KMtffotar 
 
 THE EXTBRNAL CONDITIONS OF THE PROSPERITY OF OUR COLLEGES, 
 
 AN 
 
 INAUGURAL ADDRESS, 
 
 DELIVERED JULY 30th, 184*5. 
 
 BY HENRY SMITH, 
 President of Marietta College, 
 
 PUBLISHED BY THE TRUSTEES. 
 
 MARIETTA: 
 
 FRINTED AT THE INTELLIGENCER OFFIC.n. 
 1847. 
 
(_ 
 
 i 3 \^ 
 
 
 est 
 
 INAUGURAL ADDRESS, 
 
 The philosopher Guizot, in seeking a definition of the term civili- 
 zation, places it in the idea of progress. By a series of historical 
 illustrations, he establishes the position that this progress is two-fold. 
 In the first place, civilization implies the idea of a progress in society; 
 in the outward physical organization of the social state; a progressive 
 melioration of the condition of the relations existing between man 
 and man. This is one element of civilization, to which, however, he 
 says, if the idea were confined, a community of civilized men would 
 resemble the occupants of a bee-hive. Their great business would 
 be the production and equitable distribution of the means of life. 
 But civilization, he maintains, includes another idea; the progress of 
 individual man; the development of his faculties as an intellectual, 
 emotive, immortal being. The great problem of human welfare is 
 the harmonious combination of these two elements of civilized life, 
 social progress and individual development. If we place them in 
 contrast, and compare their value, as bearing upon human happiness, 
 the verdict of mankind will pronounce in favor of the latter, as more 
 radical, more enduring, more splendid, more intimately bound up 
 with the higher destinies of the race Bearing in mind now the two 
 great elements which this analysis presents, if we propose to our- 
 selves the question, what at the present moment is the condition of 
 American civilization, we shall be brought directly to the main point 
 in which our ill-wishers beyond the seas attack us. They cannot 
 affirm that there is not social progress in America. That calumny 
 almost every square mile of our territory would refute. The buzz 
 and rattle of New England machinery, the flocks which like snows 
 in summer whiten her mountains, the lowing herds and varied indus- 
 try of the Middle States, the cotton fields and sugar plantations of 
 the South, the golden eared and wide waving harvests of the West; 
 the net-work of rail-ways threading our valleys and climbing our 
 mountains, the whistle of our steamers ascending every river, our 
 mercantile navy converting our sea-ports into mimic forests and pen- 
 etrating with the products of our industry almost every harbor on 
 
 P4 
 
 50 
 
the globe, all bear testimony to our social progress; a testimony vis 
 ible to the world, and too conspicuous to be denied. But if transat- 
 lantic writers are to be credited, alas for the higher element of civil- 
 ization in the new-born republic! 
 
 Fifty years ago, one of the most ingenious of the ethical writers of 
 England, in an argument for church establishments, maintained that 
 it would be disastrous to religion to cast it upon the voluntary support 
 of the people. It would convert preaching into a mode of begging; 
 pulpit eloquence into an histrionic exhibition, and the minister him- 
 self into a mere caterer for the popular appetite, watching more 
 closely for the increase of his subscription list than for the salvation 
 of souls. Within the last few years, one of the most popular histo- 
 rians of the present century has formally recorded it as a fact that 
 this reasoning has found its realization in the free States of America. 
 "Already" says Alison, "the ruinous dependence of the ministers of 
 all denominations upon the voluntary support of their flocks, has be- 
 come painfully conspicuous. Religion has descended from its high 
 functions of denouncing and correcting national vices, and, with 
 some honorable exceptions, become little more than a re-echo of 
 public opinion." Here then is our religious character demolished at 
 a stroke. It would not be difficult to find delineations of our intel- 
 lectual character equally unflattering. Alas then, if such represen- 
 tations are to be trusted, for the second and greatest element of civil- 
 ization; alas for the progress of individual man in America! 
 
 Intellect is dwarfed. Her scholars are mere sciolists. Where 
 are her philosophy, her poetry, her history, her fine arts] She has 
 no literature, or if she has, it is a superficial one. Her muse only 
 limps through the crazy iambics in the poet's corner of the newspa- 
 pers; or if there be a poet who writes passable verses he received an 
 European education. Her philosophy buries its leaden burden be- 
 tween the uncut leaves of the magazines. Her history is a mere 
 patch-work of European shreds and clippings. Her eloquence ex- 
 pends its windy emptiness upon the stump. 
 
 The natural affections are dwarfed in America. The American 
 in middle life has forgotten the home of his childhood. You will 
 never hear him saying, " I remember, I remember the house where I 
 was born." " The old oaken bucket" which hung in his father's 
 well; the "deep-tangled wild wood" which skirted his farm; "the 
 wide-spreading elm" which shaded his dwelling, — these things have 
 no charm for him. Ever anticipating an emigration, his very family 
 pictures he leaves unframed, lest, when with the other household 
 scuff they come under the hammer, he should suffer loss. He is 
 
 i 
 
nothing but an kt agricultural nomad," a mere migratory adventurer 
 in quest of the "almighty dollar." 
 
 Religious sentiment is dwarfed in America. Religion is an affair 
 of dollars and cents. Where are her moss-grown cathedrals, her 
 time-honored churches, her bench of spiritual lords, her arch-dea- 
 cons, her advowsons, her fat benefices, her small livings, her par- 
 ishes, her vicars, her curates, her predial tithes'? All wanting. The 
 state has proscribed Christianity, and Christianity has abandoned the 
 state. Religion has become a mere individual affair. Her altars 
 are desecrated. Her house is left unto her desolate. Her votaries 
 have become sons of Belial and her ministers priests of Mammon. 
 
