulence. Christ can quell 
 the ravings of insane wills as once He exorcised the maniac 
 of Gadara and seated him at His feet ! 
 
 If your faith is in God's comprehension of you, not in 
 yours of Him, you can surmount all menace and survive all 
 alarm. Let things flow or ebb, the chain will hold to the 
 anchor. The promises will not ravel. Sombre hours, like 
 some birds of dingiest plumage, will burst into the brightest 
 carol. The harvests need the night as well as the day to 
 ripen them. It takes the whole quartet of the seasons to 
 utter the fugal year. 
 
 There is a certain half -pessimist ( of whom Mrs. Gum- 
 midge is a type,) who has all the discomfort of the 
 practice without the dignity of the philosophy. He takes 
 the very trifles that pertain to him with an awful seriousness 
 before which the sweet smile of courage is daunted. He 
 hopes for the worst and enjoys poor health ! He always 
 has a sore spot and a grievance, and he leaks with unpleas- 
 antness. He sulks by preference and kicks by anarchic 
 instinct. The source of all this biliousness is self- preoccupa- 
 tion. The penalty of having no interests but one's own is 
 moroseness. Play will sometimes lift the mind out of this 
 lugubrious and inhospitable frame. Active love for others 
 always will. If religion is not good to cure this jaundice 
 then it is not good for anything. Honest hope should be a 
 thoro antiseptic. Life, — you shall make it as you take it. 
 
 77 
 
" From the self -same quarter of the sky, 
 One saw ten thousand angels look and smile, 
 Another saw as many demons frown." 
 
 You may regard the pool of water at your feet as a muddy 
 obstruction, or you may look into it, as into a Claude Lor- 
 raine glass, and behold the reflected stars. 
 
 " Some murmur, when their sky is clear 
 
 And wholly bright to view, 
 If one small speck of dark appears 
 
 In their great heaven of blue. 
 And some with thankful love are filled 
 
 If but one streak of light, 
 One ray of God's good mercy, gild 
 
 The darkness of their night." 
 
 Look where the light looks and you will see rainbows ! A 
 close grip upon our text will carry you thro a myriad inci- 
 dental dissatisfactions. Not too sanguine or too anxious, 
 neither idle nor nervous, but always modestly brave, you 
 shall find that ( even when tempted to say, with Jacob, " All 
 these things are against me," ) the very thorns weave into a 
 crown, and that the pillow of stones is the foot of a ladder ! 
 
 " In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread." God 
 has you upon his lathe to make something of you. If you 
 meet His love with your own, He covenants for you with the 
 beasts of the field; the stones shall be in league with you; 
 all laws shall further you ; the stars shall fight for you ; for 
 He Who " telle th the number of the stars " is He Who 
 " healeth the broken in heart and bindeth up their wounds." 
 
 You cannot look behind, nor about, nor within, nor 
 above, and think that the compensations of the All-true are 
 either unmoral or insecure. This whole world, the instinct 
 of faith, the insight of obedience, all the intimations of im- 
 mortality, join in this unison: "To them that love God all 
 things work together for good." Love is royal and indomit- 
 able. Gideon's fleece and the dream of the tumbling cake 
 of barley-bread have still an oracle. 
 78 
 
Consider the parable of that " king of instruments," 
 the organ. Perceive there the common consent of dis- 
 tinct laws, hydraulic, dynamic, acoustic, their co-ordinate 
 functions not confused, but all subordinated to the higher 
 law of music. They all " work together," combining in 
 a unity which is " perfected by that which every joint sup- 
 plied.' ' 
 
 But here again the whole is greater than the sum of its 
 visible parts. The intent is more than the contents. As 
 mechanism alone, it stands unvocal, dumb. Its adaptation 
 yields no tone. The organ cannot play itself ! Its sound- 
 letters may make chords, its chords weave into the syntax 
 of phrases, its periods and rhythms build into poems, lyric, 
 dramatic, epic: but all this in not in the organ, but in the 
 soul of the player. It is but instrumental to him, and no 
 accident can ever waken a symphony from that impersonal 
 metal and silent wood. But all in the twilight you listen 
 while an unseen organist presses the keys and gathers pedals 
 and stops to work his thought. Your heart feels and 
 answers and you know that, invisible to you, one is there 
 whose life, thro a common but ineffable language, reveals 
 yourself and him ! 
 
 What harmonies the Master of sound and meaning 
 awakens ! How all secondary laws contribute to the 
 " hidden soul " of music ! It is pathetic, sublime, and 
 thro all the melted approaches, welding the counterpoint 
 and subduing the devious modulations, you catch the imma- 
 nent theme — broadening, increasing in purpose and depth, 
 waxing to the great burst of trumpets and open diapasons. 
 It is the Messiah ! A greater than Handel is here. Wait, 
 heirs of salvation, you shall yet join that " Hallelujah 
 Chorus." In mighty arcs, Eden and Babel and Egypt 
 and Sinai and Canaan and Babylon and Bethlehem 
 and Gethsemane and Calvary and Olivet — and all thro 
 which love has wrought, " shall meet with joy in sweet 
 Jerusalem ! " 
 
 79 
 
Men of the Class of '98: 
 
 You are about to join that procession of graduates which 
 began here when this old century was young. The honest 
 traditions of this school of men are all yours. You are 
 theirs. All hours have high values that realize the heart. 
 This hour has such values. The year that has seen the old 
 Sixth Massachusetts go thro Baltimore, not as it went that 
 19th of April, 1861, that has heard the northern hurrah 
 greet the southern yell, with one united purpose for the cause 
 of freedom and under the starlight of the flag of the morn- 
 ing — this is no year for doubtful, but for daring, men. 
 God's truth is always at war with some Spain. Maleficent 
 strategems will, your lives long, summon you to resist and 
 reduce them. I have sought to turn you away from an 
 unscientific and an ungodly despondency, and I am sorry to 
 make an end. I commit you and your ways to Samuel 
 Kirkland's God. 
 
 " I hold 
 That it becomes no man to nurse despair : 
 But in the teeth of clenched antagonisms 
 To follow up the worthiest, till he die." 
 
 Every one of you, whatever he has misdone so far, stands yet 
 for a splendid possibility. Heed no clabber of words. Stand 
 in with the constructors, not the censors. Instead of pulling 
 back the freight of the years, push it along ! Gott mil uns ! 
 
 " Brother ! sing a loud psalm; 
 Our hope's not forlorn; 
 
 After darkness and twilight breaks forth the new morn ! 
 Let the mad foe grow madder, 
 Never quail ! Up the ladder ! 
 Grasp the sword of the Lord and forward ! " 
 
 You will come back and whisper in her ear, up on yonder 
 hill, the " open sesame " of memory, and the names of those 
 who one by one can come back no more, and then, God 
 grant it to you all, there shall be another class day, in the 
 land where it is always June ! 
 
 80 
 
THE STATION OF OBEDIENCE 
 
 TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 25, 1899 
 
 Go thou thy way till the end be; for thou shalt rest and stand in thy lot at the end 
 of thy days. Daniel 7 :13. 
 
 For nearly eighty years Daniel was prime minister of that 
 Chaldean monarchy which in his prophetic vision was the 
 golden head, whereof Babylon, magnificent with the spoils 
 of subjugated peoples, was the surpassing crown. Upon that 
 capital long ago the word of Isaiah was precisely fulfilled: 
 " The golden city has ceased." The " beauty of pride " is 
 overthrown. Over her " perpetual desolations " twenty-five 
 centuries have trailed, and palace and battlement, warrior 
 and sword, wizard and king, crumble in common dust. 
 
 Of all that pomp and power, only the name lives now — a 
 seal of the severity of God and a synonym of self-destruc- 
 tive iniquity, a name that is an appropriate epitaph for any 
 city or people that seeks but self. Babylon's very shame is 
 chiefly memorable for her place in Hebrew prophecy and for 
 her association with him who, tho her counsellor, was the 
 liegeman of the one untarnishable crown and of the only 
 sceptre that shall never fall. These twelve chapters are a 
 book of obediences, beginning with the story of those sturdy 
 youths who, far from home, were true to their upbringing 
 and would not defile themselves with the idol-blessed meat 
 and wine. 
 
 Of these four, to Daniel God gave especial wisdom, " more 
 than all the magicians and astrologers in the realm." He 
 " found favor and tender love " from the king's steward; but 
 he was a " man greatly beloved " of God. He was the John 
 of the Old Testament and Babylon was his Patmos, where 
 God unrolled for his recording the divine map of time, its 
 rising and sinking empires, His exact advent Who should 
 " take the dominion under the whole heaven " — and the 
 
 81 
 
ages to be, on till " the time of the end.*' The panorama 
 he could not comprehend, and of his tutor-angel he seeks 
 the issue — " searching what or what manner of time the 
 Spirit did point unto " — the suffering, the glory. But 
 " not unto themselves did they minister these things." 
 Even a Daniel must wait. Philosophical curiosity is not 
 met. As God's scribe he must write and seal the book. 
 The pledged fulfilment is but sketched — Providence must 
 write in the commentary of fact. He, too, saw but " in a 
 mirror, enigmatically." The perspective and vista is clouded 
 even to the prophet. He cannot understand all mysteries. 
 The lantern is not the day. The fidelity is more than pre- 
 science. Here, too, all our queries find at once their solace 
 and rebuke. " After long grief and pain " our bewilderment 
 asks: " What shall be the end ? " and still the heavenly an- 
 swer is: "Go thou thy way." So once the disciples — 
 " Tell us when shall these things be ? " and so say we, too 
 often, only to hear that wise refusal — "It is not for you to 
 know the times and the seasons which the Father hath hid 
 in His own power." 
 
 The impenetrability of the future is of grace. The dis- 
 count of our bains and successes would foil their disciplines. 
 Amid ten thousand uncertainties of our forecast, our Guard- 
 ian's voice and presence is better than knowledge. 
 
 There is no confusion in His plan, nor delay in His per- 
 formance. He does not deviate or halt. Every atom and 
 act, every being and event, in that section of eternity 
 which we call time, has its appointed way and lot. Crea- 
 tion was not launched in vain: it is no splintered derelict, 
 adrift upon the waves dappled by a dying moon. All worlds 
 and wills are helio-centric, and what we think inscrutable 
 works out the expected end. Largest or least, everywhere 
 loyal order answers royal mandate. He " metes out the 
 heavens with a span " and guides every fleck of vapor that 
 floats in those depths. The breeze is His barge and the tor- 
 nados are His chariot. " He sends forth the snow like wool " 
 
 82 
 
and places each hesitating flake. He plants the forests and 
 unrolls their every leaf. He overrules the empires and the 
 transmigrations of men, and the "very hairs of their heads are 
 all numbered." " He hath measured the waters in the hollow 
 of His hand." The perpetual surfs break upon lonely 
 coasts; but each drop goes its own way, and every grain of 
 the rearranging sands maintains the equilibrium of the 
 great globe. 
 
 Enumeration pants before the lavishment and wonder of 
 form and force. Law, infinite and infinitesimal ! Change 
 everywhere, nowhere chance ! Comparison is swallowed up 
 of awe before Him Who counts the nations as a " drop in 
 the bucket," and " taketh up the isles as a very little thing." 
 
 Weights and measures drop from our hands as microscope 
 answers telescope, from either lens deep calling unto deep in 
 an antiphon of worship, while the shechinah glows between 
 inmost and outmost creation. High vision only multiplies 
 the inexhaustible. Stare with forty-inch eye into the stellar 
 abysses, conquer more worlds, till science, forspent, weeps, 
 there every sun and system goes its several way. The 
 boundless void is full with a Presence ! The comets that 
 trail their golden fleece thro the sheer depths finity can 
 never dredge, are no runaways ! He shepherds those flocks, 
 and hangs the gems, trembling from His touch, as the lamps 
 of His palace. From monad to nebula, no system is too 
 great or satellite too small to be unheeded in the balance of 
 obedience. But the realm of conscious intelligence is higher, 
 deeper. Mind is the occupant. Being is the most amaz- 
 ing. These are the mansions of the Father of Spirit. The 
 archangelic serenity of freedom and peace is there. Into 
 that heaven of obedience where privilege and duty are 
 one, man with his birthright of personality may also 
 come. Of all the circles of life God is the final centre. 
 There is that about this little star that makes it " first in 
 night's diadem." Where love is the warden there can be no 
 collisions. One seraph stands as a page close to the white 
 
 83 
 
throne, one speeds as a messenger to some far world. One 
 sentinels a city, and one carries a beggar to Abraham's 
 bosom. But each, joyful in his assignment, knows that 
 fidelity is glory. Gabriel, if God said so, would count it as 
 worthy to watch the bed of a believing leper as to marshal 
 in burning row the sunny legion of seraphim ! 
 
 The lesson is as personal to us as it is boundless. It is 
 strong and saline. As among the armies of Heaven, so for 
 every inhabitant of Earth — " Go thy way to the end " is 
 the will of God. 
 
 Prophet or child, there is no less nor more. " One after 
 this manner and another after that." Each of you has a 
 path to which your Maker points no other feet. In life, as 
 in an orchestra, " there are many kinds of voices and none 
 of them is without signification." Each task and trial is 
 enough and not more, with grace sufficient and none to 
 spare. The patient teacher does not turn a new leaf until 
 the first is mastered, tho it be dogs-eared and tear-stained. 
 
 " My bark is wafted to the strand 
 By breath divine — 
 And on the helm there rests a hand 
 Other than mine. 
 
 One who has known in storms to sail 
 
 I have on board; 
 Above the raging of the gale 
 
 I hear the Lord. 
 
 He holds me when the billows smite — 
 
 I shall not fall. 
 If sharp 'tis short, if long 'tis light; 
 
 He tempers all." 
 
 Our lot may seem a chance; but its disposing is with Him, 
 and to envy another's opportunity or to criticise our own 
 is to set up that lie of self-autonomy which interprets 
 honor by condition. He who appoints our ways knows our 
 best good, and what seems the barrenest spot in our lives, 
 under the irrigation of tears may bloom with more than 
 May and bear the peaceable fruits of righteousness. The 
 
 84 
 
alluvial years witness strange issues. God's motherliness 
 does not indulge the whims that endanger character, grant- 
 ing all the candy we cry for, and with medicine that is often 
 bitter to take He cures the aches brought on by our self-in- 
 dulgences. It is displacement from God's way that makes 
 all the petulant confusion of this strange Earth. In man's 
 caprice alone, amid the full concords of Nature, is struck a 
 tuneless and jarring note. Resenting his environment and 
 inverting his dependency, all his bitter heart-burnings come 
 from his wayward will. The coronation of desire brings in 
 the whole train of distresses. Passion forfeits peace. To 
 " go our ways " reverently and " stand in our lot " weaves all 
 life, and that in silver woof, upon a warp of gold. This is 
 the love that never faileth. It gives initiative and evolves 
 persistency. The full acceptance of God's control makes 
 endurance an active virtue. It is the pull of the wires upon 
 a piano frame, their resistance to high strain, that holds 
 them to their music. Eagerly, wistfully, we seek to surpass 
 our limitations; but God does not disclose the event. Better 
 than that, He secures it. He steers the ship, and it shall 
 clear the foggy channel, for all the reefs. He who sets our 
 tasks will not forget the love that accepted, and the labor 
 that to level of its best attempted them. Thus we learn. 
 Life gives us certain exercises with "figured bass"; but 
 when by such helps we master something of harmony, and 
 deeper yet, something of the principles of form, we can man- 
 age chords, progressions and resolutions over whose elusive 
 intricacy we once could have cried! No function is second- 
 ary to the spirit of obedience. The gun-deck is as noble as 
 the quarter-deck. It was not only the men in the turrets, 
 but the men at the engines, that cleared the sea at Santiago, 
 and back of them the builders and machinists who had set 
 every bolt and pinion in its place, and hammered true each 
 rivet that held tight the iron lips of the boilers. 
 
 It is obstinate fidelity in minor duties — in the " one hour 
 subjects " — that graduates " high honor " at the last. This 
 
 85 
 
surmounts the temptation of the sallow and surly moods, 
 and all the mongrel theories of diluted epicureanism, the 
 violence of a greedy will, and the torpor of a false modesty. 
 