 To such attacks upon American character it may not be essential 
 that we furnish a written reply. It is essential to our own well- 
 being, essential to the progress of free principles, essential to the 
 fulfilment of the hopes of the friends of liberty throughout the globe, 
 that we live the slander down. The orb of human freedom has been 
 too long in rising to be thrust down again by American hands. 
 Longing eyes watched for its appearing during a weary night of 
 centuries. At length the gray twilight is seen; next the morning 
 blushes; then the clouds kindle and burn before the brightness of its 
 coming. Behold in these progressive stages of illumination, the pro- 
 gress of liberty in the thirteenth, the sixteenth, and seventeenth cen- 
 turies; in the Magna Charta of Runnemede, the Reformation of Lu- 
 ther, and that series of events, political and religious, which found 
 their consummation in the Revolution of 1688. One century more; 
 and the broad disc reveals its full orbed glory above the summit of 
 the mountains. That orb is the sun, not of American Independence 
 merely; it is the sun of constitutional liberty, of religious toleration, 
 of popular intelligence, of emancipated mind. Seventy years have 
 elapsed since it passed within the circle of vision to the people of 
 this country; it now begins to pour its splendors upon the opening 
 eyelids of awakened and universal man. No power on earth can 
 eclipse its brightness but the fatuity of the very people whom its 
 beams first blessed. 
 
 I have referred to the slanders of transatlantic writers upon Amer- 
 ican character. Slanders they doubtless are. And yet slanders may 
 reveal to a wise man some latent weakness of character to be cor- 
 rected, some infelicitous tendency of temperament to be checked 
 which had before escaped his notice. For a season we are put in 
 trust by Providence with a liberty which may work out the highest 
 well-being of the race. If it prove in our hands a liberty which pam- 
 pers the body, and starves the soul, let us understand, this is not the 
 
G 
 
 liberty for which the heart of humanity yearns. That liberty is not 
 the freedom of the animal to pursue his pleasures. It is the freedom 
 of the man to pursue his happiness. It is the freedom of mind to 
 investigate truth. It is freedom to think, not to ruminate ; freedom 
 to worship God, not to break his bands asunder and to cast away his 
 cords. It is the liberty which supplies not merely the conditions of 
 physical well-being, but the conditions also of spiritual development. 
 These conditions are comprehended in the two words Education, 
 Religion. Of that element of civilization, which the philosopher, 
 whom I have quoted, denominates the progress of individual man, in 
 distinction from social progress, these are the two great roots. The 
 law of custom and the proprieties of the occasion limit my remarks 
 to the former of these two topics. There are, I need not inform you, 
 in this country, four well defined classes of institutions, almost uni- 
 versally recognized as essential instruments in the work of popular 
 education; Common Schools, Academies (male and female,) Colleges, 
 and professional Seminaries. You will expect me to confine my re- 
 marks, in the main, to the third of these four classes. To insist 
 upon the necessity of Colleges in the work of general education, would, 
 before this audience, be a superfluous task. It is admitted. To 
 describe their internal economy, and to attempt a vindication of the 
 claims of the several branches of study pursued in them, would be a 
 work, which has been so often and so ably executed, that in my 
 hands, at least, it would prove a theme barren of interest. To assert 
 and maintain, at this day, the position that a College, in order to suc- 
 cess, and of course to usefulness, must be conducted upon religious 
 principles, would be to assert and maintain a truism. I propose 
 rather to direct your attention to some of the external conditions which 
 are essential to the prosperity of our Collegiate Institutions. 
 
 In the first place, it is essential to their prosperity that they find 
 favor with the people at large. They spring from the people. They 
 belong to the people. They are designed to aid in securing the in- 
 telligence and happiness of the people. And without a warm place in 
 the affections of the people, they are comparatively powerless for good. 
 Whatever may be true of monarchies, in this country it is true, that 
 no great public interest can be sustained in opposition to the popular 
 will. Public opinion, w T e must admit it, is the last appeal. It is 
 omnipotent. You have heard the dictum of an English casuist, that 
 the interests of religion would be fatally compromised by casting it 
 upon popular sympathy for support. You have seen the picture 
 drawn by an English historian of our religious condition. Do you 
 admit this reasoning to be just] Do you recognize this picture of 
 
religious society in America to be true? If in the reasoning ol thi 
 moralist we can detect a flaw, will it not be found in the assumption 
 that popular opinion must of necessity be wrong? must of necessity 
 be depraved and perverted ? that it will positively require the minister 
 to sow pillows to all arm-holes; that in the first place it will 
 station a watch at the mast head to descry the dangers which threaten 
 the vessel, and then absolutely force him to cry " all's well," what- 
 ever tempest thickens, and whatever breakers roar 1 If we pronounce 
 the picture of the historian a caricature and no likeness, shall we 
 not assign as the reason of it, the blindness of prejudice mistaking 
 an accident for an essence, an incidental perversion of public opinion, 
 for its inherent and total depravity] But whether the validity of this 
 reasoning, and the fidelity of this picture be affirmed or denied, the 
 power of public opinion, in this country, remains a "fixed fact." 
 We cannot deny it if we would; I trust we shall ever have occasion 
 to say, we would not if we could. If it be asserted that the fate of 
 religion in this country is yet to be decided, that the experiment is 
 yet in progress and the problem yet unsolved, it still remains true 
 that the chief agent in the experiment, the radical element in the 
 problem, is public opinion. And what is true of our national religion 
 is true of our every great national interest, is true of our national 
 intelligence. Public opinion is the ruling planet in our national 
 horoscope. To employ the language of judicial astrology, it hath 
 entered and its stands, flaming and dominant, in the " cusp" of our 
 "house of life." And be its influence baleful or benign, it is our 
 destiny to work out the problem of our national existence beneath it, 
 It has often been said that the cause of Education in this country 
 is popular. The proposition is a very general one, and the terms 
 perhaps not always perfectly well defined in the mind of him who 
 makes it. The cause of Education, what is meant by it? The cause 
 of Common Schools'? or of Academies'? or of Colleges? or of insti- 
 tutions for imparting legal, medical or theological instruction? or 
 all these together? The cause of Education, in this country, is pop- 
 ular. This is a great country. It stretches through twenty-four 
 degrees of latitude, and sixty of longitude. It is therefore certainly 
 not impossible that a subject, the discussion of which upon the banks 
 of Charles's river would strike one of the most sensitive chords of 
 popular sympathy; would summon the farmer from his plough, the 
 mechanic from his workshop, the merchant from his counting room, 
 the clergyman from his study, the lawyer, the physician, the legisla- 
 tor, from his brief, his professional calls, his senatorial deliberations, 
 may enkindle but small enthusiasm, and secure but a meagre "mass 
 