 The pigments, umber and amber, splotched upon the 
 palette, have that in them that mastery can use to paint 
 Madonnas. Out of the rough quarry-block Thorwaldsens 
 can chisel immortal form. And life is to every one of us 
 but the pedestal, the canvas, where the soul may — must — 
 somehow utter its ideal, be that Fra Angelico's angel or 
 Bougereau's satyr. Ah, that we may not talk Corregio and 
 live chromo ! For it is by reality, not by poising and pos- 
 turing, that character becomes statuesque. Conscience 
 toward the unseen and eternal drives away the attitudes of 
 self- consciousness. 
 
 It was a whole result of truth in genius, when Phidias re- 
 plied to one who chid his pains over a part of his work 
 always to remain unviewed: "The gods see and must be 
 satisfied." Few things rescued from the flux of the ages 
 have a nobler pathos than the form of that sentinel who 
 stood to his post in Pompeii while the ashes fell ! Duty ! 
 
 " As the bird trims her to the gale, 
 
 I trim myself to the storm of time, 
 I man the rudder, reef the sail, 
 
 Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime : 
 'Lowly faithful, banish fear, 
 
 Right onward drive unharmed; 
 The port, well worth the cruise, is near, 
 
 And every wave is charmed.' " 
 
 The man after God's heart is the man who minds. There 
 is nothing archaic and cryptic about Daniel as an instance. 
 He, and every like soul, " rests and stands in his lot at the 
 end." There is a grander pantheon than Westminster. By 
 a sublime conservation of energy what has been truly good 
 is unwastingly great. It may escape history, but it works 
 on in the chemistry of time. Its ozone continues. We are 
 sharing the momentum and entering into the labors of those 
 
 86 
 
who saved past epochs from decay. We are mainly the lega- 
 tees, not of the famous few, but of the anonymous myriads 
 who have piled up the coral island from beneath the sea, and 
 who in the dark wrought with a perpendicular instinct. 
 
 The " mute Miltons " are not inglorious — they are part 
 of the organ whose music is not yet opened. 
 
 " Ah, if our souls but poise and swing, 
 Like the compass in its brazen ring, 
 Ever level and ever true 
 To the toil and the task we have to do, 
 We shall sail securely, and safely reach 
 The Fortunate Isles, on whose shining beach 
 The sights we see and the sounds we hear 
 Will be those of joy and not of fear." 
 
 It is not canonization that is great, but saintship, and that 
 which makes it is the daily syntax and maturing idiom of 
 docility toward the God Who owns us all. It is a rough 
 path may be, but it is well blazed by sharp axes. Doubt- 
 less Moses wondered why he was called to spend forty years 
 out of the centre of his life as an Arabian shepherd ! For 
 this had he mastered Egyptian lore ? Must he thus wait 
 while Israel grovelled under taskmasters and acquired the 
 slavish mind ? Yes, in Midian, even Moses, and because 
 Moses, must find the school where in his one life was pre- 
 paring the emancipation of a people, where in meditative 
 and germinal years the lawgiver of ages was himself master- 
 ing submission. 
 
 Oh, how fully, upon life after life, is our text illuminated! 
 Which of you would have elected the disciplines of Bedford 
 jail ? Yet there was one who, persecuted and silenced, 
 made that " den " the House of Interpreter, — a Beulah 
 mountain. That which there he wrought made it a more 
 notable dwelling than Lambeth palace. Which of you can 
 tell, or cares that he cannot tell, who was just then Arch- 
 bishop of Canterbury ? One John Bunyan has outweighed 
 all the primates England ever had ! 
 
 87 
 
Coarse cradles and rough tutoring oftenest shelter and 
 train the most effective personalities. 
 
 How then dare you, dare I, so plunder the future as to 
 renounce responsibility to God's control of us ? Your life 
 whirls on into unknown distances, you can see the landscape 
 but sidewise, but the eye of the Engineer looks right on, 
 whether you sleep or wake. Shall ignorance meddle 
 with the intricate mechanism, shall madness change the 
 switches in the night ? What do we know of the complex 
 bearings of one day, how much less can we foresee the lead- 
 ings of a lifetime ! He who lights all that chandelier of 
 stars, listens to and loves to answer the child's petition 
 that well becomes us all: "I pray Thee, Lord, my soul 
 to keep." 
 
 " Far better in its place the lowliest bird 
 
 Should sing aright to Him the lowliest song, 
 Than that a seraph strayed should take the word, 
 And sing His glory wrong." 
 
 " Blessed is he that waiteth and cometh to the end." It 
 is a busy, beautiful world, and good to live in. God's con- 
 trol makes the living lovely, the good- night peaceful, the 
 waking blessed. 
 
 O Thou Ancient of Days, send out Thy light and truth 
 to lead us all ! Let not one of our souls be cast down or 
 disquieted because we do not now know all that Thou doest. 
 We shall know hereafter and be satisfied when we awake in 
 Thy likeness. While many run to and fro and knowledge is 
 increased, may we begin our wisdom in Thy fear and crown 
 it with Thy favor. Increase our faith. Curb our impatient 
 wills. Sustain our needy hearts. Plant us by the rivers 
 that make glad the city of God. For Thy name's sake order 
 our lot and guide our growth in it, today, tomorrow, and 
 forever more ! Amen. 
 
 Men of the Class of '99 : 
 
 To you have I said thus much already, and yet closer 
 
 88 
 
would I come to you in a few words more. Forty-five of 
 you arrive at the line. But two larger, and they but slightly 
 larger, classes have graduated here. You have had upon 
 your roll in all sixty-five names, six you have inherited from 
 earlier classes, eight you have bequeathed to classes still in 
 College. One, Hildreth, whom you loved, has finished his 
 mortal work and " passed to where beyond these voices 
 there is peace." 
 
 Your record is one of work, of good- will, and of excep- 
 tional scholarly average. You have been faithful to the 
 standards that keep manhood clean and honor bright. 
 
 Your instructors hold you as friends and believe you hold 
 them such. We are sure you will be working-bees, not 
 drones, in the great hive of human life, not men of flighty 
 impulse, but as steady to your task as the hour-hand of the 
 clock. We believe in you. 
 
 Do you remember that 1799 was the date when the first 
 recitations were held on our old hill ? 
 
 It was a hundred years ago, 
 
 Upon the crest that crowns the slope, 
 They did what they could never know 
 
 Who opened there the doors of hope. 
 
 Scholar and soldier, man and saint, 
 
 Our Kirkland made what naught could move, 
 
 And from that cradle rude and quaint 
 Has grown the Hamilton we love. 
 
 It was a day of little things, 
 
 And poverty and doubt were near, 
 And tho his prayers had sturdy wings 
 
 He could not guess the hundredth year. 
 
 He struck the plow in fallow soil, 
 
 He sowed the seed with open hand, 
 The God of Wisdom owned his toil, 
 
 And where he wrought and sleeps we stand. 
 
 And still shall stand when we are gone 
 
 The widening walls and ampler task, 
 And the good College shall live on 
 
 With more than we can think or ask. 
 
Thou God Whose mercies never cease, 
 
 While runs a second century, 
 Let our high beacon towers increase; 
 
 We trust their lamps of truth to Thee. 
 
 The College has stood, and stands, and will stand, firm as 
 the integrity of these primeval hills, upon her face the vision 
 of perpetual morning and all the sunsets at her back. The 
 Observatory shall again search the stars, and the Chapel 
 spire shall ever point beyond them. The sciences of sense 
 and of the soul shall walk hand in hand thro the long to- 
 morrow. The trees will grow, noble buildings rise, the 
 campus hum with increasing life, but to the last it will be 
 your own — your mother's fireside. The iron tongue of the 
 bell shall ring golden notes of welcome. Changes shall be 
 evolutions, not revolutions — growths, not decays. 
 
 Tune your hearts to the old key once more before you go 
 — that loyal gratitude, in which you in your time, shall tell 
 the fame and promote the advancement of your College. 
 There will be an echo in the mellow air, room at the table, 
 always and only yours. The place with all its paths, its 
 romance of your youth, will be a goodly tryst long after the 
 voices of the Faculty you knew are heard no more. 
 
 We take your hands hard. Go your way, and at the end 
 of all the days stand in your lot. For He said it for you 
 also, — "I am the way, and the truth, and the life." 
 
 90 
 
THE BETTER WAY 
 
 TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 24, 1900 
 
 / pray not that Thou shouldst take them from the world : but that Thou shouldst 
 keep them from the evil. John 17:15. 
 
 These immediate chapters of the fourth gospel are, of all 
 places in the New Testament, those in which we come clos- 
 est to the Messiah. 
 
 Here, hiding as " in a pavilion from the strife of tongues," 
 the heart can hear itself listen. Sophism and doubt are 
 silenced and answered, before this most divine and most 
 human revealing of a Saviour's soul. 
 
 Here Love finds its utmost speech and takes that eleven, 
 and all who will go with them, into its innermost confidence. 
 
 In this sublime intercession we overhear the very mind of 
 Love itself, and vital and perpetual things, ennobling and 
 surpassing language, are told so plain that words can never 
 increase them. This mediatorial prayer not only goes to 
 the quick of motive and feeling, it not only brims with per- 
 sonal and passionate affection, it also sketches the whole 
 character and purpose of those who are to become the rep- 
 resentatives and messengers of their Master — gives their 
 errand, their secret of power, their antagonisms and perils, 
 their pains, their peace. 
 
 The word " world " is deeply instructive in its iteration 
 thro fourteen clauses. Indeed, we have to go carefully not 
 to lose its force. The teaching as to the " world " (ampli- 
 fied in John's first letter ) prompts us to distinguish the 
 varied sense it has thro all the Testament. 
 
 Here it has mainly the special sense of denoting the gen- 
 eral multitude of men, with their sphere and aims, as apart 
 from those who are chosen into and who choose utterly the 
 faithful fellowship of Christ as their Lord and Life. 
 
 And this petition is permanent in individualizing and col- 
 
 91 
 
lecting all those, everywhere and always, who are the suc- 
 cessors in the faith of that little company of followers. For 
 them, severally and all together, its every accent and term. 
 
 I speak now in hope that no man of this company would 
 forfeit his possible share in a Redeemer's invocation, nor 
 undo by one iota its blessed bond. For you, or not for you, 
 as you decide it, this prayer endures. 
 
 We may be sure that such a supplication omits nothing 
 necessary and includes nothing unimportant. What the Son 
 of Man sought, for all who will to be His, contains the 
 abundant legacy of manhood. 
 
 And our text carries us to the very centre. Superiority, 
 and not isolation. Use, without abuse. The highest life, 
 lived tranquilly and bravely amid strenuous conditions. All 
 terrestrial things interpreted by celestial ends. In the world 
 and not of it ! 
 
 Not absenteeism but transcendence, neither abstraction 
 nor distraction. This was Christ's own way, and by those 
 who would have all or none of Earth He was equally mis- 
 understood and misclassified. The task and the joy, the 
 rejection and the victory, go together, and the equation of 
 loyalty to His way must have all its terms complete. 
 
 Not common forms but common motives, not identical 
 circumstances but unity in character, is what creates the 
 sympathy and the alliance between those who surpass the 
 superficial substitute of uniformity, in true unity of the 
 spirit. 
 
 Christ's own mind and method toward all visible and 
 social surroundings, is what substantially joins all who are 
 truly His. This is the bond of their peace. 
 
 This great request in our behalf cogently teaches that 
 the super-mundane life is not yet the extra-mundane — that 
 it is not maintained by a thought exterior to its condition- 
 ings of sense and sin, but superior to these. Waywardness 
 and outwardness are to be surmounted by inwardness. 
 
 Surrender and sin lie not in surroundings but in contami- 
 
nation. We can squeeze it right to this, — not taken but 
 kept I 
 
 " All its pleasures and its griefs, 
 All its shallows and rocky reefs, 
 All the secret currents, that flow 
 With such resistless undertow, 
 And lift and drift with terrible force 
 The will from its moorings and its course. " 
 
 When we meditate these dangers of the wide sea it seems 
 easier not to venture. It is easier. But smooth roads 
 make small men. Temporarily it is safer to avoid risks; 
 but temporizing is the tune of feebleness. Monasticism 
 gives up the fight in preferring seclusion to exclusion. An 
 honest and brave manhood does not let that contemplation 
 supersede action which rather should stimulate it. That 
 " fugitive and cloistered virtue " failed of the very purity 
 which it idealized — failed because it fled the war. 
 
 I suppose we all know what it is to avoid circumstances 
 
 — to pray that the uncomfortable particular thorn may be 
 withdrawn — that difficulty and pain may cease — or even, 
 like Elijah, to say " Let me die, for I am not better than 
 my fathers." Each of us more than he admits has Becky 
 Sharp's theory, — " I think I could be good on £5,000 a 
 year ! " 
 
 We praise endurance and preach it to others: but when 
 our turn comes we flinch. We want to learn obedience in 
 some other than the grammar school of suffering, and resent 
 the processes by which God would get the world out of us 
 by keeping us in it. 
 
 But it is not by withdrawal, but by courage in the face of 
 all the world can do or deny, that we magnify the power of 
 grace to keep. " In your patience ye shall win your souls " 
 
 — make them really your own ! Absent-mindedness can 
 not do the business. They who, like our Intercessor, carry 
 Heaven with them, challenge all horizontal things with the 
 confidence that God will give truth the victory in a fair fight. 
 
 93 
 
Strength lies not in avoiding the enemy but in sticking 
 close to the leader; for nothing will surrender to a force that 
 is always falling back. Christ was a man among men — not 
 locally but spiritually " separate from sinners." The com- 
 mon life of the busy and bleeding and wicked and yearning 
 world was His arena. 
 
 That goodness which would thrive by getting into a lit- 
 tle room and fastening all windows and doors, will suffocate. 
 The Christian man will be forced constantly to his base of 
 supplies: but he can be in the largest sense a man of affairs. 
 He will, if he is a good soldier, be more anxious about the 
 ammunition wagon than the ambulance. He will not pray 
 to be taken out of the harness, but to die with the tugs 
 straight ! 
 
 A John Bright knows how to keep himself unspotted from 
 the world. Statesmanship need not be statecraft. There 
 are filthy politicians, nevertheless politics is a noble calling. 
 There are shyster lawyers, and editors who come cheap, and 
 time-serving, apologetic preachers, and business men whose 
 morals are frightfully decollete : but " go not after their way." 
 
 Temptation like contagion must always have some re- 
 sponse in its subject. It is not contact with worldliness 
 but affinity with it, and consent, that pulls a soul to pieces. 
 
 Here lie the life and power of what we call the Church. 
 The salt must be applied. The light must shine not under 
 a bushel nor a bed ! To be " carried to the skies " is no 
 concern of yours yet. When Elijah has swept Carmel then 
 God will send him His own carriage, but not to any juniper 
 bush ! Men need men — inspired, inspiriting men. You 
 are here to help — you are equipped to serve — to spend 
 your last ounce of energy for Him who loved the world be- 
 cause it could be saved ! Exploit it — it will exploit you ! 
 Your fellows, right on this planet, need muscles, not crutches 
 — courage, not cold-pieces ; and no man gives until he gives 
 himself ! What a man has, too often declares the price the 
 world has paid for him. What a man does for the world, 
 94 
 
measures what he would be worth. Once there was a Man 
 Who, — but that's the Gospel ! 
 
 The problem of Christian progress is not to get good men 
 away from the world, but to get them close to it. The less 
 worldliness there is in a man the readier will he be to come to 
 close quarters, where others, weakly good, dare not take the 
 seeming risks of fidelity. It is one thing to read medicine, or 
 even to take it, and quite another to practice it. We are 
 afraid of catching something, and that is where the epi- 
 demic gets us ! 
 
 To avoid those grapples that put us to the strain confesses 
 weakness. For instance, it is because men's civic principles 
 are so brittle ( not so good ) that city politics often become 
 the puddle and trough of the loathsome. Alleged respecta- 
 bility disowns right itself when it votes the regular ticket of 
 partisan lepers, who "fear not God nor regard man." Our 
 sewer-scented municipalities need less cologne and more 
 chloride of lime. Schemes to evade the world must always 
 be less efficient than plans to master it. That was a bright 
 bit of Rufus Choate's wit, when to one who asked after his 
 health he replied that he " had used up his constitution and 
 was living on the by-laws." And it is when we have run out 
 of inspiration that we idolize organization as such and trust 
 in appliances. For processes of mere manipulation often 
 strangle the truth, and good causes are smothered by pon- 
 derous committees. 
 
 One of the surest ways to get a thing done is to do it your- 
 self. Saul strutted about in his defensive armor while 
 David, with simpler equipment, took the offensive. Good- 
 ishness guards its rear — Gospel grit pushes its front. It was 
 Grant who said: "When this army is beaten it won't need 
 any supplies." 
 