8 
 
 meeting," on the banks of the Muskingum, the Wabash or the Illinois. 
 The cause of Education is popular. But what is popularity? In the 
 sense of the proposition, doubtless, favor with the people. This, 
 however, is a predicate which admits of degrees. The pendulum | 
 may swing through a large arc. The voice of popular favor may ; 
 have every variety of pitch and of strength. There is surely some j 
 little difference between that deep-toned and jubilant superlative of | 
 it, which, for example, rang in our ears during the political campaign \ 
 of 1840, and that small chinking note, that feeble, questionable sound, 
 sometimes reaching the tympanum of the ear and sometimes inaudi- 
 ble, which, issuing from the collision of half-dimes at the bottom of a 
 circulating charity box, marks the sub-positive degree of popular 
 favor. In what sense of the terms is this proposition true? and, in 
 what sense of them will the people make it true? Assuming that 
 we are a christian people, and that we possess a free constitution, an 
 answer to these two questions, and to no third, would the student of 
 political history require to enable him to sketch our condition in re- 
 spect to the highest element of civilization and to predict our destiny. 
 To such a people there are therefore no two questions, which can by 
 any possibility be propounded of equal magnitude, no two questions 
 the answers to which involve a significance so vital and so far reach- 
 ing, as the questions : In what sense ought Education to be popular 
 amongst us? and: In what sense shall it be? 
 
 Without attempting to decide the question, in what sense of the 
 terms Education is popular in the country at large, let us narrow the 
 field of vision. It is a more practical question to inquire, in what 
 sense it is popular in Ohio. Are Common Schools popular in Ohio? 
 Doubtless, if by popularity is meant a general acknowledgment of 
 their importance. If popularity implies that the people have made 
 adequate provision to sustain them, that they have digested a com- 
 prehensive and thorough system of Common School Education of 
 vitality and power enough to secure the simplest rudiments of Edu- 
 cation to the whole mass of our citizens, the proposition may be more 
 than doubted. There are at the present moment, as appears from 
 the Report of the Secretary of State, to the last Legislature, not less 
 than 40,000 of our citizens, over 20 years of age, (12,000 of whom are 
 exercising all the rights of freemen,) who can neither read nor write. 
 If it is said that considering the influx of foreign population this 
 fact does not infer a defect of popular interest in the subject, another 
 fact from the same document may be adduced in point. There are 
 in this State not only 40,000 persons over 20 years of age who can- 
 not read and write, but there are nearly 150,000 under that age, and 
 
within the limits of the provisions of the law, " entirely illiterate.'* 
 Commenting upon these facts, the secretary remarks, "were there 
 as many thousands in the midst of us who through poverty or imbe- 
 cility should pass their lives without any improvement in their vital 
 powers; who should, in the language of scripture, 'have eyes but see 
 not, ears but hear not,' their senses all torpid, their limbs nerveless 
 and incapable of muscular movement, all but lifeless and yet alive, 
 what should we think of such existence, of such being'? And yet 
 that which in debasement, if done to the body, surpasses even our 
 imagination, is done by individuals and the community, and permitted 
 to be done by civilized governments, by ourselves, under the full 
 blaze of Christianity, to the immortal mind, to those lofty capacities 
 which, in their nature and destiny, as far exceed the physical pow T ers, 
 as mind excels matter, spirit, clay, heaven, earth." I should re- 
 joice, had I time to quote more largely from this interesting document. 
 The picture which it presents of dilapidated school-houses, incom- 
 petent teachers, wasted funds, and official faithlessness, are suffi- 
 ciently humiliating to our state pride. It ought to be published in 
 every newspaper, and placed in every family which can read in the 
 state. And yet its cogent reasonings, and its powerful appeals, 
 failed, so far as I can learn, to secure any action in the body to w T hich 
 it was addressed. Thus much for our common schools. Now let 
 us ask, are academies popular in Ohio? — They are certainly toler- 
 ated. As they do not fall within the provisions of the law reg- 
 ulating the state school funds, there are no statistics, so far as I 
 know, to enable us to ascertain their number or their condition. — 
 There are preparatory schools connected with all our colleges, and 
 here and there a private high-school, owing its existence to the en- 
 terprise of some adventurous teacher, and depending upon that en- 
 terprise for continued life. Regularly incorporated academies, aside 
 from these, possessed of funds and apparatus sufficient to ensure use- 
 fulness, or even continued vitality, I will not say there are none in 
 the state, for there are ; but they certainly may be classed among the 
 rarcB aves of Ohio. Let us pass to the third class of educational institu- 
 tions, and I do not propose to carry the inquiry further; — are colleges 
 popular in Ohio? If we may judge from their multiplicity, most as- 
 suredly, yes. If multiplicity implies popularity, Ohio outpeers New- 
 England in lavishing its favors upon colleges. It does not even lag 
 far behind its sister state of Pennsylvania. The facility with which 
 your literary projector can manufacture a college puts to the blush 
 all the other wonders of this age of steam and magnetism. It re- 
 
10 
 
 minds one of the exploits of the Horatian hero in poetry, who could 
 turn off his two hundred verses in an hour: 
 
 Ego poemata pango 
 Occupet postremum scabies; mihi turpe rclinqui est, 
 Et quod non didici, sane nescire fateri. 
 