 We are too worldly to dare to meet worldliness and con- 
 front evil right where it lives. We want to segregate good- 
 ness ; Christ would colonize it. He sends men, as He sends 
 nations, to open up the world and let in the day. The 
 
 95 
 
cleansing of one Havana does more to purge the world than 
 all the quarantine regulations ever framed. Our divine 
 Pattern would save us by having us save others. 
 
 Any company of men fancying itself "good," that sits 
 and harangues itself about its " privileges ", is as unreal and 
 spectacular as a theatre, and its exercises, even tho called 
 religious, are mere sentimental vaporings. 
 
 " I pray not that thou shouldst take them out of the 
 world. ' Christianity is far more than a mere protest. 
 
 The evil of " the world " — the root of all evil, which our 
 Lord prayed that we might be kept from, is selfishness. It 
 may be orthodox or not — Pharisee or Sadducee — little 
 odds which, so it merely theorizes truth and but depicts 
 duty. First Christ prayed against the evil world, then He 
 died for it ! 
 
 He not merely prescribed the cure, He became the cure. 
 We, dainty, greedy, ungrateful, underrate the responsiveness 
 of men, at large and in detail, to the power which in self- 
 sacrifice overcomes evil with good. 
 
 All men instinctively distinguish between real human love 
 which needs no other defense, and self-love exhibiting and 
 defending itself in condescension. If one holds himself apart 
 as super-precious and important, if he makes helpfulness an 
 incident rather than an aim, if he merely praises the efforts 
 of others, he thus becomes a part of the incubus. 
 
 For if you are not a lifter you are an addition to the load, 
 and in the light of the very Gospel be it firmly said, that if we 
 are too good to be used we are not good for anything ! 
 
 And why should any one of you shun the suffering sinful- 
 ness of this struggling and piteous world ? Why should any 
 of you try to climb up by using those who are down ? 
 
 Reverently we may paraphrase our text, — "I prav not to 
 put them in Heaven, but to put Heaven into them. ' The 
 Prince of Life anchored His Gospel in the world by bringing 
 it in Person. He so took up His residence here that the 
 common everyday people of Syria heard Him gladly. He 
 
 96 
 
did it and we must do it, or Cease to pray, — u Tliy will be 
 done on Earth as it is in Heaven." 
 
 Would any of you be such a man ? Nay, will you not all 
 be such ? In the world, yet none of it. For it, not from it. 
 The ship floats in the water until the water gets into the 
 ship. It is not location, but relation, that shall differentiate 
 you from the element in which you are placed. Your pro- 
 bation hinges there. 
 
 Emancipation from the things seen and temporal is in 
 deliverance from the world's spirit, philosophy, temper, lust, 
 — not from its problems. 
 
 It often takes sharp surprises and bitter sufferings to 
 make one aware how much he has allowed himself to 
 become involved in the world's pretentious bankruptcy. 
 Meet life now in its demands, not run from it, and save 
 yourself too sharp a shock and too bitter a pang. Pray 
 yourself the prayer Christ prayed for all disciples. 
 
 For all men do practically pray something. Some pray — 
 Give me the world — the pride of life, — and success be- 
 comes an optimism which angers at any contradiction of its 
 dream; failure, a pessimism angry at both rebuke and remedy. 
 
 Or some pray — Take it away — Take me away. 
 
 But third, and hardest and noblest and surest, is the 
 prayer, — Keep me in it and yet keep me from it. 
 
 Agur's prayer was prudent, — " Give me neither poverty 
 nor riches'; but deeper, wiser, were it to say to God, — 
 As Thou wilt, give me either poverty or riches. 
 
 Men of the Class of 1900 : 
 
 Would you indeed be men, learn a noble non-conform- 
 ity to all patterns save One. Make yourselves by His help 
 a known quantity for good in a world where you are bidden 
 to be laborers together with God. 
 
 " Ah, what a wondrous thing it is 
 To note how many wheels of toil 
 One thought, one word, can set in motion.'* 
 
 97 
 
Count nothing small that you do bravely to make the 
 world nearer to what God wills it to be. 
 
 Neither antiquated nor new-fangled, meet what each year 
 brings you, sure that in all the flux of your time there are 
 fixed stars by which to sail to a desired haven. 
 
 The century in which you were born has a mighty mes- 
 sage to the century in which you shall die: but Christ's 
 message is one for them both, and for you all. Remember 
 that manly man who a year ago was your teacher, and not 
 less a friend. Cleave to such men as Grosvenor Hopkins 
 was. Strive to be such men, and pass down from this divide 
 of your years into the valleys where rare harvests invite the 
 reapers. 
 
 In the memory of the College that mothers you, recognize 
 the inspirations of her historic past. Whatever she has been 
 to you, she may be more and will be more to you, as you 
 look back to the friendships, the unconscious tuitions, the 
 happy reveries and the prophetic dreams. Once, twice, 
 thrice more, all of you together, and then never again this 
 side the war! May your Lord and Master " fulfil for you 
 every desire of goodness and every work of faith, with 
 power." I do not want to let you go : but all the rest must 
 speak unspoken. 
 
 98 
 
SPECIALISM AND SYMPATHY 
 
 TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 23, 1901 
 
 Love is the fulfilment of law. Romans 13 :10. 
 
 My purpose is to speak of two aspects of all mental earn- 
 estness as they combine in a true theory of education; then 
 of this true theory of education as it increases personal char- 
 acter and vital influence. 
 
 I would restate and if I can reim press some fundamental 
 principles in which you are already well begun, and in which 
 I know you must continue to advance if you are to be men of 
 discrimination and efficiency. Two things I shall try to 
 urge as mutually indispensable in the real development of 
 both mental and moral life, — Specialism and Sympathy. 
 Each consideration touches present and permanent problems 
 in education, as this in its means and ends is concerned 
 with that harmony between capacity and energy which 
 unifies and intensifies life. 
 
 From these two descriptives I would attempt to cleanse 
 some obscurities, and would carry your convictions toward 
 that comprehensive view of them which is instantly related 
 to manly growth in both knowledge and grace. The correct 
 vision of these two duties of the mind must open a generous 
 and inviting vista, and invite you to proceed with that 
 honest caution which ministers to the surest courage. 
 
 Emerson somewhere wrote that " The poorest poem is 
 better than the best criticism upon it." How much easier 
 it is to write poor poetry than to write good criticism there 
 are doubtless here as many as several who know well ! But 
 I suppose he meant not that, but that creation is nobler in 
 kind than inspection. And I take a little comfort as I try 
 not merely to construe words but to construct an idea and 
 an ideal whose sum shall be just to its each part. " Mixing 
 things ( said Mrs. Carlyle ) is the great bad. 
 
 99 
 
Law is rational order and its interpretation. Science is 
 that careful and arranged appreciation of this order which 
 classifies and ratifies every kind of attainable knowledge. 
 It is information philosophised into that mental result which 
 reads out of the fact what the Supreme Mind has written 
 into it. It is a recognition of reality far anterior to itself. 
 
 Love goes deeper. It is of the will. It gathers all feeling 
 into consent. It establishes voluntary relation to that wis- 
 dom which thro law addresses life. It is intelligent affinity, 
 — the soul's Amen to the divine Yea. It incorporates law 
 and transcends it. Law teaches and invites the response of 
 life thro love, and love is life filling law full. 
 
 Now Specialism is the legal method of the brain under 
 man's double limitation in both ability and time. 
 
 Divide et impera is its behest. It detaches one single 
 range of research or enterprise. It is particular, focal, and 
 individualistic. As to one thing it would know all that can 
 be known or do all that can be done. It concentrates its 
 power upon a point, and by intense abstraction and an ever 
 closer subdivision and analysis it pushes the wary atom to 
 its lair. The specialist sinks one shaft. He gazes thro a 
 tube at his single object. In art or affairs he is utterly de- 
 voted to his one investigation. In whatsoever realm, the 
 instincts of the honest specialist are vigilance and thoroness; 
 eagerly he plods, slowly he hastens. His errand is not to 
 impose theories but to uncover facts. Patiently he prepares 
 the way. His function is not to plead a case but to gather 
 the evidence. His attitude has been typical of all the learn- 
 ing of our time, as it has been the note of all the vast and 
 masterful expansion of our mechanic arts. 
 
 But Specialism is hemi-spherical. If we would not be 
 "ever learning and never able to come to a knowledge of the 
 truth," we must know that life is not a circle but an ellipse. 
 That which mind perceives is one of the two focii — the 
 mind which perceives is the other. These bivalve parts are 
 inter-regulative and co-efficient. 
 
 100 
 
Curiosity without co-ordination is aimless and futile. In 
 all factoring, analysis is a full half: but it is only half; the 
 other half is synthesis. The one must distinguish and the 
 other must combine. And the mood and effort in which the 
 synthesis is realized is Sympathy. 
 
 Analysis unties, synthesis unites. The means are instru- 
 mental to this end. The portion seeks the sum. In a 
 creation where all separate things have this supreme affinity, 
 namely, that they exist in one total, all facts are gregarious. 
 They interlace and are reticulated. To dissect and there 
 quit them is to destroy. The severalty can only be under- 
 stood by the jointure. The community of interest is what 
 makes the "effectual working together" of the manifold 
 items, and so makes them intelligible. All suffer and rejoice 
 interactively. "The whole creation ( and because a whole) 
 travaileth in pain together." 
 
 Sympathy cares for what all parts share in the sum. It 
 is vital; for life is concerned with the total unity of a total 
 world. Study the staves, study the hoops that clasp them, 
 so as to study the heads, and at last the barrel. You must 
 build as well as carve — if you are to fill full the barrel. 
 The mere addition of these various shreds will not give you 
 the result; for assorting is not consorting: but their proper 
 combination will, as each gives and receives meaning to and 
 from the purposed end. Here is one more vindication of 
 my pet paradox, that except in the abstraction of mathe- 
 matics the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. 
 Mere juxtaposition is barren. A football team is more than 
 eleven players. Our nation is more than forty-five states. 
 You are more than your aggregate faculties. A sentence is 
 more than the words it assembles. The ' law of the spirit of 
 life ' is more than the separate activities which it uses. 
 
 After all the statics and dynamics under which your bar- 
 rel is built, the question of what shall fill it is cardinal. 
 Remember to be good coopers: but remember to be more 
 than coopers. And consider that a barrel must at least con- 
 
 101 
 
tain enough to be worth freightage. It pays to carry a 
 "fulfilment" of flour from Minneapolis to the seaboard; 
 but the same space full of shavings would mulct the consig- 
 nee. Better be a keg of dry powder than a cask of putty ! 
 
 Sympathy is telepathy. All things and all men are inter- 
 dependent. Relation designates co-responsibility. This 
 rescues every detail from incoherency. Its high kinship is 
 the nobility of the instant and the instance. To forget the 
 implication of any part of anything is to strip it of meaning 
 and to make it a sherd. The exaggeration of individualism 
 is its secession and defeat. Your Latin teaches you that its 
 synonym is egotism, your Greek that it is idiocy. 
 
 You must inspect in order to contract. The strands are in 
 order to the cable, — the day in order to the year. Sympa- 
 thy does not proceed toward a quotient, but a multiplicand. 
 
 " To see life steadily and see it whole " is to know that 
 man is naturally federative, and that no fact or fellow is 
 alien from any man's endowment in God. 
 
 While Specialism all by itself is isolar, gibbous, sexless, 
 barren; Sympathy, with all that is and can be, brings us into 
 fellowship with the ' One law, one love, one element.' It is 
 the pollen of life. It fertilizes all capacity. Law and love 
 are thus necessary complements. Finally, they are not 
 merely harmonious but vitally identical. The whole man, 
 the integral man, the man whom they together have freed 
 from astigmatism, uses them as interchangeable terms, and 
 sings with Browning, — 
 
 " All's love ; but all's law,"— 
 
 and so to the higher chemistry gives them one symbol ! 
 
 Not omniscience then, which is the modern gnosticism, is 
 your goal: but unity of feeling with every other child of the 
 one Father, and the appreciation that of that unity the 
 unity of all the tangible and optical world is the parable 
 and pedestal. Even if Specialism could ever become omnis- 
 cience, Sympathy would still be omnipotence. 
 
 102 
 
If you follow me, you cannot think that I am disparaging 
 analysis. I exalt it, in the name of that synthesis which is 
 its warrant and its crown. They are the two sides of the 
 one coin, obverse and reverse, from the same mint. They 
 are the bi-sexual reason! 
 
 Unwarped, unthwarted, every true and severe task, of the 
 mind or of the hand, of study or of action, leads from the 
 particular to the general, from the mechanical to the vital, 
 thro the rational to the emotional. The fulfilment suffuses 
 the process. We are fuel for that fire. The Way, the Truth 
 and the Life speaks, and our hearts burn within us. So are 
 we fashioned. A full connection and circuit, and that which 
 is not of the wire leaps thro it ! For all science, of the 
 senses or of the soul, is in order that we may realize life and 
 Him who grants and guides it. In this half-time, so much 
 dominated by the apparent, we are to be delivered from 
 considering ourselves as mere cogs and pinions of an appara- 
 tus, by those spatial affinities which convince us that the 
 enginery is less than the engineer, and the track less than 
 the destination. 
 
 " Two worlds are ours," and thereto even the " flower in 
 the crannied wall " is a witness. Between the outmost and 
 the inmost — between " the starry worlds and the con- 
 science " — the Presence ! 
 
 Sympathy then, — that co-feeling which makes kin, com- 
 mon-weal, catholicity of heart, the whole as the point of 
 view, — this I urge. 
 
 It is more than amount of knowledge, it is motive. 
 Motive more than locomotive ! Accuracy not for the arrow's 
 sake, but for the archer's. 
 
 So may you be delivered, whether in the laboratory or 
 the closet or the factory or the field or the chair, from the 
 idolatry of your particular topic or sub-topic, nor hold any 
 of your acquisitions as a self-sufficing end. Each is for all. 
 Regard for one's own segment of industry, if it becomes 
 antipathetic or even apathetic toward the tasks of others 
 
 103 
 
will greatly diminish your value even on your own half -acre; 
 while a genuine human interest in the relation of your 
 knowledge to another's, of your search to another's search, 
 will encourage both him and you. Always there are others! 
 In every sphere of man's attempts, large-hear tedness is the 
 antidote for that over-concentration which in ignoring other 
 parts frustrates its own, 
 
 Let it be Government. The durable patriotism is not 
 parochial nor provincial, nor even merely continental: but 
 it is international. The commonalty and reciprocity of all 
 the families of Earth is the corrollary of that prayer which 
 Europe and America owe to that true Light of Asia Who 
 was the Light of the World ! Love, like light, makes no 
 apology, but is universally diffusive. In the sight of God 
 they are the barbarous nations who treat others as such ! 
 A mere localized philanthropy is only a modified misan- 
 thropy. No eulogy of Man goes well with the obloquy of 
 men or races of men. 
 
 Let it be Literature. It is valid as the reflection of life. 
 Life is the dominant — the strong, searching, chord. The 
 specializing of language as such is external to the impulses 
 which make words subservient to rich feeling, and find those 
 the only classics which hold the world's heart. The best is 
 that which most invites and best endures translation. To 
 get and to appreciate another point of view, — this is the 
 benefit. Motif then is more than technique. We study the 
 masters of English, if duly, that we may value and per- 
 petuate the genius of English manhood. Hebrew, Greek, 
 Latin — all tongues, or modern or antique, — they are 
 human. Their polyglot finds Sympathy of one speech. 
 This is the Pentecostal affluence which reverses Babel ! 
 Philology ought to inspire a philanthropy which forgets race 
 and date. Toward the whole synthesis of mankind litera- 
 ture is the most potent and perennial influence. It is the 
 vessel of prophecy. By it the dead speak. No language 
 that has voiced a literature can ever be dead except to men 
 
 104 
 
who are not alive. It is a mirror in which, for those who 
 will look, heart answers heart. " To learn language ( wrote 
 John P. Coyle ) but not literature is to be barely human, — 
 to be a non-historical man. Literature is specifically higher 
 than language. It stands for a higher type of a corporate 
 life. It is the chief agency thro which the higher historical 
 forces are transmitted, with least refraction or deflection, or 
 diminution of energy." Hence the Bible. One should 
 study Greek to understand the Greeks — German to under- 
 stand the Germans — and specialize in any tongue so as to 
 sympathize with the men who speak or who spake it. So 
 let grammar and glossary do their best : but so that they 
 may lead to the Library, and there the Library pour its 
 gold into the furnaces of Life ! $4$ 
 
 Or let it be Sociology. What is Society, or the still in- 
 choate because unethicised science thereof, without sympa- 
 thy ? Society itself is a super-specialistic term. Work and 
 wages and weal, brain and brawn, craft and craftiness, get 
 and give, — our Economics, — must be debrutalized, intensely 
 humanized, nay evangelized, if it is not to be a dismal 
 swamp of bog and malaria. Subdivisive specialism will not 
 shoulder the load. We need first a justified and second an 
 applied generalization — Ethics, which is universal equity. 
 Over against every wrong a right, by the side of every 
 right a duty, sympathetic deed: else antipathy and nations 
 slipping in blood ! 
 
 " Does business mean — ' Die you live I !' 
 Then ' Trade is trade !' but sings a lie; 
 'Tis only War grown miserly." 
 
 Or be it the Church. If it is not to be a dissonance of 
 clanging symbols ( and you may write the first sibilant 
 either way ) it must recognize that Theology like every 
 other science is a specialty, but that Religion is a sym- 
 pathy. Its privilege is essentially inclusive and flatters no 
 selfish exceptionalist ! Caste is anti-Christ. To care for 
 God is to care for men as God understands them. To clas- 
 
 105 
 
sify and segregate sympathy here is to tear the vesture of 
 the Lord — to divide His heart. The real Church is at once 
 the infirmary and the arsenal of all souls. Comprehension 
 is its passion and its power. It is either a plan and specifi- 
 cation of Society as it ought to be and as God means it shall 
 be, or it is the most stupendous failure of history — all fail- 
 ures in one ! But if the sympathy of God is not impracti- 
 cable and the Gospel stultified, then to join the Church is 
 to join mankind ! 
 
 So then, by all this illustration, "Love is the fulfilling of 
 the law," and in every way Sympathy, which is love's vindi- 
 cation, stands as an ideal, a motive and a goal, over against 
 the insularities, the antagonisms, the envies, and all the Kil- 
 kenny quarrels of partisans and egotists. Not money for 
 money's sake, nor art for art's sake, nor science for science's 
 sake; but all these for man's sake, and for every man's. 
 
 " Such as the love is, ( said Swedenborg ) such is the wis- 
 dom." Out of specialism are the issues of knowledge but 
 " out of the heart are the issues of life." Knowledge alone 
 inflates — Love upbuilds. If my distinction is clear it in- 
 volves its own applications and appeals. 
 
 My illustration is special in so far as it is pedagogic, but I 
 seek to use this but as a good instance and in sympathy 
 with all things that it subtends, even to the very highest. 
 True education is eduction — the outdrawing of the utmost 
 capacity. The market value of it is in its production of 
 whole men, wide-based and well-builded, such as are more 
 and more demanded for the enlarging and compacting part- 
 nerships of mankind. " The function of education (writes 
 Herbert Spencer) is to prepare for complete living." It 
 should teach men to generalize well, and thus, in the appre- 
 ciation of large relations and in the inclusion of many 
 points of view, best to compass each his own work. 
 
 The truest preparation toward any one calling is wide- 
 mindedness, and the alert, the agile, the joyful application 
 of diverse and even oblique bearings. The wider the lens 
 
 106 
 
the more rays it focuses. The narrow tire wears a deep 
 rut; but the broad wheel both arrives earlier with a larger 
 load and also betters the way for those who follow. 
 
 The great Italians are the first and finest instance of a 
 various and superb general ability. Leonardo da Vinci, Fra 
 Paoli Sarpi, Michael Angelo, are of a group more than 
 ambidextrous, who wrought wonderfully in many fields. 
 Their specialty was to live. Moses was such a man, and it 
 took an Angelo to interpret his heroic mould. 
 
 An interest aroused and established in the whole round of 
 lore and life, a heart responsive to the multiformity of 
 knowledge and endeavor, — this is the best preliminary prepa- 
 ration for any and every particular pursuit. If a too- early 
 partialism crowds this aside, it steals away that horizon 
 beyond his peculiar task which, for the relief of his intellect 
 and for the health of his heart, every man needs. When 
 professionalism becomes a vice it is because it looks meager- 
 ly and torpidly upon all that does not fit its own furrow, is 
 only practical at one angle. It lacks amity and comity. It 
 is selfish. Its analog is in that piteous and happily rare dis- 
 ease of the eye in which vision can only see in one direct line 
 and is as if directed thro a gun barrel. Blindness supervenes. 
 
 Solitary and intense concentration requires the offset of a 
 well- taught and therefore early- taught outlook, uplook, in- 
 look, onlook. Bare routine of head or hand, becoming 
 automatic, starves ideality. Only large conviction and a 
 sense of relativity can school that content and sweet heart- 
 edness which, because of the ultimate meanings beyond all 
 present utilities, confers upon each plain and frugal task the 
 touch of finality. 
 
 Only sincere sympathy can redeem any specialty from 
 monotony and myopia: but this sympathy gives momentum 
 to all skill, and in its climate the eyes kindle, because 
 " patience worketh experience, and experience hope, and 
 hope maketh not ashamed, because love is shed abroad in 
 the heart." Here is where comes in the humanistic side of 
 
 107 
 
education. In his final published article it was thus put by 
 one of our noblest graduates, who this year has begun his 
 endless 'summer in a garden,' — Charles Dudley Warner 
 of 51. 
 
 " The better part of the life of a man is in and by the 
 imagination. This is not generally believed, because it is 
 not generally believed that the chief end of man is the accu- 
 mulation of intellectual and spiritual material. Hence it is 
 that what is called a practical education is set above the 
 mere enlargement and enrichment of the mind, and the 
 possession of the material is valued and the intellectual life 
 is undervalued. But it should be remembered that the best 
 preparation for a practical and useful life is in the high 
 development of the powers of the mind, and that com- 
 monly by a culture that is not considered practical. The 
 notable fact about the group of great parliamentary ora- 
 tors in the days of George III. is the exhibition of their 
 intellectual resources in the entire world of letters, the 
 classics and ancient and modern history. Yet all of them 
 owed their development to a strictly classical training in the 
 schools. And most of them had not only the gift of the 
 imagination necessary to great eloquence, but also were so 
 mentally disciplined by the classics that they handled the 
 practical questions upon which they legislated with clear- 
 ness and decision. The great masters of finance were the 
 classically- trained orators William Pitt and Charles James 
 Fox." 
 
 The old term, " a liberal education," and the thing itself, 
 it is today a fad to challenge and with much self-sufficient 
 ascerbity; but I make bold to urge that " liberal education " 
 was never more needed, both to introduce the skill and to 
 amend the tenuity of the expert. In spite of all belligerent 
 neological dogmas liberality of mind and purpose is indis- 
 pensable. Liberality has many windows and many doors, 
 and makes room at its hearth for every guest that is clean 
 and sane. It is constructive, and so while hospitable it 
 
 108 
 
does not keep a disorderly house! Its liberty is not license 
 nor its largeness laxity. It is broad, but its dimensions 
 include depth also. It neither abandons law nor worships 
 it. It follows the " more excellent way." 
 
 Such an education puts no premium upon haste, nor does 
 it discount future power by an immature substitution of 
 learning for training. It is structural toward the whole 
 man and seeks to issue him not besmeared but bessemered. 
 It considers the capable metal more than the commercial 
 false edge. Self-realization is the end. It seeks not yours 
 but you ! It teaches you to ponder the wherefore and the 
 whither. You are not tools but men. If you would be 
 handy in this big world you must be hearty. Just in so far 
 as you are men, and no further, will your scholarship prove 
 available. For in letters and in life, in art and religion, in 
 school and house, in whatever balances the harm and heals 
 the hurt, in whatever makes woman tender and man brave, 
 whatever enlarges the scholar, the seer, the saint, — Sym- 
 pathy interprets and bonds all things, and " passe th all things 
 for illumination." It gives quality to quantity. 
 
 Men of the Class of 1901 : 
 
 You are the best class that ever graduated from this Col- 
 lege in the twentieth century ! When from the Gymnasium 
 gallery that bears your imprimatur forty classes look down 
 upon you, may you still be without a better ! I shall not 
 be there. You have had " tutors and governors until the 
 time appointed." All that is over. You are glad and sorry. 
 I have at least one good reason to feel an especial proprie- 
 tary right in you. I claim it and you will grant it. You will 
 keep faith with the lovely old lady that lives on the hill ! 
 You are a part of her brood and breed. She is not rich but 
 she is kindly. Such as she has had she has given you. 
 Keep it. Put it to the good usury of life. Cherish every 
 pure ambition, every manly vow. Revoke every mistake. 
 In the name of all your teachers, who have also striven to 
 
 109 
 
be your friends, — in the name of all the College that is, that 
 has been, and that shall be, — by this last word of admoni- 
 tion and of hope, — I greet you. Bon voyage I May you 
 do business in the great waters of Time, and may you not 
 come home " in ballast " but deep-laden, upon tides " too 
 full for sound or foam," and so with an abundant entrance. 
 May God always have with you the last word! Be perfected 
 in that love which casteth out all fear ! 
 
 Prayers for you, — tears for you, — cheers for you, — 
 years for you ! Be of good courage. Hurrah ! and Amen ! 
 
 UO 
 
SYMMETRY 
 
 TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 22, 1902 
 
 Ephraim is a cake not turned. Hosea 7:8. 
 
 With gratitude and hope I note the passing years, and 
 for the tenth time stand here to say to you of this latest 
 graduating class a word of final exhortation. Bear with it 
 and me this once more. With what I try to utter to you I 
 search myself. 
 
 Hosea was both a preacher and a type. Strikingly he 
 instanced what it was to carry the " burden " of the 
 prophet. His task was vicarious, as are the tasks of all men 
 who upbear their time. His words are anguished as he 
 views the deep apostacy of the ten tribes; intense with 
 reproach, with lament, with entreaty, lurid with the reflec- 
 tion of astounding wickedness and its impending wo, in a 
 day when his land was saturated with lust and blood, and 
 when elegant scoffing went hand in hand with vile degen- 
 eracy. The passion of his broken rhetoric, the abrupt 
 blending of wrathful accusation and pathetic appeal, are of 
 the very " accent of the Holy Ghost." 
 
 The prophet snatches illustration from every side, and 
 midway in his tempestuous utterance he makes the plainest 
 every-day comparison — a kitchen picture — serve his use. 
 He likens Israel to the baker's oven — heated, waiting while 
 the leaven works, standing hot thro the night, blazing out 
 in the morning, devouring all that is near it. It is sharp and 
 vigorous. Then he swings the figure, and Ephraim, who has 
 been the red-hot oven, is now himself that which the oven 
 destroys. 
 
 That primitive appliance, the oriental tan-nur, was a 
 cylinder of baked clay. Three feet high it stood, somewhat 
 conical. The fire was lit within, the baking placed against, 
 or plastered upon, the outside. The utensil was familiar, 
 
 in 
 
and its careless use sufficiently so. In every household what 
 the prophet pictures had sometime sacrificed the morning 
 fare. A hot oven neglected, a " cake not turned ", and a 
 ruined baking, — one side done too much, the other not 
 done at all, one side scorched and cindered, the other an 
 insipid paste. Overdone, underdone, undone, — an unpalat- 
 able and indigestible compound of grit and dough, sheer 
 worthlessness and waste. The housekeeper must begin 
 anew, or if flour and yeast are gone must go hungry. 
 
 There, then, is a parable wrapped small. Such a cake 
 Ephraim was, and such, alas, is many a modern man who 
 thinks it fine to despise both Hebrew and prophet. It is 
 the plainest suggestion of an abundant lesson. It exhibits 
 good materials badly manufactured, — too much fire and too 
 little cook ! Misapplied fuel, facilities frustrated, good 
 stuff spoiled, a charred and emetic result, fit only for cats 
 and dogs ! " Because thou art lukewarm and neither cold 
 nor hot, I will spew thee out of My mouth ! " 
 
 Life's hot ovens, not enough tended, are ever turning off 
 those who are done on one side and on one side only, — half 
 baked characters. These men, ( and some of them are 
 women,) a composite of exaggeration and neglect, are 
 " cakes not turned." For, fine flour, stout yeast, stiff 
 kneading, and you haven't good bread unless you add to 
 these careful cooking. " These ought ye to have done and 
 not to leave the other undone ! " We can all recall enter- 
 prises of ours that fell out a dead loss simply because we did 
 not watch our ovens ! 
 
 Today's ruined batch is not however all a loss, if patient 
 experience works betterment tomorrow. 
 
 The blunders of this world are mainly the result of heed- 
 lessness. 
 
 " Evil is wrought by want of thought, 
 As well as by want of heart." 
 
 Where malice slays its thousands, carelessness slays its 
 myriads. It is therefore more disastrous than malice ! Con- 
 
 112 
 
tinually men are going to the wall because they do not 
 remember that opportunity always has double possibilities, 
 evil as well as good. Permission to make a great success is 
 permission also to make a great failure. Bad handling can 
 wreck the sturdiest ship, mismanagement waste the amplest 
 fortune, inadvertence foil the best occasions, delay slam in 
 our faces hope's brightest door, — the whole life fail by not 
 turning the cake all ways to the fire ! Homely and whole- 
 some then the precept, that the result after God's mind is 
 a man done on both sides. Thoroness, which is thro-and- 
 throness, is as desirable in character as in cookery. And so 
 our theme is a warning against that disproportion which 
 follows both excess and neglect. All-aroundness, balance, 
 symmetry, is the true ideal and goal of an available man. 
 He loses this equipoise and sphericity, and becomes gibbous 
 and lopsided, who is willing to let defects offset his excel- 
 lences. He has the moral mumps ! 
 
 Even distribution is the task of the true life, to utilize the 
 maximum of energy and to minimize the waste. With a 
 loose joint and poor packing the mechanism has " play " 
 and there is friction and lost motion. Misspent force shat- 
 ters its tools. If the enginery does not fit the hull there is 
 strain and danger. The steam boiler that fizzes at all its 
 joints wastes steam — - the boiler overtaxed bursts. A good 
 equilibrium lavishes nothing and uses all. 
 
 For the differences which determine and distinguish suc- 
 cess or failure are no great differences. Not toto coelo, but 
 by a little arc, does winning change to losing. Tall men are 
 taller by inches, not feet. It is in the final ten per cent, of 
 possible force that men surpass their fellows. 
 
 " The little more, and how much it is: 
 The little less, and what worlds away ! " 
 
 In wooing or in war, the margin wins. The last few grains 
 turn the balance. Three of four degrees of the barometer's 
 thirty- two register the calm and the tornado. A " Water- 
 bury watch " can run within ten minutes a month, and that 
 
 us 
 
is all its inferiority to the chronometer that runs within ten 
 seconds. Seven per cent, profit and the business succeeds; 
 seven per cent, loss and it fails. Fractions decide the life ! 
 
 We all know men with attainments we despair of matched 
 with weaknesses we despise, who, beating the air with one 
 wing, chafe, struggle, and die distanced. He will get further 
 who walks on two feet than he who attempts to run on all 
 fours ! The upper and under tensions must both be regulated. 
 The window plant must be turned about. For a complete 
 beauty the tree must stand in the open. A ship that has 
 not enough keel and ballast for her sail is " crank," and so 
 is a man who leans too far one way and lacks recovering 
 power ! If suddenly this whirling planet were to slow 
 down and cease its revolutions, think how its very zones 
 would shift ! — the side towards the Sun becoming an intol- 
 erable Sahara, the side away a more than Arctic midnight, 
 all the tribes of men presently peopling only the narrow 
 belt of permanent twilight ! But what the Earth has from 
 her impartial exposure to the Sun, that must we get by 
 turning our entire being to the illumination of God. 
 
 This is it — that wholeness must fortify all ways. Isolated 
 virtues are not virtue. One may have some good traits yet 
 not be good. Energy will not redeem selfishness, nor beauty 
 and taste condone idleness, nor brilliancy offset scrofulous 
 morals. Keen gifts set in such broad defects make carica- 
 ture. He who would live more than platitude must; know 
 that, far from averaging force with fault, high desire urges 
 that allegory of Holmes', — 
 
 " The weakest spot must stan* the strain, 
 An' the way to fix it, ez I maintain, 
 Is only jest to make that place as strong as the rest." 
 