 The purple rag of a title flaunts in the distance and beckons him 
 onward, the curse of obscurity urges him behind, he waves his 
 magic quill, and lo ! a college armed with the Vulcanian panoply of 
 a state charter, leaps from his laboring brain, full-grown like Pallas 
 from the head of Zeus. If you visit the locality indicated by its 
 style, expecting to find the ancient appendages of such institutions, 
 buildings, books, apparatus, teachers, you are laboring under a sad 
 mistake, a most vulgar error in regard to the essence of a college. 
 These things are only its accidents. If they should be found want- 
 ing, what then? Has it not a charter? Suppose it has no "local 
 habitation," what is that to the point] Has it not a "name?" And 
 has not the echo of that name reverberated throughout the land! Has 
 not the trumpet of its fame waxed long and loud in the newspapers'? 
 Sadly infidel indeed must be the tendencies of your mind if you still 
 doubt its existence. The very style by which it is denominated, the 
 very names of its board of trustees, the very amount of funds which 
 they are authorised to hold w T hen they shall have obtained them, as 
 well as that most important provision that these funds are never to 
 be perverted to the purposes of banking, behold, are not all these 
 things plainly written down in the book of the chronicles of the 
 legislature of Ohio! 
 
 If adhering to your antiquated views touching the constituents of 
 a college, you ask the questions, are those institutions in Ohio which 
 possess them popular? Do the people take pride in them? Do 
 they secure to their children the advantages which they proffer? I 
 fear the answer would not be as flattering as we could wish. It is 
 true a certain portion of our citizens feel strong interest in them, and 
 have taxed themselves deeply to sustain them. The burden however 
 has as yet fallen not lightly upon the many, but heavily upon the few. 
 There are, I believe, but two or three colleges in actual operation in 
 the state, which would not be compelled, if the hand of charity were 
 withdrawn, to disband their faculties and to close their doors. And 
 of these, one was endowed by Congress, and another by accident, or 
 rather by one of those providences to which men give this name. 
 
 If again the question of popularity is decided by patronage, the 
 case will stand thus. The New England States and Ohio may now 
 be said to be equal in population, New England has more than two 
 
11 
 
 thousand undergraduates. In a regular college course, I should think 
 iive hundred a large estimate for Ohio. 
 
 Such is something like a picture, I do not say of the present intel- 
 ligence of Ohio, hut of the foundation upon which her future intelli- 
 gence is to be upreared; of that system of means to which is en- 
 trusted the perpetuation and development of the highest attribute of 
 civilization within her borders. It is a Serbonian swamp. It is a 
 continent of chaos, which reminds us of that " boggy Syrtis, neither 
 sea nor good dry land," which the fallen angel of the Paradise Lost 
 met in his perilous journey from darkness up to the light. And an 
 energy of intellect in a better cause not totally dissimilar to his, is 
 manifested by the adventurous stripling, who from many a county in 
 the state conceives and executes the difficult enterprise of climbing 
 to the heights of mind — 
 
 " Nigh foundered on he fares, 
 " Treading the rude consistence, half on foot, 
 "Half flying; behoves him now both oar and sail." 
 
 If a remedy be demanded, it will be found in the prosperity of our 
 colleges, and the prosperity of our colleges will be found in the 
 favor of the people. To secure that favor, it is necessary only that 
 the claims of colleges be discussed, investigated, understood. The 
 relations of colleges to the progress and welfare of society, and to 
 the progress of individual man, must be thoroughly canvassed and 
 settled in the popular mind. Society is bound together by the mu- 
 tual wants of its members. Most beautifully does Plato, in the 
 Socratic dialogue of the Republic, illustrate this dependence. Upon 
 this basis he builds up his ideal city. He reasons thus. The most 
 pressing of human wants is that of food. '-'Hunger is insolent and 
 must be fed." The next is clothing. The next is lodging. The 
 smallest commonwealth then must have four members, a husband- 
 man, a weaver, a shoemaker, a mason. Shall each supply his own 
 wants in all these particulars'? That is savage life. Shall each de- 
 vote himself to a particular branch of industry, and perfecting his 
 skill in it, exchange the products of his industry for those of his com- 
 panions* That is the germ of civilization. And mark what it im- 
 plies. As skill advances, the husbandman wants oxen and ploughs 
 and spades, and other implements of agriculture. The weaver will 
 need not only a supply of textile materials, but distaffs and spindles 
 and looms and shuttles and all the implements of his art. The same is 
 true of the mason. The same of the shoemaker. Their commodities 
 moreover must be exchanged, without trenching upon their time. The 
 city waxes in population. It has joiners, and smiths, and herdsmen, 
 
12 
 
 and shepherds, and merchants. These again have their wants to he 
 supplied. The city now begins to swarm with inhabitants. Prop- 
 erty accumulates. Men become luxurious and must have physicians. 
 They are avaricious and must have laws and magistrates. They 
 engage in war and must have defenders. And if those who engage 
 in the several vocations are to be skillful and expert so that the in- 
 terests of the whole may be best subserved by their services, they 
 must be trained and instructed in their several arts. The city now 
 has its cooks and victuallers, and barbers and hair dressers, and nurses, 
 and undertakers, and pedagogues, and tutors and instructors, and 
 artists and poets and philosophers. Such is something like a picture 
 of the web of a civilized society woven by the philosopher of Sunium, 
 in his effort to investigate and illustrate the principle of justice. It 
 coheres throughout. Take hold of it by either side and you move 
 the whole. The law of mutual dependence binds it together. It is, 
 in this respect, a picture of every civilized community. " All the arts," 
 says the great orator of Roman antiquity, "which appertain to civili- 
 zation have a certain common vinculum." This is the vinculum. It 
 is the law of mutual dependence. Sever the bond where you will and 
 the entire unity suffers. Let the philosopher say to the husbandman, 
 I have no need of thee, or the husbandman to the philosopher I have 
 no need of thee. You shall find in the event a hungry philosopher 
 and a ragged husbandman. What can be a more useless suffix to 
 society that a poet 1 And yet in the very oration from which I have 
 quoted the sentiment of the great Roman orator, he affirms that he 
 owed the skill in speaking, by which he had so often aided the suffer- 
 ing and rescued the persecuted, the mental power by which he de- 
 livered his country from the machinations of conspiracy and dignified 
 the annals of her literature with some of the noblest productions of 
 the mind, to the early training which he received at the hands of 
 his teacher, the poet Archias. 
 
 If this bond of mutual dependence in a civilized state be analysed, 
 its main constituent will be expressed by the term knowledge. — 
 Knowledge, knowledge acquired by division of labor, by application 
 to particular pursuits is essential to the idea of a state. The diffusion 
 of it is not essential. In a despotism there must be knowledge, but 
 it may be knowledge " cabined, cribbed, confined," parceled out in 
 castes and stereotyped forages. " Ne sutor ultra crepid am " may 
 be literally applied to it. The shoemaker to his last, and the tailor 
 to his goose. To represent truly the bond of union in a highly civ- 
 ilized and especially in a free state, we must abandon the figure of a 
 web. The idea of diffusion now becomes essential. Our web must be 
 
IS 
 
 converted into a plexus of blood-vessels, into a sanguineous system of 
 heart and arteries and veins. Such an apparatus is found in a sys- 
 tem of popular education. The college is its heart. Neglect this, 
 cramp it, starve it, and your labor upon the extremities is thrown 
 away. They will perish, do what you may. With a change of a 
 single word to prevent misapprehension, and with no change of sense, 
 I can quote, strong as they are, with a perfect confidence in their 
 correctness, the remarks upon this point of one of the most able, and 
 ardent friends of popular education in the West. 
 
 k *The college has ever been the friend and nursery of common 
 schools. In modern times, whenever the college has flourished un- 
 trammelled and unrestricted by jealous, arbitrary authority, there the 
 common school has taken root and prospered also. The fact is no- 
 torious, indisputable and undisputed. In no country, at this day, do 
 we behold the slightest approach to a good common school system, 
 except where the college is honored and liberally sustained. Scot- 
 land, Prussia, Germany, Holland, New England and New York may 
 serve as proof and comment. I hold the attempt to create and foster 
 common schools, without the aid of the college, to be utterly vain 
 and nugatory. It cannot be done." 
 
 In the second place, colleges require as a condition of their highest 
 prosperity, the fostering care of the legislature. 
 
 No one subject, at this day, in this state, more imperatively de- 
 mands investigation, calm, clear-sighted, patriotic investigation, 
 than the relation, actual and desirable, of the legislature to colle- 
 giate institutions. These institutions are the nuclei around which 
 cluster all the dearest interests of society. They are the centres 
 from which is to radiate the future civilization of the state. Their 
 relation to all the great interests of man within our borders, whether 
 social or individual, is the relation of cause to effect. The regular, 
 methodical observation of the phenomena of nature, the further elu- 
 cidation of her laws, the development of the mental power which 
 may apply the deductions of science to the arts of life, to agriculture, 
 to mining, to manufactures, to commerce; the power to frame, to 
 expound, and to vindicate law; to investigate the diseases of the body 
 and prescribe for their cure; to investigate the laws of mind and en- 
 force upon it the obligations and restraints of religion, these are the 
 works of colleges, these are the great interests of which they are the 
 conservatories. Society has no higher interests, nor has individual 
 man, than those which will be periled by the neglect of colleges, 
 dwarfed by their inefficiency, and prostrated by their destruction. 
 The intellectual life of the state which neglects them is a borrowed, 
 
14 
 
 not an independent life. It is the life of an embryo, derived from a 
 vital organization not its own. The founders of this state well un- 
 derstood this. They did all which, under the circumstances, could 
 have been expected, if not all that was desirable, for the immediate 
 establishment of colleges. They secured in the original purchases of 
 territory, grants of lands for the endowment of two universities. They 
 evidently regarded colleges as legitimate objects of future legislative 
 provision and encouragement. In the third article of the ordinance 
 of 1787, we have the following language. " Religion, morality and 
 knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of 
 mankind, schools and the means of education shall be forever encour- 
 aged." The same declaration, with augmented strength of language, 
 is made in the third section of Art. 8, of the constitution of Ohio. 
 " Religion, morality and knowledge being essentially necessary to 
 good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the 
 means of education, shall be forever encouraged by legislative pro- 
 vision, not inconsistent with the rights of conscience." 
 
 There are two questions connected with legislative provision and 
 encouragement proper to be bestowed upon collegiate education, by 
 the state, which demand careful and candid investigation, at the hands 
 of our legislators. The first is, what number of collegiate institutions 
 does the state require? What number is necessary to secure the diffu- 
 sion of those principles of religion, morality and knowledge, which the 
 constitution declares to be essentially necessary to good government. 
 All beyond this number are a drawback, not a help to learning. They 
 divide patronage and conflict with the usefulness of all. It seems to 
 have been thought that the power of the legislature to limit the 
 number, is annihilated by sec. 27, of our bill of rights, which secures to 
 every association of persons, when regularly formed and named, the 
 privilege of receiving letters of incorporation to enable them to hold 
 estates, real and personal, for the support of their schools, acade- 
 mies, colleges, universities, and for other purposes. Now the point 
 which demands investigation is this: what is the meaning of this 
 article, in its application to colleges'? What is the animus impo- 
 nentis? the real intent of the framers of this section in our bill of 
 rights] Did they mean to encourage collegiate education] or to 
 bring it into disrepute] Is it or is it not competent to the legislature 
 to inquire whether the association applying for letters of incorpora- 
 tion is in fact what the name which it has assumed imports] Should 
 a number of persons form an association and assume the name of a 
 bank, apply for and obtain a charter endowing the organization with 
 all the powers and privileges of a regular banking company, proceed 
 