 The textural quality must lie under the surface finish. 
 Symmetry is more than bigness. The three-ply man, body, 
 brain, and heart, — the man thinking, feeling, acting, must 
 have an equalized development. Terrestrial and celestial 
 relations must not quarrel, This triune life is citizen of a 
 114 
 
dual world. The so-called practical and the so-called ideal 
 life are not at variance. To specialize the muscles of one 
 arm only is to deny the right of the other. To specialize 
 any one capacity or realm, and not to generalize that part 
 with the whole, is to defeat even that one. 
 
 There is no more moving warning against an unnatural 
 prematurity and an unnatural immaturity than the auto- 
 biography of John Stuart Mill. Scholarly in Greek at eight, 
 a close student of history at ten, he wrote: " I never was a 
 boy, never played at cricket — it is better to let Nature have 
 her own way." It was monstrous: but more monstrous was 
 the way in which his father taught him austere doubt, and 
 for bread offered him scorpions ! 
 
 What abnormal schooling is that which concerns itself 
 only with the objective and ignores the soul that sees, 
 thinks, and lives on. Sufficient reason, adequate end and 
 action with this reference — these, or starvation. The 
 higher education, the real fulfilment of manhood, must be 
 " of large discourse, looking before and after." The great- 
 est realities are the innermost. That is but arrested devel- 
 opment which thinks that man's chief end is to know things, 
 rather than to discern personality. To do, to be — the 
 realm of person and conscience — this is life. Spiritual navi- 
 gation, too, must be by the stars of Heaven; and of them all, 
 brighter than Sirius and Alcyone, by the Star of Bethlehem. 
 
 " When science reaches forth her arms to feel from world 
 to world," she still must cry with the old Psalm, unless 
 her heart is frozen in conceit, — " My soul thirsteth for the 
 living God !" One may be broad, yet be shallow. To see 
 horizontally, but be blind vertically, is to usurp ethics by 
 mere esthetics and statistics — esthetics which fail of the true 
 beauty, and statistics which omit the supreme fact. Walter 
 Scott's last word to his son Lockhart was: "My dear, be 
 a good man ! " Devotion to the highest is the root of wis- 
 dom. Upper education begins not with abstruse mathemat- 
 ics and abstract speculation and all the array and analysis 
 
 115 
 
of objects, but with the lore of loving lips that taught us — 
 
 " Now I lay me down to sleep; 
 I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to keep," — 
 
 and sealed it with a mother's kiss ! There can be no equity 
 of manhood that refuses life's inner side and ultimate ques- 
 tion. The thinking and the doing that does not culminate 
 in God is truncated and thwarted. Its restlessness is its 
 confession of poverty. It denies the heart hunger which is 
 either a prophecy or a doom. Nor is admission of the God- 
 side of life enough, without a joyful submission. One may 
 have a mind furnished like a great library, and a spirit as 
 hard and cold as that library's walls. It is the " cake not 
 turned ! " For what a distortion is it to know and not to be ! 
 — never to arrive — to be mentally finished and spiritually 
 not begun ! Again I turn you to that one complete man- 
 hood — His, in Whom we are to " grow up in all things " un- 
 til we come to the complete and entire man — to the meas- 
 ure of the stature of fulness This only is accomplishment. 
 True education is a ripening — a seasoning. It endeavors 
 to evoke many-sidedness — to help one's mind to become 
 public, large, hospitable. It is the glory of a true college 
 course that it does not purport to finish its scholar but to 
 start him well. It is not a sausage-machine. Its disciplines 
 neither attempt nor desire to rival the school of technology. 
 It takes time, and therefore must often hear the sneers of 
 haste-making avarice. Remember Moses' college course of 
 forty years. To surround the task, to compass and com- 
 prehend it, has less haste but more speed. 
 
 " We may o'errun by violent swiftness that which we run at, 
 And lose by overrunning." 
 
 Far from circumstances jostling mediocrity to the top, 
 they will throw it under. Shake a measure, and see the big 
 tubers come up! In this exacting and sifting time the small 
 potatoes go out of sight. There is a plenty of demand for 
 those who will be all they can be: but little enough for 
 
 116 
 
seconds. Well- tempered tools will longest hold their edge. 
 The steel process takes longer; but then you get steel. "He 
 that will have a cake out of the meal must needs tarry the 
 grinding." One who would precipitate himself half-baked 
 upon an unwary world will ultimately pay the freight. The 
 world will get even with him. It will not willingly set its 
 teeth twice in a raw man. He isn't cooked! 
 
 You have not taken the " short cut." You are now to 
 advance upon the same broad guage, and not for a moment 
 to lose the wider view of capacious, generous sympathies. 
 You will be available not because you have been here, but 
 because you have absorbed this idea of being many-bladed. 
 You cannot lie down upon past privileges. A wider view 
 demands not less intensity but more. No stencilled A. B. 
 will make indeterminateness efficient. One who prides him- 
 self merely because he has had advantages, is as foolish as 
 one who prides himself because he has not had them ! Worth 
 is as the man is. " A man is worth to himself what he is 
 capable to enjoy, worth to the world what he is capable to 
 impart." This is the whole lesson of Hosea's oven and of 
 the " cake not turned." And I make the prayer, — " The 
 God of peace himself sancitify you wholly, and may your 
 whole body, soul and spirit be preserved entire, without 
 blame, at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." 
 
 Men of the Class of 1902: 
 
 In the name of the College, and of all your instructors 
 there, I give you each a hearty hand. You have been a part 
 of Hamilton in days of progress. Your influence has been 
 true and steadying. You are still to be a part of the College 
 and she is still to claim your concern and your fidelity. 
 Stand by her true advancement as long as you live. Honor 
 her imprimatur. It takes good men to be leaders and to be 
 followers. Stand four-square toward life's exactions and 
 awards. Be apart from that cross-eyed envy which puts an 
 emphasis upon equity that denies liberty, and from the one- 
 
 117 
 
eyed greed that asserts liberty to the denial of equality. 
 Hold fast to that equity which is duty, and stand for it 
 steadily, even tho contra mundum. Dr. Weir Mitchell has 
 written well that " temperament is permanent mood." So 
 set each mood broadly in all its just relations, and let your 
 joys be " more than mere animal spirits." Both weed your 
 souls and plant them, both plant them and weed them. 
 
 It has been deplored that " There are no great men now." 
 It is not true. Real greatness is absolute, not relative. The 
 ideal is not a few exceptions, but a high average. Success 
 lies not in surpassing your fellow men, but in surpassing 
 yourself. So shall you lift the world, which is harder and 
 nobler than to surprise it. Recall the last order of Col. 
 Liscum of the Ninth Infantry, falling at Tien-Tsin, — "Keep 
 on firing ! " Always there is a firing line. Stand there un- 
 der the great unseen Captain. That's the place, and as to 
 what men say, no matter, — or not the first matter. 
 
 " They out-talked thee, hissed thee, tore thee; 
 Better men fared thus before thee, 
 Fired their ringing shot and passed, 
 Hotly charged, and sank at last. 
 
 Charge once more then, and be dumb ! 
 Let the victors when they come, 
 When the forts of folly fall, 
 Find thy body by the wall." 
 
 And last I cite you to the two noble examples that you 
 have had, in the persons of those honored and sturdy men 
 who, while your course on the good hill has been accomplish- 
 ing, have finished theirs on Earth, — Dr. Hopkins, Dr. Ter- 
 rett. Carry those twin memories as your go and never for- 
 get that they were your friends ! Separated but not sun- 
 dered, may every manly affection, pure ambition, generous 
 labor, that you have shared here, bless you in days to come. 
 And in that life of prayer which is a pledge and a prophecy, 
 may your friendships still be a unit — 
 
 " Bound with gold chains about the feet of God." 
 118 
 
PROBLEMS OF CHURCH AND COLLEGE 
 
 TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 21, 1903 
 Hold fast that which thou hast, that no man take thy crown. Revelation 3:11. 
 
 The source of this admonition, and the stimulations of its 
 great inducement, furnish room and breath within which 
 our present thought can move freely. Gladly I reckon that, 
 whatever our several orbits, we have, who are here, a com- 
 mon solar centre, and that American patriotism, mental 
 ardor, and that faith whose counterproof is unflinching fidel- 
 ity, include us all in their high compulsions. 
 
 I must be satisfied to condense and to suggest, italicising 
 some chief matters which urge a new fortitude toward the 
 exacting privilege of a time whose every pulsation is so stim- 
 ulated. I must be positive, yet assuming no infallibility. 
 For that, there are too many counter-popes here, yet hold- 
 ing all of them, I trust, a pontifical theory of indulgence, 
 and willing to shrive my errors. If you love the tides of 
 truth, you are assured that it is not for the closet alone but 
 for " free and open encounter," not merely for the armory, 
 but for the tented field and the battle's perilous edge. 
 
 I speak as to some of the primary present problems of the 
 College and the Church. The Church is " the blessed com- 
 pany of all faithful people." Not in our differences, which 
 all are secondary and provisional, but in the things in which 
 we agree, are we of the one Shepherd and the one flock. An 
 ebbing faith obtrudes the non-essentials; — flood- tide, where 
 the ships go free, buries these. It is not that this polity or 
 that argument may prevail; but that the masterful love of 
 the world's Messiah may subdue, inform, confirm, and so 
 bring in the only and immortal kingdom. 
 
 All stages of growth are new occasions of fidelity or of 
 default. They " teach new duties " and " make uncouth " 
 the comprehensions and measures which they displace. Our 
 
 119 
 
dislodgements test us whether we have rested upon unshak- 
 able reality or upon transient form. Winds and floods 
 emphasize the rock. Fire searches the " wood, hay and 
 stubble " of traditional interpretations. Loyalty stands 
 sure, and, tho with modern ordnance and smokeless powder, 
 it is still a convinced and expectant manhood that wins the 
 
 %ht. 
 
 Exigency always stimulates the brave. In a rapid and 
 anxious time the timid flutter and cower, the tumid bluster 
 — to no better purpose; but they who "know Whom they 
 have believed " front the new conditions with new courage. 
 
 New conditions there are. Each day the world compacts 
 and the inter-relation of mankind is more intense. Provi- 
 dence is now forcing our tardiness to realize the Orient, and 
 also sternly facing us toward complex and culminating 
 domestic questions. 
 
 Immigration by the annual half-million and more; Africa 
 within our doors, with the involved evasions of the Constitu- 
 tion in which the old barbarities reappear; the tireless mach- 
 inations within the wooden-horse of Mormonism; stolid 
 illiteracy; the organized tyrannies of greed and envy — 
 playing with fire; the overriding of equity both by capital 
 and craftsmanship; the evasion, the barter, the trampling 
 of law; the congestion of the city; the depraving of local 
 government; the rape of the ballot; the place-seeking of 
 scoundrels; the contempt of that only code which offers 
 tired man fifty-two holidays in the year, and there gives his 
 soul and God the right of way; the fungoid development of 
 oligarchy and pseudo-aristocracy; the sins of " pride, idle- 
 ness and fulness of bread," which sap the household and rob 
 the cradle; amid all, the epidemic of graft; — these are some 
 of the problems which throw deep shadows upon the moral 
 map of our country and our time. Over all these a sordid 
 materialism, whose final logic installs sense and sensuality 
 above spirit and conscience, and which curses this world by 
 ignoring another, broods portentous, and invokes the judg- 
 
 120 
 
ments of Him Whom it does " not like to retain in its 
 knowledge." 
 
 And the problem of a Church, not supine, is whether it 
 can hold its own ! No ! If it hesitates and halts, otiose 
 and senile. Yes ! If it sees and dares rise up, vibrant, to — 
 
 "Live pure, speak true, right wrong, — 
 Follow the King ! " 
 
 The dilemma is Zeitgeist or Heiliger Geist — the age-spirit 
 or the Lord's ! For soft seduction is worse than fierce 
 attack. Piety and patriotism alike urge a reminting of the 
 worn and debased coin-current of alleged Christianity, 
 invoke the purging of nominalism with fire and fan, demand 
 the bugle-call, " Who is on the Lord's side ? " exact Eli- 
 jah's alternative, " Follow Jehovah, or Baal ! " Not so 
 much do we need revision of creed, even with its trenchency 
 of simplification, as we need renewal of credit, of consent to 
 the standards of obedience. " Two masters " are one too 
 many! The attempt fails. Yes; "The time is come for 
 judgment to begin at the house of God." What the appar- 
 ent Church of today unconsciously invokes is an era of 
 persecution — the apologia of martyrdom ! For merely to 
 " hold one's own " is no martial ambition. Napoleon's 
 strategy taught well that "The army which stays in its 
 entrenchments is beaten." The defensive postpones defeat; 
 but only the offensive wins. So Sedan and Metz, so Tren- 
 ton and Yorktown, so Lookout and the Wilderness. The 
 enemy marches around our fixed artillery. He circumvents 
 us and takes us in flank. The wisdom of our war needs 
 the tactics of aggression. We must force the fighting. 
 
 Unable then to drift up stream, two things are demanded. 
 First, to see and say that the purpose and power of the Christ 
 covers all possible human relations, that His " mind " in- 
 cludes all these issues and is alone their solvent. His idea 
 of the " Church " is not an ark, but a life-boat ! It is a 
 life-saving service, or it is none. All lives, and all of each! 
 The universality of the Gospel is its singularity. It means 
 
 121 
 
everything if it means anything. To "exploit it selfishly 
 is to deny it utterly. It is not abstract. The appli- 
 cation of the non-partisan ethics of Christ to all that 
 affects the society of men is His exaction of our day. Under 
 her critical opportunity and probation, He yet forbears with 
 this headstrong America. If He is not practicable by us, 
 then either He is impossible or we are, and then one must 
 give up the other ! If we are to retain Him, the Church, 
 not fatuous, must with a prophet's voice declare that the 
 " law of Christ " makes illegitimate much that affects to be 
 legal, that our economics, our politics, our sociology, must 
 not only be ethicised but evangelized ! It must repent of 
 its isolations, its temporizing, its idolatries, and no longer 
 deaf and dumb and blindly cloistered, deserve and regain 
 the respect even while it dares the hate of the world ! 
 Ephatha! 
 
 Salvation is not in the passive voice. The " offense of the 
 cross " is not ceased. He who will not make it a bauble, 
 and will bear it to the place where Christ bore it, shall find 
 unexplored meanings in the Gospel ! Well indeed may the 
 frightened sailors of time cry to all fugitive and snoring 
 prophets, — " Awake, O sleepers, and call upon your God, 
 that we perish not ! " 
 
 The other thing is to go — out, if on. Outreach alone is 
 apostolical. Narrow individualism defeats itself in wasting 
 its virtues upon egotism. The Church must claim, and be 
 worthy to claim, far more. It must vindicate its appeal to be 
 the highest fulfilment of human longing for federation in God. 
 
 Clinkers in your house furnace are not fuel. They receive 
 fire but add nothing to it. They hinder, and they must be 
 cleansed out and a new fire built that will give heat. And 
 the Church is today such a furnace, clogged with red-hot 
 slate and burned- out slag. It must be dumped and re- 
 lighted ! Better Gideon's few than the bigger company of 
 those who won't fight, who take the oath and their rations 
 and take nothing else ! What is an army good for that is 
 
 122 
 
busy only to burnish its buttons, to improve its barracks, 
 and to sing ( at a stand-still ) " Onward, Christian Soldiers ! " 
 — never resisting unto blood ! 
 
 In many of our villages four or five feeble and sickly con- 
 gregations compete impotently, dividing the body of Christ 
 with their unimportant specialties and shivering over their 
 'isms' — a handful of coal in each separate stove ! Much 
 good home missionary money is wasted in maintaining this 
 unfruitful rivalry. In our cities the elite saints affect the 
 avenues, while the storm-centres of population are not really 
 attempted. In emphasizing incidentals, and in succumbing 
 to commercial and so-called social standards which Christ 
 spurned, the Church but loads the avalanche ! 
 