15 
 
 to issue paper and to transact business whilst yet destitute of a far* 
 thing of capital — entirely irresponsible, would such an association be 
 a bank, a real bank? or an association of swindlers'? Would the 
 legislature in granting it letters of incorporation confer a benefit, or 
 inflict a curse upon the commercial community? Would it meet or 
 thwart the intention of the framers of our bill of rights] I do not 
 make the supposition as an illustration of facts actual, but only of 
 facts possible, in relation to colleges, under this interpretation of the 
 provisions of that bill. A college is a definite thing. It is under- 
 stood throughout Christendom to be an institution possessed of a 
 body of teachers, of an amount of books and other apparatus of in- 
 struction, sufficient to secure to the youth who resort to it an educa- 
 tion, which the republic of letters denominates liberal; as well as to 
 issue those literary notes current, which certify the possession of such 
 an education. Suppose now an association of men should secure 
 from the legislature a college charter, and then instead of estab- 
 lishing a bona fide college, should send out an agent to hawk diplomas, 
 conferring them upon all who, tickled with the titles of literature, 
 might be willing to pay the price demanded. Suppose again, another 
 association possessed only of the menas of establishing an academy 
 or a common school, and with no earthly prospect, which a man of 
 sense would call rational, of ever possessing them, having in like 
 manner obtained a college charter, should publish a flaming pro- 
 gram of studies, and invite parents to secure for their children a 
 college education within the walls of their institution. Would these 
 things be honest or fraudulent? And would the legislature have 
 subserved the design of the framers of our bill of rights in lend- 
 ing them its sanction, or would it, on the contrary, have contributed 
 to thwart it] I might pursue these suppositions further. They are 
 imaginary cases designed to raise the question of the power of the 
 legislature to protect the true interests of collegiate education under 
 this section of the constitution. The cases may not be in esse; un- 
 der the interpretation which seems to have been given to it, they are 
 at least in posse. I do not affirm that the cases exist; I affirm only 
 that, for some reason or other, the term " Ohio college" has become 
 a term of somewhat doubtful significancy; that the literary scrip of 
 the state, like the fiscal scrip of some of our sister sovereignties, is 
 not always quite at par at the east; is sometimes subjected to a 
 scrutiny not precisely creditable to the soundness of our institutions. 
 In glancing atone of the possible causes of this, I have only been 
 indulging a dream of the imagination. I fear, however, that a waking 
 
1G 
 
 review of facts would oblige me to say of it, as the poet peer said of 
 his vision of darkness, 
 
 " I had a dream, which was not all a dream." 
 
 The second question, which it appears to me, demands candid in- 
 vestigation at the hands of our legislators is this: Ought not the leg- 
 islature to bring collegiate education, to a greater extent than has 
 yet been done, within the circle of interests which receive direct pe- 
 cuniary state patronage ] I do not propose to discuss the question. 
 The limits of this address will not permit it. The time, however, has 
 come, in which it ought to be thoroughly discussed, everywhere before 
 the people, and settled. If the representations of the secretary of 
 state, in the report already quoted, are correct in regard to the delin- 
 quencies of the state, as touching the construction of those pipes and 
 conduits, which are to diffuse through our population the simplest 
 rudiments of learning, how much more emphatically true in regard to 
 the erection of the reservoirs of learning from which these pipes and 
 conduits may be supplied ! "Although education," says he, " holds 
 an acknowledged superiority by the professions of our people, and in 
 intrinsic merit, is unrivaled by any competitor, yet it has been ex- 
 iled from an honorable companionship in the family of state interests; 
 and has been thrown out like a poor despised foundling, half-clad 
 and half-fed, to beg for protection. We have claimed to regard it as 
 a paramount topic, and yet our admiring eye has been caught by 
 some trifling interest of party or policy, as in the case of the astron- 
 omer, who, while looking at the sun, saw an animal of huge limbs and 
 immense bulk rushing up on one side and soon overshadowing and 
 darkening its whole surface, which however proved to be only a fly 
 crossing the upper lens of his telescope." 
 
 This state is perfectly competent to foster all the great interests 
 of man within her territory; to provide for the perpetuation and de- 
 velopment of the higher, as well as the minor element, in the civili- 
 zation of her citizens. Let our people be but convinced that an en- 
 terprise is necessary, or that it stands connected even by a moderate 
 probability with the public weal, and it will be done. You need not 
 travel far to find proof of the ability and willingness of the state to 
 make expenditures for the public good. As you pass from the doors 
 of this house, you will behold the terminus of a state work, con- 
 structed at an outlay of a million and a half, which is but a single 
 artery in our system of internal improvements. In every quarter of 
 the state you will find evidences of the same spirit, in our roads and 
 canals and bridges and dams, in our noble institutions for the relief 
 