 Organized originally for direct human help, it crushes its 
 ministers with proxies, and substitutes services for service in 
 the cottage and the alley. It handles a crucifix rather than 
 practicing the cross, and is much sophisticated by the spec- 
 tacular fallacy of place and day and the opus operatum of 
 dignified make-believe. Always this moderatism resists the 
 Holy Ghost, the more touchy as it is the more self-satisfied. 
 And all the while whole areas of those for whom the Lord 
 bled are thinking, — " No man cares for my soul ! " In 
 the vestibules of many a theoretical sanctuary the Great 
 Mechanic waits wearily and shares with lonely hearts their 
 cup of pain. " I was a stranger and ye took Me not in ! " 
 
 Nor is this irony. I know there are true hearts, open 
 hands, swift feet: but oh, they are too few ! The Church 
 that willed and that went, that called nothing its own, that 
 knew the " fellowship of suffering," that was fed to the lions, 
 was the Church that once " shook all the mighty world." 
 " Stir up Thy strength, O God, and come and save us " — 
 from ourselves ! Upon the verge of religious bankruptcy, 
 the boundless help of the actual Christ calls us to a deeper 
 vital movement of conscience than ever yet stirred our land. 
 
 To retranslate Him in a f modern Pentecost, to reincarnate 
 His love right where men are striving and grieving, to wit- 
 
 123 
 
ness brotherhood, to wear the red cross, this is the only 
 mission, and obedience under it the only problem, of the 
 Church. For this alone it was founded and exists. Solve 
 this, not by discussion but by direct action, and all is solved. 
 The out-of-door Christ, the people's Redeemer, would open 
 to such a Church the windows of Heaven and break to it 
 the bread of angels ! The Church that suffers is the Church 
 that reigns. 
 
 Go forth to the unbidden. By your humanity prove 
 again His divinity and mastery, and society would upheave 
 in response. Yes, the comfortable and complacent who now 
 forsake us because they do not believe that we believe what 
 we say, who see no moral difference between us and them, 
 would crowd our doors, aware at last of their poverty and 
 their calling, and seeking the way of the simple and abun- 
 dant life ! Such a movement cannot work from the top 
 down, nor from the outside in. In so far as the Church 
 makes religion but a phylactery and evades the intense prac- 
 ticality of Christ, the world laughs. That the laughter is 
 hysterical but makes it the more piteous. A crisis ! Christ 
 will have all or nothing. Yes, or No ! Of a truth it is a 
 day to rebuild the altar, and with a mighty cry to God, to 
 lay ourselves thereon. 
 
 The problem of the College, as it concerns that of the 
 Church, is what remains. Nor is the modulation abrupt. 
 The Church must make its reasonable appeal to and by 
 prepared men. Not merely for its ministry, but for what 
 Pope Leo has well called the " apostolate of the laity, " 
 education is an essential demand of its strength. Histori- 
 cally there is a profound interdependence between the 
 American College and the American Church. John Har- 
 vard and the founders of Yale, Tennant and Wheelock and 
 Kirkland and Wayland and Finney and Hopkins — these 
 were men whose idea was elementally Christian. They 
 loved the Lord God " with all their mind." The moral 
 
 124 
 
and vital relation of College and Church I hold to be larger 
 and fuller than direct ecclesiastical control ; but by indirect 
 I do not mean remote, I mean informal. Reciprocity and 
 affinity are ample, and they are indispensable. The College 
 idea and ideal has been thoroly Christian, and so may it 
 ever be. Were the College to deny the Great Teacher 
 it would be to bite the Hand that has fed it and led it. 
 Under the generosity of the Evangel the College purports 
 the general distribution, not as opposed to, but as distin- 
 guished from, the local condensation of higher education. 
 Between the scope and methods of the University and the 
 College there should be no hostility, but there should be 
 a precise discrimination. Each is needful and distinct. 
 Neither should envy nor vaunt. 
 
 Advanced investigation is necessary, and excellent are the 
 foundations that foster this. Toward this the adapted Col- 
 lege graduate may well be prompted. But there should be 
 no composition nor confusion 01 the two disciplines. By 
 whatever indirection, to seek to foreshorten the more 
 generic work of the College proper, to despise that anneal- 
 ing of personality in which the time element is so import- 
 ant, to urge immaturity upon technical research, is short- 
 sighted and raw, and it panders to a haste which depreciates 
 the quality of both schools. To truncate the College 
 course, to sacrifice process to speed, that half-ripe persons 
 may be rushed upon the market, to base the doctorate upon 
 the tasks which belong to the bachelorate, or to elide these, 
 is to shear away strength. The bland device ravels. It 
 plays Procrustes. 
 
 For one College, just a College and distinctively such, I 
 speak — one that, however others may denude and disinte- 
 grate themselves, will (I trust and believe) remain faithful to 
 the idea of those solid beginnings from which all later 
 edifices of special skill shall better build. Radically conser- 
 vative of this, if it shall be singular, singular it will cheer- 
 fully be, undiverted from making mental character the foot- 
 
 125 
 
ing-course of mastership. It will not scramble to follow the 
 bellwethers of novelty into the bog of miscellaneousness ! 
 
 For mental training, decried only by sciolists, is primary. 
 Language, logic, literature, life — are its quadrivium. The 
 broad horizon of these nurtures the true synthetic spirit 
 which grasps final meanings — which compresses the tire 
 upon the wheel. To study what man is, which is psychol- 
 ogy; what proof is, which is mathematics and logic; what 
 man has done, which is history and law; his instruments, 
 which are the languages; what he has said best, which is 
 literature; his environments, which are the materials of the 
 five laboratories; what he is for, which is patriotism, ethics, 
 religion, — all these sciences unite in that humanistic and 
 liberal education for which it has stood, and for which this 
 College, at least, will stand. 
 
 This definite concentration, not upon abstract subjects 
 but upon the subjective man, realizes him, and compacts his 
 personality at every step. 
 
 Seeking inspiration as well as instruction, it is concerned 
 with the influential quality of its teachers as well as with 
 the quantities of their knowledge — the impartation of broad 
 comprehension and commanding motive; for true education 
 is the influence of life upon life. The genuine College is 
 bent to discover, to awaken, to excite noble emulation; to 
 make for sanity of mind and body; to teach the soul to 
 swim; to rub men close, as life will rub them; to promote an 
 accuracy and promptitude that is not pedantry, and a vision 
 that is not dreaming; to develop intellectual poise and reach, 
 along with cogency of expression and oral leadership; not 
 to lose the unit in the mass, to stimulate a common moral 
 sentiment, which shall shame the dullard, the superficial, the 
 unsocial, and repudiate the snobbish, the profligate and the 
 false. And the College which does this can never be small 
 to the eyes that look for quality rather than noisy bulk. 
 
 All this lifts youth toward manhood, in its most plastic 
 and formative years. Unto this an eager College gathers 
 
 126 
 
local material that else would largely go ungathered, aids it 
 to seek and to find itself, and impregnates it with an ardor 
 at once human and public. 
 
 Unconditionally and boldly be it said, that the historical 
 and natural scope of the College recognizes that this is God's 
 Earth, that the furniture of the world is not all of it, and 
 that man is God's, to guide and to complete. Nothing at 
 last is merely secular. Every fact and act is moral and may 
 be holy. The song and romance of College days is to be 
 sanctified by that which, while it impels toward nobility and 
 quenches passion, leads up to the motives of a service which 
 is a worship, and which constrains and satisfies the inmost 
 heart. Buckle ( and he has had a sinister school of imita- 
 tors ) heaped many heterogeneous and partial instances 
 about the two propositions; first, that nations are the 
 creatures of circumstances, and next, that the only progress 
 is the intellectual. Let Athens, Alexandria, Constantinople, 
 answer him, in their age-long crouching under the dirty foot 
 of the Turk ! No ! Character makes men and nations, 
 and its salvations are more than knowledge. Character is 
 reason schooled to think hard and straight into the ultimate 
 constructive standards of duty, and obediently to choose 
 them with all their enduring implications. 
 
 The truths of religion are to be taught, and the potency 
 of those scriptures which focus upon the one complete Man. 
 Then let the College speak of right, and keep wide open that 
 Book without which, well-pondered, none can be thoro in the 
 world's history and significance, or be rooted and grounded 
 in the real life. Out of its intensative scrutiny shall come 
 a larger interpretation of the stages by which, on from Ur 
 to Egypt, all leads up to the central and enduring Christ. 
 
 Our challenge is that here lies the secret of Time — its 
 sore travail and its shining goal. Only the human is the 
 good; but only the divine is the human. All other theory 
 is neither beautiful nor rational. The age that forgets this 
 is a self-confused and wandering age. The age that denies 
 
 127 
 
it is intellectually bastard and blighted. Not in the terms 
 of ecclesiasticism, but in those of undefiled relation to the 
 spotless and ever-outgoing Vitalizer of Time, not as the 
 scribes but as the disciples, let our educations be drenched, 
 saturated, fulfilled, exalted, with essential, practical Chris- 
 tianity ! To the College which maintains that " the fear of 
 the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," the Church, the peo- 
 ple, must look for the cadets of truth and devotedness. 
 The one problem of the College is to hold fast her integrity 
 to the supreme Teacher of Men. But this also is the one 
 problem of the Church. Both problems are at last one. 
 
 Men of the Class of 1903: 
 
 The history, the horizon, the hopes of this Hamilton of 
 ours are dear to us together. You have grown here in that 
 loyalty to fine and firm things which is not a mere impres- 
 sionist mood, but which is of the will and the heart. Never 
 fear but that this loyalty will always find the work it is fit 
 for. You have been taught that curiosity and tenacity are 
 completed in reverence. You have been taught to honor 
 Him Who is the true Author and Finisher of knowledge. 
 Stupidity is ungodly and ungodliness is stupid. If the fear- 
 less and magnanimous love of truth as the guide of duty is 
 to live in you, your ideals must be spiritual not mechanical. 
 Fight your battles hard and fight them in the fear of God. 
 Remember that " a just man falls seven times, and riseth 
 again." A right heart never can say Die. To your College 
 that is, and that is to be, I pledge your hearts. The ark is 
 coming home, and as the men of Beth-Shemesh, reaping in 
 the valley, lifted up their eyes and rejoiced, so all of us say 
 Praise and Amen ! By your manhood and its influence you 
 are to honor this old Hill of ours. Always may the voice 
 live in your souls that has been our word today, — " Hold 
 fast that ye have, that no man take your crown ! " Con- 
 quest now, and in God's time the coronation. Athletes of a 
 mightier field-day, — Hail to you all ! 
 
 128 
 
THE GLORIFICATION OF SERVICE 
 
 TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 26, 1904 
 I magnify my office. Romans 11 : 13. 
 
 The Revision reads,— " I glorify my minis try." The 
 word is really the word " diaconate," or " deaconship." 
 " Deacon," in Greek, is the title of a voluntary servant, 
 as distinguished from doulos — a bondservant. One offers, 
 the other is compelled. A deacon is a willing servant. 
 
 Transferring the very word, we should reread some f amil 
 iar phrases after this sort ; — 
 
 " He that is greatest among you let him be your deacon." 
 
 " I am among you as the deacon." 
 
 " Made us able deacons of the New Testament." 
 
 " Fill full thy diaconate." 
 
 " Satan's deacons fashion themselves as deacons of right- 
 eousness." 
 
 " Deaconing of the strength which God supplieth." 
 
 The service makes the office. Too much we think of 
 office as place and position; Paul stated it as work. We 
 describe it as a tenure, he declared it as a task; not some- 
 thing to inhabit but something to do; not a thing snug, easy, 
 well-paid, but an exacting opportunity. Officialism puts 
 the officer forward, magnifies itself: service puts forward the 
 offices, the duties, for which alone the office exists. In the 
 parable of Christ, " Occupy till I come " does not refer to 
 tenancy but to activity. Be busy with the charge, keep 
 the capital moving, use it. 
 
 So then here is the generic principle of fidelity, which ever 
 is concerned not to exhibit a title but to fulfil a trust. 
 
 When Paul thus stated his purpose and interpreted his 
 commission, he spoke sincerely. He was not bragging. 
 Services were his credentials as a man " sent forth." His 
 errand is his end, all that he is or has is but a means toward 
 
 189 
 
that. So he claims nothing for himself, everything for his 
 message. Dress parade, canonical fuss, formal precedency 
 — he scouts them. Weapons not epaulettes, fulcrum not 
 pedestal. His terrible zeal makes any ecclesiastical martinet 
 preposterous. Pomposity and punctiliousness are the refuge 
 of small men, who when their station is too large for them 
 stiffen their littleness with starch and mannerisms. 
 
 Paul's harness could dispense with trappings, seeing that 
 it was for draught, not show. Garbed as the ordinary man, 
 not tricked out in special attire and vestment, quick-handed, 
 ready to rough it, familiar with long hours and short 
 rations, intimate with danger and deprivation, inured to the 
 rod and the mob, without salary or vacation and supporting 
 himself with his tent-needle, in prison and in pain uttering 
 one devoted testimony, alert, daring, incorrigible, thrust 
 aloft like a rocket by his own fiery heart — here once for all 
 was a man I Calling himself the least worthy, from Damas- 
 cus to Spain, on two continents and in three languages, he 
 gave the word "Apostle" its undying glory. 
 
 "If your sword (said the Spartan mother) is too short, 
 step closer to your enemy," and oh how swiftly this eager 
 soul hastened to close quarters, how rapidly with every man 
 he made Christ the theme and the issue ! How surely he 
 did his errand. What havoc would that stout blade make 
 now of our trivial and tinsel distinctions, social and philo- 
 sophical. With what compulsions of nobility this leader of 
 leaders packed with results the one life God gave him to 
 live ! Service was his business; not warbling himself to 
 death upon a pink cloud, but handling the troubles and dan- 
 gers of every soul he could get at, meeting the epidemic of 
 the world, penurious of not one resource so as to get the 
 thing done ! 
 
 Thus he was an example that every man is to be a dea- 
 con, called to ministry, ordained to labor, that God's will 
 may be done on Earth. Capacity to serve, diligence to 
 serve, this is the only earldom. Labor is life. A true 
 
 130 
 
Church, a true society, is a peerage of servants. Office is 
 to be an active, not a passive, noun. A deacon is a doer. 
 To consent to be described by " cloth " is to submit to a 
 bitter epithet. Intense usefulness is the only honorary de- 
 gree; all else may but veil nakedness under ornamental rags. 
 Only servants are saints. Deacons all ! 
 
 Now the glorification of service lies in not seeking great 
 things for self. That is an undersized ambition. Like the 
 owl it has more feathers than flesh, and its beak is better 
 than its vision. Like the peacock, its plumage is a poor 
 apology for its voice. It is the little bird that does the sing- 
 ing, — the lark, the thrush. Officiousness is not effective- 
 ness. Love is what thrills and inspires, and " love seeketh 
 not its own." If the place is greater than the man, he will 
 rattle in it. He advertises the misfit. For bulk, men may 
 stand as much alike as barrels, but the empty ones sound 
 loudest. Better be a full keg than an empty hogshead ! 
 The full ships ride deep. " The shallow murmur." 
 
 It is true that every place shrinks or stretches to fit its 
 occupant. A man of moral size has a displacement that 
 crowds back the world. A compressed purpose has a " spe- 
 cific gravity " all its own. Every person has an opportunity 
 to read himself into his calling, to create his part. Sothern 
 took a subordinate personation and made Lord Dundreary 
 the main thing. It is the will to push the work that digni- 
 fies and adorns any station. There are two or three best 
 razors in every dozen, tho stamped by the same maker. 
 The difference is not in material, but temper. In a man, 
 temper is choice — the will. 
 
 Many a young man (it is an undergraduate notion) thinks 
 there is no room for him, that all the good places are pre- 
 empted. It is not true, except to the flabby. The world, 
 like Diogenes, is always looking for the man. The right 
 men are always scarce. For those who glorify service there 
 is a demand far beyond the supply. How scarce, for in- 
 stance, is the strong candidate in politics ! Unavailabilities 
 
 131 
 
there are in plenty. The machinery of affairs waits for the 
 power. Will is electricity — it moves all wheels. The 
 handle awaits the hand. The purpose to do the thing un- 
 derlies ultimate mastery, and this is the wisdom that is will- 
 ing to postpone its rights rather than its duties, and to keep 
 its bills even if it loses its receipts. One maximizes service 
 by minimizing self, finds life by losing it, the paradox of all 
 loftiest manhood. One can have the praises he seeks — 
 men's or God's : but the lower recompense may be the price 
 of the higher, and the approval that ripens last is worth the 
 waiting. It is a vice of our impatient time that so many 
 wish to begin at the top and not at the bottom. They seek 
 to get rather than to give. The unrest in artisanship is but 
 one symptom and instance. Men are trying to evade ap- 
 prenticeship, the steady, disciplining details of preparation. 
 But it was by declining Saul's armor that David showed 
 himself one who would at last come to be able to wield 
 Goliath's sword. 
 