17 
 
 of the maladies of suffering humanity, in our military system, in out* 
 for the protection of society from the depredations and assaults 
 of crime. Here are tokens of indomitable energy, of unparalleled 
 progress in a people whose territory, half a century since, was a wil- 
 derness almost unbroken. In which great element of civilization 
 however has this progress been mainly experienced] Upon which 
 great class of human interests have these prodigious expenditures 
 been chiefly made? the internal or the external; the physical or the 
 spiritual? Has our progress been chiefly the progress of society, or 
 the progress of individual man? No answer is required to these 
 questions. We have it in the magnitude and splendor of our cities; 
 in the rapid development of the sources of our wealth, and its distri- 
 bution; in the prosperity of our farmers, our mechanics, our mer- 
 chants, of men of every class w T hose vocation relates to the supply 
 of the physical wants of men. We have it also in the comparative 
 paucity of men among us distinguished in the higher walks of liter- 
 ature and science; we have it in the fewness and smallness of our 
 public libraries and scientific collections. We have it in almost two 
 hundred thousand of our citizens, every tenth man, woman and child 
 n the territory, if the report of our secretary of state is to be trust- 
 3d, entirely destitute of the simplest elements of learning. We have 
 .t in county jails by no means destitute of tenants; and in a central 
 Denitentiary "better patronized," by far, than any other state institu- 
 ion. Is then our physical prosperity a subject of complaint? By 
 10 means. It is a matter of just pride. As in the origin of Plato's 
 maginary republic, so in the origin of all states, the physical wants 
 )f man are most pressing, and assert their claim to precedence in 
 ittention. Let us not forget however that the precedence, justly 
 onsidered, is a precedence in time, not in importance. Let us re- 
 nember too, that this physical prosperity has its limits. Mind is the 
 ource of wealth, not matter. It is the source of every physical 
 comfort. The stream can never rise above its fountain. The de- 
 elopment of external prosperity is limited by a law as fixed as 
 ate; as inexorable as the law T s of the universe. It is a law of the 
 miverse. That law is that every physical and social development re- 
 hires an antecedent and proportional development of mind. We owe 
 ur social progress to the action of cultivated intellect. But we have 
 •een thriving upon borrowed capital. Let us at length pay our debts 
 o mind. Let us bethink ourselves of the more ample production of 
 he radical element, in the lasting progress and true glory of the state, 
 
 "What constitutes a state? 
 
 "]Not high raised battlements, or labored mound, 
 
18 
 
 "Thick wall or moated gate ; 
 
 "Not cities proud with spires and turrets crowned, 
 "Nor bays and broad armed ports, 
 
 "Where, laughing at the storm, rich navies ride; 
 "Nor starred and spangled courts 
 
 "Where low browed baseness wafts perfume to pride, 
 "No — men, high-minded men, 
 
 "With powers as far above dull brutes endued — 
 "In forest brake or den, 
 
 "As brutes excel cold rocks and brambles rude ; 
 "Men who their duties know 
 
 "But know their rights, and knowing dare maintain, 
 "Prevent the long aimed blow, 
 
 "And crush the tyrant while they rend the chain : 
 "These constitute a state, 
 
 "And sovereign law, that state's collected will, 
 "O'er thrones and globes elate 
 
 "Sits empress, crowning good, repressing ill. 
 "Smit by her sacred frown, 
 
 "I'he fiend dissension like a vapor sinks, 
 "And e'en the all-dazzling crown 
 
 "Hides his faint rays and at her bidding shrinks." 
 
 In the third place, an indispensable condition of the true prosperity 
 of our colleges is the favor of our churches. 
 
 The relation existing between our colleges and our churches is a 
 relation of mutual dependence. Religion is the natural ally of learn- 
 ing. They are both acting upon the same high element of civiliza- 
 tion. They bless society by blessing individual man. They secure 
 the progress of society by securing the progress of its individual 
 members. Of the Protestant church universal, if I may venture up- 
 on such an expression, it may be affirmed that colleges are the right 
 hand of her power. She was born in the revival of learning. She 
 has waxed with its triumphs and she would wane with its fall. It is 
 a condition vital to her existence that she propagate an intelligent 
 faith. When she ceases to do this she has fulfilled her mission. Ex- 
 ternal bond of union she has none. Her spirit disavows all compan- 
 ionship with the clamps and ligatures of a spiritual hierarchy. She 
 lives in light, and by light. Her bond of union is the bond of life, i 
 It is the vital circulation through all her members of the living ele- ■ 
 ment of her being. That element is light, religious light. We may 
 have faith without intelligence, and intelligence without faith. But 
 intelligence without faith is practical atheism, and faith without in- 
 telligence w 7 ill become practical heathenism. Such a religion may 
 have prodigious elements of power, but it is the power of frost, not 
 of fire, the power of despotism, not of liberty. Such a religion may 
 govern mind. It may crush it with penances, and scare it with 
 visions of purgatorial fires. It may gird its vitals with a strait-jacket 
 
19 
 
 of forms. It may bind it hand and foot with the cords of priestly 
 pretension. It may emasculate its manhood by the worming inter- 
 rogatories of the confessional; by the mummeries of sacred relics, of 
 holy coats and true crosses, and patristic bones; by the splendor of its 
 mitres, by the glitter of its gewgaws, by its rosaries, and incense and 
 images and pictures and indulgences to sin. Yea, it may administer 
 to it extreme unction, bury it in the grave of superstition, sprinkle its 
 sepulchre with holy water, erect a cross over it, and pronounce it 
 blessed. Then indeed is mind governed, governed effectually, gov- 
 erned to death. The priest is the master and the laic is the slave. 
 Such a religion may require colleges, but it needs them for heretics, 
 not for the faithful, for its priesthood, not for its people. It is a plant 
 of darkness. It sends out its root most rapidly amid the obscurities 
 of popular ignorance. It thrives most vigorously in the night of mind. 
 But is there no nobler method of subjecting the human soul to the 
 sway of religion than this! Yes. It may be governed by light; by 
 the inculcation of intelligent views of the laws of its own being, and 
 Df its relations to other minds, created and uncreated, on earth and 
 in heaven. The great condition of its civilization is thus met, for the 
 law of its government is the law also of its growth. The very prin- 
 ciple which governs it is the aliment of its life. 
 
 Here is vitality; here is development; here is progress; here is 
 subjection to wholesome law, as well human as divine, all secured 
 oy the propagation of one great principle — an intelligent faith. That 
 principle is to the Protestant church, casque, buckler and sword. It is 
 ler munition of rocks and her tower of refuge. It is her weapon of 
 Offence in the day of battle. She can achieve no conquests without 
 It is her very life. Strip her of it, and she is Protestant no 
 onger. She may have a name to live, but she is dead. From the 
 /ery constitution of Protestantism it cannot flourish, it cannot live 
 n an ignorant community. It will repel ignorance, or it will perish 
 tself. The whole history of Protestantism shows that its triumphs 
 )ver sin and ignorance have gone hand in hand. Inflame an ignor- 
 int community, anywhere, with religious zeal, stereotype its ignor- 
 mce, prohibit the progress of intelligence, and publish in its ears the 
 Treat Protestant doctrine of the right of private interpretation of the 
 tcriptures, and w T hat have you done 1 You have opened Pandora's 
 dox, and no man on earth can predict the result. 
 