 It is not the carved scroll that is the secret of the old 
 Stradivarius : but the delicate and sure adjustment of the 
 simple inner posts and props. And his cunning who makes 
 the violin alive, is the perfect work of patience and pains. 
 To offer what will merely pass confesses mediocrity. The 
 best men are those who exact of themselves the best work, 
 not that which will barely " do ". Results reward that ser- 
 vice which counts nothing unimportant, and which reckons 
 every day as good as any that ever was or will be. To bor- 
 row from our betters, to follow the greatest, we must per- 
 ceive that what they most valued was serviceability, not 
 show. And this purpose held fast 
 
 " Shall find the toppling crags of duty, scaled, 
 Are close upon the shining table-lands 
 To which our God Himself is Moon and Sun.'* 
 
 A man in Western New York realized the demand for a 
 first-class hammer. He studied the tool, and with no 
 patent, by sheer excellence conquered the market. " How 
 
 132 
 
long ( one asked him ) have you been making hammers ? " 
 " Twenty-eight years." " Well, by this time you must 
 know how to make a pretty good one." He answered, " I 
 never made a pretty good hammer, I make the best ham- 
 mers in the United States." 
 
 " I remember ( said a wealthy snob to a young lawyer 
 who was steadily climbing ) when you used to black my 
 father's boots." " Didn't I do it well ? " was the reply. 
 
 Yes, the servant is the master. The lowlier the fidelity, 
 the loftier the life. There is no bargain-counter, no ten- 
 cent store, where character can be cheapened. Not by 
 memorizing aphorisms about success, but by cheerfully 
 serving God, day in and week out, do we touch the apos- 
 tolic life. The nearest thing done in the truest way is that 
 which angels, and even devils too, respect, and what God 
 will own. This concentration is what finds its aim, while 
 mere sporadic mood scatters like an old bell-mouthed gun, 
 more honored in the breech than in the muzzle. 
 
 As a race-horse responds to a skilful driver, and as a 
 thorobred dog loves to point for a hunter who kills with 
 either barrel, so men are glad to give " the tools to the man 
 who can use them." 
 
 It is a story forty years old — how when the flank was 
 turned at Cedar Creek and all was panic and disaster, there 
 came down the turnpike like a cloud's shadow, rowelling, 
 riding, flying, a resistless will ! " The other way, boys ! 
 Face the other way ! We're going back." The rout was a 
 rally, the rabble a charging front, — " Sheridan ! Sheridan !" 
 — and Jubal Early went the way he came. Such a leader 
 one man can be. Almighty God wants such to stem the 
 flood, to reform the broken lines, to face the discouraged 
 " the other way," by the impact of a determination about 
 whose strength ten thousand men gather to the renewed 
 
 %ht. 
 
 When the Wesleys confronted the Deism of the eighteenth 
 century with the Gospel, it shook and died, and the leaden 
 
 133 
 
age breathed life again. Never was there a really great 
 movement or achievement on this Earth into which some 
 one had not put his total capital. 
 
 Men of the Class of 1904 : 
 
 I speak to you as to those of whom I am persuaded 
 things that accompany a manhood at once devoted and 
 reverent. 
 
 The moral obligations of college men to make their train- 
 ing efficient in " the stream of life " cannot compel you too 
 sternly, nor invite you too ardently. It is a gallant thing to 
 live hard and strong. A man whose ambition is dedicated 
 to his God will shirk no demand, nor reckon less than noble 
 any of the penalties of high leadership. " Go in anywhere, 
 ( said a general to one of his colonels ) — you'll find lovely 
 fighting along the whole line ' ' ! By and by we will hang 
 your swords somewhere on the walls of our templed Hill up 
 there. We grudge you no sacrifice, we spare you not one 
 pain, we give you now to God, to time, to your country, to 
 men, and only pray that you may pay the full price of 
 immortality without misgiving or any backward look. 
 
 Let the thought that rules these verses of our own Clinton 
 Scollard sing for us all; — 
 
 " Tears for the weaklings ! but for those who fought 
 And perished nobly, upon land or wave, 
 No lamentation, no dark draperies brought, 
 No sad songs for the brave ! 
 
 "But rather jubilation — peal on peal 
 
 Of joy-bells, — Hope's white lilies 'neath the Sun, — 
 Because they died with sacrificial zeal, 
 Their patriot duty done ! " 
 
 You go forth from a College radically conservative to 
 educate men, " practical " to develop spirit, to stimulate the 
 whole mind and manhood, striving not to issue a product 
 smitten with the intellectual mumps of the partialist, or 
 addicted to the exploitation of vagaries. Respect the hall- 
 
 134 
 
mark by never resting upon it. It is a permission and a 
 commission to rouse and spur you. Let your memories be 
 a tonic, not a sedative. Law, politics, science, art, letters, 
 the chair of the teacher or editor, that pulpit which Spur- 
 geon called " the Thermopylae of Christendom," — all these 
 are opportunity for you to make a brilliant and benign 
 record or a ghastly failure. God calls every man of you 
 into the ministry — to serving. " Take heed ( O Archippus ) 
 to the ministry which thou hast received in the Lord, that 
 thou fulfil it." Glorify your diaconates with a vow and a 
 vigor that shall never know the futilities and the fatigues of 
 self-idolatry ! Follow that flag whose field, white as the 
 light is, bears a crimson cross ! Pledge yourselves to the 
 utmost that God and men can get out of you. Crowd your 
 place, whatever it may be, with personality. Empty your- 
 self into your task as the founder pours the molten metal 
 into every crevice of the mold. Seek always an issue with 
 right in it and fight the Devil with fire. Make every wrong 
 your quarrel. Say your word boldly, do your deed bravely, 
 then, " Good and faithful servants,— ENTER " ! 
 
 135 
 
DEMOCRACY AND CHRISTIANITY 
 
 TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, JUNE 25, 1905 
 
 As free, and not using your freedom for a cloke of wickedness. 1 Peter 2: 16. 
 
 Real freedom, rightly used. 
 
 Before Rome was, or Greece, Moses outlined and at- 
 tempted a system of government by and for the people. It 
 laid great stress upon the personal partnership of each man, 
 It was, on its human side, elementally republican. The 
 initiative lay with the responsible units. Their coordina- 
 tion was to be affirmed thro chosen and answerable repre- 
 sentatives. It based upon the two unchanging human re- 
 quirements — individuality and federation. Thus Israel was 
 to be the " prevailer ". But the idea has prevailed, and will, 
 tho Israel lapsed from it. Moses survives. He was the 
 prophet of a social inspiration which slowly dawns upon the 
 modern world. It is not even yet ripe: but it is ripening. 
 The Old Testament is not antiquated; it is the people's 
 book, the primer of freedom. To that tribunal the fiery 
 Hebrew prophets, who thundered the divine demand for 
 righteous law, for liberty, for equal rights, cited their genera- 
 tions and subpoenaed monarch and priest. 
 
 For Israel had swerved from its popular prerogative and 
 taken up with a borrowed subserviency. When they de- 
 manded a king their political decay had begun. Samuel an- 
 nointed Saul under a solemn protest that royalty would be 
 the disappointment it proved. The acclaim was a confessio 
 paupertatis. Bulk them, and Israel's kings were, and all 
 kings have been, a sorry lot. History also " poureth con- 
 tempt upon princes." Their alleged " divine right " has 
 been a grotesque. 
 
 Seeking the deepest estimate of man and his associate 
 life, distinguishing makeshift means from primary ends, 
 essential humanity from its temporary furniture and uten- 
 136 
 
sils, let us measure those two mighty and mutual words which 
 spell the whole hope of mankind — Democracy, Christianity. 
 
 I shall today draw heavily upon your patience, but even 
 so the time-limit permits only the broadaxe and adze. I can 
 only hew it rough and rapidly. Anyone is welcome to the 
 chips: but if you cannot refute you must not refuse. 
 
 Mankind is man kinned — brothered. Paul's phrase, 
 " the whole Fatherdom," affirms an integral race, of one 
 origin, anatomy, concern, probation — " one far-off divine 
 event." " One spirit, one body " is the full precept of that 
 New Testament which daringly contemplates and deter- 
 minedly intends the rearrangement of the world. Under 
 and unto God the Gospel instinctively, unswervingly, pur- 
 poses this infrangible unity of man. It is the one alterna- 
 tive opposing all present sedition and secession. Either 
 solidarity, cohesion, making way steadily, by steps however 
 slow, over the stupidities of selfishness; or at last a sterile 
 race and a shattered star ! It opposes congregation to 
 segregation. Its specialty is not parts: but the whole. Its 
 goal is mankind. 
 
 And the world process is toward the full realization of 
 human homogeneity. Time is pedagogic of this. History is 
 the record of this schooling. The evolution is racial, and 
 forces us to study geography and ethnology anew — to think 
 internationally. Artificial demarcations are proving imprac- 
 ticable. The static gives way to the dynamic. Economics 
 has to be concerned with the whole Earth's housekeeping, 
 and politics and diplomacy are finding themselves defeated 
 by mere provincialism. Philanthropy, in its deepest sense, 
 whether as equity or as religion, is revealing as the bond 
 that transcends date and region. Yes, it is " an increasing 
 purpose." Sociology is ethics. Society is man capitalized, 
 and " the life of each individual represents a social value." 
 
 Whatever else was provoked out of him, Thomas Paine, 
 when he wrote the " Rights of Man," was an irrefutable 
 prophet. Fundamentally that document is true. Its 
 
 137 
 
audacity angered all Tories: but in spite of reactionaries and 
 the recrudescence of the worship of mere force, the Tory is 
 obsolescent. The air of freedom was in Paine's book, and 
 time has justified it. The bold experiment of 1789 in Amer- 
 ica has legitimated man and refuted the doctrine of his 
 perpetual nonage. 
 
 Constructed for and environed by his fellows, man finds 
 association inevitable. Ways and means are but by-laws, 
 tentative, provisional, to be amended, to be abandoned; 
 association remains. And the definition and practical order- 
 ing of man's relation and commonweal, by whatever devices, 
 wiser or worse — this is government. 
 
 However they have stuttered or fumbled, all its experi- 
 ments have somehow sought for fair and fruitful terms under 
 which men might live together. Tho the deed has often 
 denied the tradition, well-being has been the end claimed — 
 the general good. 
 
 That government must be the best which seeks and pro- 
 motes the utmost welfare of all its people, holding equity as 
 its supreme law. As a means to any other end it is stulti- 
 fied and condemned. The seat of authority in the State 
 rests on right: but right is equity and never aught else, and 
 equity is service. For human service, and for this only, 
 government is a trustee. 
 
 Noting some of the main forms with which men have ex- 
 perimented, or been experimented, name first that of which 
 tribalism was a rudiment ( exploited at last by its strongest 
 man ), Autocracy. It is the rule of one, centering all in him- 
 self, — L'etat c'est moi, — absolutism. Sometimes it is me- 
 diately bureaucratic, as Turkey and Russia are; but at last 
 it wields the despotism which is misanthropy, the throne for 
 its own sake, the individuality of the many suppressed, what 
 is lavished upon the man depriving the people. Man, if he 
 thinks ( and shall he not think ! ) ferments and rages under 
 this frustration. Therefore is Russia today like a burning 
 mine — like a fuse whose fire eats steadily to the blast ! 
 
 138 
 
" One red star ! " Apologists for the regime tell us that the 
 non-ruling classes of Russia are " unfit to rule." But are the 
 ruling classes fit ? Is any fit who is willing or prefers that 
 any should remain unfit ? When the sleeper wakes, when 
 the unfit come to their own, wo to those who have unfitted 
 them ! When the ice of this great Neva loosens, when the 
 real Russia finds itself, then alas for those who have built in 
 denial of the summer ! Who is there, save the attorneys of 
 oppression, to bewail the dawn ? 
 
 " If freedom be not a word that dies when spoken, 
 If justice be not a dream whence men must wake, 
 How shall not the bonds of the thralldom of old be broken, 
 And right put might in the hands of them that break ?" 
 
 Next, Monarchy — a term of varied limits, and compris- 
 ing little or much responsibility. Sometimes all the real 
 control is with those who fondly retain the terminology of 
 subjection as an ornamental anachronism, and are willing to 
 pay the bills ! But think what things have come to pass 
 between the frank brutality of Henry the Eighth and the 
 obedient suavity of Edward the Seventh ! The people have 
 learned that it is their England. The Tudors and the 
 Stuarts are gone. Great Britain ( as Andrew D. White has 
 recently remarked ) "is simply a republic with a monarchi- 
 cal head lingering along on good behavior." 
 
 Plutocracy — the rule of wealth — the power of money- 
 holders as such. It is not formally proclaimed, but it is 
 strong and subtle to subvert men. Its silent arithmetic 
 does not indeed necessitate, but makes possible, oppressions 
 not less actual because insidious. Its " community of inter- 
 est," widely diverse from the interests of the community, 
 has ere now ruined great states. It instinctively resents the 
 mandate and mandamus of the people. Mammon, with 
 cowardly stealth, supplants that commonweal which is so 
 much more than wealth. Favoritism is its market. It 
 translates man as a commodity and has sway by indirect 
 bribery. Blind Plutus ! 
 
 139 
 
Oligarchy. It is " the few" in power, whether a clique, a 
 bureau, a machine, or a ring. It saps the general strength 
 and despoils representation of reality. Its odium is its as- 
 sumption and its irresponsibility. Its inner wheels, its coali- 
 tions and coteries, befool the ballot, and by its supple trick- 
 eries the peerage of freemen is undermined. Officialdom is 
 one of its forms. Slates, stolen primaries, and the star- 
 chamber deals of state committees are some of its familiar 
 features. 
 
 Aristocracy then, — a fair term, "the rule by the best"; but 
 practically it means the self-elect at their own appraisal — 
 a close corporation of opportunists. Or it illustrates " the 
 fine irony of an entailed nobility." The taint of heraldry and 
 the attainder of mere hereditary privilege is superciliousness 
 and snobbery and the dry rot of these, the insolence of class 
 prerogative and the inhuman proscriptions of caste. " The 
 best," by all means: but not the self-styled such, nursing 
 their cheap exclusiveness and affecting to be the chauffeurs 
 of the world. The day of the House of Lords is passing in 
 those lands where parliamentary law has become the register 
 of the people's liberty. The Electoral College is of this 
 piece, an antiquated absurdity, tolerated, but sure to break 
 into flying dust under any strain of honest application. Our 
 method of incubating United States senators is another illus- 
 tration of this bad leverage, making them the creatures of a 
 camarilla. It will some day be reformed in the interests of 
 responsibility. 
 
 As to Anarchy. It is a contradiction in terms. Its ideas 
 cancel. Putting caprice for reason, it denies law, which is 
 the organ of liberty, for the sake of that license which is 
 liberty's parody and defeat. Its " red laughter " is madness. 
 It is the " cloke of wickedness " and would crush freedom 
 under the absolutism of the mob. It is the anti-gospel of 
 " Every man for himself ! " In the name of " the law of 
 liberty " organized mankind smites this adder. For freedom 
 is not the absence of restraint: it is the absence of false re- 
 
 140 
 
s train t. All violence jeopards equal social justice. But re- 
 member that to deny that any man is a part is to incite him 
 to forget that he is only a part. Suppression begets explo- 
 sion. Men unvindicated are the material for men vindic- 
 tive. If a system breeds nightmares it will breed their 
 riders ! 
 
 As to Theocracy; it is actual while God lives, else all hopes 
 for the creature are " built on stubble." The ethics of col- 
 lective humanity derive at last from Him only. Its reach 
 does not alter the rule. All politics is either applied ethics 
 or it is shorn of rationality; but ethics is concerned with 
 universal relation. The right divine is never delegated to 
 any vicegerent. It is fulfilled in the common consent of free 
 consciences, and is plagiarized by kingcraft or priestcraft. 
 
 At last, Democracy, the people's self-government, a gen- 
 eral trusteeship of sovereignity. All personality dignified by 
 that accountable share, with all its sanctions, which He 
 intended who is its source and its strength. " Legitimate 
 governments ( says President Hadley ) are administered in 
 the interests of the whole body politic." See the ultimate 
 implications of this; for the prime interest of each several 
 man is to realize and to exercise the fullest rational free- 
 dom, to be a mechanic of the nation, not a mechanism, — to 
 move toward that corporate activity where none is lord, 
 none underling, to " walk at liberty " within that law of 
 which he is a part. 
 
 Democracy may be an abused term for the tyranny of 
 multitudes, a mass deflected by passion and by demagogs 
 who pander to it, flattering while they defile : but then the 
 self-control of the people is by its means thwarted of its 
 ends, and the true equation is lost. For the ideal rests upon 
 the diffusion of that conscience which is fulfilled in " work- 
 ing no ill to its neighbor," and which resents for him and 
 for itself the two tyrannies of constriction and of excess. 
 But mark that the cure for the perversion from the ideal is 
 not less democracy, but better. 
 
 141 
 
I maintain that Christianity is radically inter-human, that 
 it is no respecter of appearance, that its elemental program 
 is to shake every middle wall of partition, that it knocks in 
 God's name at every closed door, that it necessarily implies 
 Democracy. As strenuously, I maintain that its precepts 
 are the only foundation upon which Democracy has logically 
 developed, or upon which it can thrive and endure. 
 
 For implicitly the Son of Man rests His case upon the 
 right valuation of men. He and none other has exalted the 
 peoples into freedom, His autonomy secures theirs. His 
 theorem, if demonstrated, makes the unconstrained and 
 abundant life its corrolary. " Free grace " announces the 
 " square deal " and bids every man stand up and be counted. 
 It was the " good news " that God's love leaves no one out, 
 that a total mankind has " eminent domain " as against all 
 " adverse possession." And Democracy, for and by the peo- 
 ple, admits no pre-emption of authority. It emancipates 
 into the right to seek the best, while it enjoins the duty to 
 offer the most. Privilege and obligation interpret each the 
 other. Thus in a republic the delegated agents of the peo- 
 ple are " public servants " — stewards, accountable to the 
 authority which commissions them. In any other term they 
 are defaulters and forfeit their credentials. Democracy and 
 Christianity, the human expression and the divine inspira- 
 tion, make up together the final experiment of time. To- 
 gether they fare or fail; but if these fail all fails ! The 
 bankruptcy of one involves the other. Unless men can learn 
 to reason deeply, both as to the basis and the scope of rights 
 
 — then cataclysm. Law and love — " one and inseparable " 
 
 — or the deluge! "Liberty and union" mean all that 
 Webster meant, and mean far more. The whole probation 
 of mankind is as to whether he will seek that true common- 
 wealth of souls which banishes all false claims : but this is 
 Democracy ! Of such a new society the Gospel of Christ is 
 the plan and specification, and to conquer this ideal into 
 actuality is the one task and travail of this Earth. We are 
 
 142 
 
shut up to it. Nothing else is left to try; and so, to doubt, 
 to flinch, to surrender, is to desert the cause of both God 
 and Man ! 
 
 There are, I am aware, some sickly and sentimental dis- 
 senters from the genius and goal of the peoples' calling, 
 whispering or whining their rejection of the substantive 
 claim of man as man. This disregard for the many, this 
 reluctancy from the burden of the problem, is ordinarily 
 traceable ( when not merely academic ) to an absentee spirit 
 which assumes to distrust what love of ease dislikes. It 
 never preaches a full-width righteousness. Its complacent 
 apathy would postpone everything for the sake of the status 
 quo. Affecting a silken piety, it forgets that all modern 
 
 Erophets — the Luthers, Wesleys, yes, the Tolstois, have 
 een, in effect, great champions of the submerged and for- 
 gotten, uplifting aspiration in the hopeless, seeking that 
 which is lost, and restoring that cardinal proof of the Mes- 
 siah, " the poor have the Gospel.' ' These superficial invesr 
 tors in the present as it is, will take no stock in the future as 
 it should be. Like Lot's wife, they interpret the majo 
 considerations of life by the minor. For them, too, " the 
 offense of the cross is not ceased." But in the face of an 
 awakening world they are as imbecile as they are futile. 
 
 But also there are such as applaud democracy without 
 perceiving either its exactions or its guarantees. Let none 
 praise democracy as an end in itself, and ignore the obliga- 
 tions attending its permissions. It is justified not in its 
 apparatus but in its purpose; not in its negative protest 
 but in its constructiveness; in that steadfastly regulated 
 equity which distributes the burden as well as the benefit. 
 Consideration for all others, as bound with them " in the 
 bundle of life," is its basilar strength: but this is also " the 
 law of Christ." The more powerful it is, the more does it 
 require the delicate control which only that supreme love 
 can furnish which " seeketh not its own." Either altruism 
 or absolutism; for there is no logical half-way. 
 
 143 
 
Can man learn that reciprocity which lifts all around ? 
 Can he realize that every personality has a birthright, that 
 civil and religious freedom are two sides of but one thing, 
 that low forms of society and low conceptions of God go 
 together ? If not, — if anything but a cluster of preferred 
 creditors offsetting a bulk of subservients is a fond dream; 
 if the Nazarene was an impracticable enthusiast, emotional 
 rather than rational; if great populations are to be ruled 
 from without rather than from within; if the martial is 
 better than the domestic and the industrial, — then all falls 
 back into the arms of mere force; then half-developed 
 peoples instead of being taught self-direction are to be the 
 prey of robber strength; then " the gospel of blood and 
 iron" is to prevail; then the idea of the old Roman empire 
 is to re-conquer the Galilean ! This is the dilemma: right- 
 eousness or cunning power; Nitzsche's man or Christ ! The 
 last question is whether this Earth is to be a home or a 
 menagerie ! 
 
 Now any government is at a given time as strong as it 
 has purposes worthy to be believed in, and no stronger. 
 Perceived or not, the bottoming idea of democracy is the 
 utmost diffusion of two things — authority and responsi- 
 bility. All of its hopes are reducible to the balancing of 
 these two. All of its phases and attempts here are judged. 
 This duality is the law of its life. Within it each whole 
 man, and because a man, is to " count one." Persons are 
 its units, and their union is to be without confusion or seces- 
 sion. Its divisor exactly matches its dividend, and the 
 quotient is one. A division of labor which is distorted to 
 mean " You labor and I divide " is not democracy. So 
 then, in this joint severalty where every man should count 
 one, not a half, not two, every man should be fitted to count 
 one ! Democracy must vigilantly demand and strive toward 
 this fitness of its units, and stabs itself by neglect of it. 
 
 The ballot affirms the indisputable right of each integer. 
 Only so is it valid. Its qualified intelligence is its security 
 
 144 
 
that it shall always be counted as one, and never less or 
 more. Less it were tyrannized, more it were tyrannical. 
 The only real voter is the independent voter, and to seduce 
 or to intimidate him violates manhood. Degradation is dis- 
 franchisement. Democracy agrees with Christianity to say 
 that every man should count one, and that because he 
 should he shall ! Nothing else ever believed this, or 
 declared it, or attempted it. But the tools are for the task. 
 No theory works itself. This one cannot be carried; it 
 must walk. It must wrench itself out of dullness and delay. 
 It must lift itself away from the appeal and stress of mere 
 passion, and cease to be pleased with! flattery and fireworks. 
 " Use your freedom." It is not an end but a means, a con- 
 dition of opportunity, a capacity. It makes normal action 
 possible; but this must be fulfilled in the wisdom and the 
 will to do ! 
 
 Therefore education, the tutoring of men in their duty to 
 secure their rights. Provision for this is self- protection. 
 Liberty thinks, enslavement only feels. Ignorance breeds 
 political bastards. Every election that is not a farce is an 
 appeal to opinion and purpose. Thus the people say, We 
 will have it so, and so. The greatest state shall be that one 
 with the greatest ratio of voters who think clearly and reso- 
 lutely, and who will not be browbeaten or cajoled. This is 
 pivotal. The minority which thinks will at last outnumber 
 those who only pretend to. By thinking, man in both 
 senses comes to his majority. 
 
 Let this be seen in the rise of Humanism. It was a part 
 of the subsoiling of the world for the seed of Democracy. 
 Freedom breathed thro the new learning. Letters were 
 Republican. It was the mind of man pawing to get free. 
 Thus the school is the arsenal of the people's rights, and a 
 College is a battery of men ! The specialty of education is 
 liberty; for it rests upon " the right assessment of what 
 constitutes human value." 
 
 In the last analysis, Democracy rests its dictum upon the 
 
 145 
 
bench of justice. The court embodies the people's con- 
 science as to equity. Its decree registers their deliberation 
 and their relf-restraint. It becomes, under God, their ulti- 
 mate affirmation and refuge. It is the final institute of 
 liberty. 
 
 Under that fraternity of men which the evangel mapped, 
 the Ishmaelitish spirit recedes. The history of human 
 arrangements unfolds this generic man- right. This is the 
 developing purpose of the parturient years. Thro slow eras, 
 or in convulsive epochs, the impulse has pushed as by 
 hydraulic pressure. The paramount description of a man 
 is that he has a passport to all the freedom he can use, and 
 to an equal chance to show how much that is. He shall 
 resist whatever would steal or crush his fair share of it; for 
 to yield to such dispossession is to deny the nature God 
 gave him. Well said Lincoln, that foremost modern repre- 
 sentative of the fine old family of man, in 1856, " They who 
 deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and 
 under the rule of a just God can not long retain it." 
 
 Liberty is menaced today in its own household by pride 
 of power, by lust of empire, by a somnolent and unprotest- 
 ing Church with little else than soft words for Mammon; 
 but what shall it profit democracy if it gain the whole world 
 and lose its own life ! To enable and ennoble ' every crea- 
 ture under heaven ' toward his fullest possibilities is the 
 formative idea of a just society, and it should remove all 
 that opposes this, by pick or by powder. Democracy and 
 Christianity have it in common that we profess both and 
 practice neither, except tentatively and with limiting reser- 
 vations. Neither has yet been fully worked. Men fear and 
 resent both the law of love and the law of liberty; but alike 
 they must either be applied or abandoned. 
 
 To reduce its limitations to the lowest terms, to exalt its 
 universality, liberty is to be delivered both from those who 
 assume to monopolize and from those who dare degrade it; 
 for to rule and to serve are the two halves of the divine pur- 
 
 146 
 
pose that all men shall be " kings and priests unto God," 
 and this purpose can be interpreted neither by the aristocrat 
 nor the mob. 
 
 In quoting Bismarck's characteristic saying, that " After 
 all a benevolent, rational absolutism is the best form of gov- 
 ernment," Matthew Arnold replies: " The one fatal objection 
 to it is that it is against nature, that it contradicts a vital 
 instinct in man — the instinct of expansion. The impulse 
 of democracy is identical with the ceaseless effort of human 
 nature itself." Hear ! Hear ! indeed. Always to be chosen 
 for, rather than to choose, is arrested development, pro- 
 longed childishness. Nations arriving at their majority put 
 away this nursing bottle of royalty, this theory of unchange- 
 able babyhood, which offers tin toys to adults and spanks 
 bearded men ! Littoral Canute can not scold back the 
 untamable tides — sceptre and spectre depart together. Let 
 the chess-game picture the play of titular rank. There are 
 kings and consorts, castles, bishops ( ever diagonal ), 
 knights erratic, pawns as the servitors and spoil of these; 
 and for a parable the white always with the first move. 
 But ' the order changeth.' The day of the pawn comes. 
 In testudo, he advances to the king row, turns transfigured, 
 and gives checkmate ! " Democracy ( said Lowell ) is that 
 form of society in which every man has a chance and knows 
 that he has it." 
 
 What is our " Monroe doctrine " but this, that we mean 
 that our democracy shall not have its influence narrowed by 
 the proximity of any other theory of the people ? To 
 maintain this theory of the people undamaged, and to hold 
 its vantage unimpaired, we would fight ( tho God forbid the 
 emergency ) till all the seas ran red ! It was with this 
 instinct that we lifted Cuba from the dunghill to place an 
 unquenchable star upon her brow, still keeping faith with 
 freedom. 
 
 The Gospel's idea accords with the idea of Democracy. 
 Their aims are cognate, their purposes mutual. They join 
 
 147 
 
in that view of inter-human rights of which International 
 Law is the logical resultant. They alike resent " every yoke 
 of bondage," and intend that freedom which is the clearing- 
 house of mankind. Each seeks the greatest quantity of the 
 highest quality, and demands that none shall be outside of 
 law, none beneath it, none above it. They " come to make 
 the best the world knows native to the humblest." 
 
 The Son of Man is man's Man ! He arraigns all despot- 
 isms, and threatens every divisive artificiality, every defraud- 
 ing, every treachery to the human cause. Before Him every 
 antiquated lie of caste stands disheveled, every usurpation 
 shudders, and every " prisoner of hope " leaps up with joy. 
 " All for each and each for all," is the bold and beautiful 
 charter which is sealed with His cross. " And the govern- 
 ment shall be upon His shoulder ! " 
 
 Democracy is not " the multitude in power with no ade- 
 quate ideal to elevate and guide": but it is the people 
 guided and elevated as common shareholders in a celestial- 
 ized manhood. It is indigenous to Christianity, and is 
 implied by that. Dependence upon God, independence of 
 all insalutary duress, interdependence as fellows and friends, 
 these are the three signals of what the " Leader and Com- 
 mander of the peoples " purposes and will perform. They 
 stamp all temporizing expedients with paresis. To deny 
 them is both apostacy from the faith and barratry against 
 the ship of state. 
 
 All gain in appreciating what whole democracy both 
 includes and excludes, has been, consciously or not, an 
 appreciation of Christ's idea of man. Painfully it has pene- 
 trated the banal policies and sodden politics of the world, 
 attended by harsh reactions and bitter doubts, but despite 
 the appalling follies of those who " promised liberty, while 
 themselves the servants of corruption," it has continued and 
 will conquer. 
 
 The timid dread the birth-pangs of change, and the near- 
 sighted refuse to think beyond the status they have cap- 
 
 148 
 
tured: but the dynasty of the few becomes decrepit and 
 nigh to vanishing. The Magnificat was the annunciation of 
 a new society. It enfolded an apocalypse: " He hath put 
 down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low 
 degree." " The Desire of all nations " makes all classes 
 " dangerous classes," and those the most so who absent 
 themselves from concern for that cause of the people which 
 widens and deepens with each newest day, and before whose 
 " awful rose of dawn " the lanterns of the groping years 
 grow dim. 
 
 For Democracy this America, this people's land ! Hither 
 they come who would escape the mortmain of stole and 
 throne. We are building better than we know, and repeat 
 Columbus, " who only sought a way and found a world." 
 Our freedoms are not ours to seclude. If we forget His 
 purpose, wide as the Earth is, Who begat these, we abandon 
 their security. To evade the duty is to despise the blessing. 
 If this Sampson, shorn and blind, lays hands upon those two 
 commandments which are the pillars of a divinely human 
 society, he shall indeed " make sport for the Philistines," 
 but in catastrophe and common burial ! 
 
 Before the envious fallacies of both ermine and rags, 
 America is to retract nothing of her earlier faith in the sov- 
 ereignty of God and in the sanctity of man, His child. She 
 is still the pioneer of the cause of man, not to exploit a con- 
 tinent but to uplift a race. The enlargement of men from 
 both slavery and license is pressed upon us by our double 
 faith. We " shall walk at liberty because we seek His pre- 
 cepts," " as free and not abusing freedom." And shall we 
 not thus move ? 
 
 " Humanity with all its fears, 
 With all the hopes of future years, 
 Is hanging breathless on thy fate." 
 
 Well said Grover Cleveland, at St. Louis, " It is a solemn 
 thing to belong to a nation favored of God." 
 
 149 
 
Men of the Class of 1905: 
 
 Stand up, then, and stay up, to meet the possibilities of 
 these big years with conscience and backbone. Hear the 
 high trumpet. It calls you to be as brave as wise. God and 
 your time summon you also to the potential throngs whose 
 hair is unflecked and whose blood is full of iron. You rep- 
 resent no school of doubt, of hesitation, of moral pusillani- 
 mity. Just, sympathetic, unconditional, stand with lip and 
 life to resist the reign of greed and graft, the cunning that 
 plays Jacob's trick upon Esau, and the rash surrender of the 
 birthright. Let all that assails man-right sting you to testify 
 and to act. Let no good cause lack you, let no right event 
 fail because any of you is a coward absentee. Down to 
 that day when your final valedictorian shall speak your final 
 word, be such as wear their swords to the hilt, such soldiers 
 of democracy and of godliness, of society and its salvation, 
 as those in whom and by whom " the Lion of the tribe of 
 Judah shall prevail to open the book ! " 
 
 
 
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CORRECTIONS: 
 
 Page 65, 30th line, spell transcendent. 
 
 Page 72, 10th line, speech. 
 
 Page 102, 14th line, for contract read construct. 
 
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