 You may have reproduced the peasant war of Thuringia, the sedi- 
 ious ravings of the rabble rout of Munster, the delirious visions of 
 he Fifth Monarchy men of England, the fooleries of Millerism, the 
 mpostures and crimes of Mormonism, unheard of combinations, it 
 
20 
 
 may be, of stupidity, violence, fanaticism and fraud; you may have 
 called into being other Muenzers and Bockholts and Venners and 
 Matthiases and Jo. Smiths; Protestantism, in any just sense of the 
 term, you have not propagated, you have not produced, and you can 
 never thus produce or propagate it. 
 
 Let now the Protestant church in the west survey her position and 
 her work. That position is no longer among a homogeneous peo- 
 ple. The providence of God has thrown her upon the great moral 
 battle field of the world. If I may borrow a grouping for the picture, 
 I would say, every shade of political sentiment, every hue of religious 
 faith, almost every people on earth has here its representatives. 
 The " New England Puritan," the " Irish Jesuit," the "English Mon- 
 archist," the "American Republican;" the "gay Frenchman," the 
 "plodding German," the "voluptuous Italian," the "law-abiding 
 Scotchman," the "passionate Spaniard," the "calm Quaker," are 
 here thrown together and commixed. Every grade of intelligence, 
 from the most abstruse learning to the most unlettered ignorance, 
 and these extremes compounded with religious and political preju- 
 dices by no definite law, may be here found. In the midst of such a 
 people, and surrounded by such influences, does the Protestant church 
 at the west find herself. This is her position. What now is her 
 work 1 If I were to speak in keeping with the usual figure of speech, 
 to which I have already referred, I should say, conquest. I do not like 
 the figure. It sometimes makes a false impression. It implies hos- 
 tility. It savors of arrogance. That is not the spirit of the Protes- 
 tant church. She is not arrogant. She claims no perfection. She 
 claims only, by the evolutions of Providence, to be in possession of 
 the great principle of individual progress, the principle which, by an 
 infinite progression in its action, of which she has as yet felt but the 
 beginning, may continue to purify her own members, whilst it blesses 
 the world. Protestantism is hostile to nothing but ignorance and 
 sin. It regards the family of man as a mighty brotherhood; a broth- 
 erhood "dissevered and belligerent" now, but hereafter to be one 
 and harmonious. It aims to reunite the broken links of fraternity, to \ 
 disarm discords, to prevent collisions, to neutralize antipathies. How 
 then may the work of the Protestant church, at the west, be described! 
 It is not simple conservatism; it is not hostility. Aggression that k 
 work of necessity implies, but it is the aggression of light and love. I 
 It maybe summed up in one word, assimilation; the assimilation of 
 foreign elements to its own body, and of the whole to Christ. The ' 
 great means by which she is to accomplish it, the only means by 
 
21 
 
 which it can ever be accomplished, is the propagation of an intelli- 
 gent faith. If the mass of mind, upon which this principle may be 
 brought to act, in the west, be surveyed, it will be found in a state 
 most favorable to its success. A mighty, though silent, disruption of 
 the social elements in Europe has precipitated upon us an avalanche 
 of mind. But it is not a dead mind, crushed beneath the weight of 
 old opinion. It is not a paralytic mind, smitten and shaken with the 
 palsy of despotism. The providential contact of heterogeneous opin- 
 ions has aroused it to intense action, to a fierce effervescence. One 
 sentiment it possesses common to all its parts, and only one, the love 
 of civil liberty. This is the sentiment, which has summoned it from 
 the four winds and made it one. Behold, in this, the nucleus of a Prot- 
 estant crystalization, ready formed to your hand. Behold the stand- 
 point, upon which it may plant its lever. Old opinions and preju- 
 dices and affections, the product of another hemisphere and of different 
 political and religious systems, opinions fatal to individual freedom 
 and progress, may it is true exist, in the same bosom, with that love 
 of liberty which is throwing upon us the fugitive victims of transat- 
 lantic despotism. But they can coexist only in the absence of light; 
 just as hostile armies, to employ an illustration of the bishop of 
 Dublin, may unwittingly encamp together in the dark. Let us try 
 upon such minds the sun-light of the great Protestant principle. God 
 jiever threw upon the hands of any human beings an enterprise more 
 magnificently grand, more full of glorious promise to Christendom and 
 to man, than that, whose trumpet-call, in this valley, summons, and it 
 should thrill, the slumbering energies of the Protestant church. The 
 pulpit, the press, the school, the academy, the college, — Protestant 
 instruments all and equally. But if that church values the others, 
 let her beware how she neglects the college. The power of the 
 pulpit is a prodigious power. It is the most august and potent moral 
 engine ever w 7 ielded by human hands. No other human power can 
 compare with it. It acts upon the profoundest sympathies of hu- 
 manity. It moulds the deepest convictions of the soul. It can bat- 
 ter down thrones and it can build them up. It can undermine re- 
 publics and it can establish them. It presses upon mind as the at- 
 mosphere presses upon matter. It acts upon society as wind acts 
 upon water, and, beyond any other human power, it can agitate its 
 lowest depths. But it is not the pulpit radiating heat alone, it is 
 not the pulpit giving off merely wind, it is the 1L ht-beaming pulpit 
 only which can penetrate, assimilate and erect into a spiritual or- 
 ganism the mental elements upon which it acts. If, without the 
 
22 
 
 college, the pulpit can in any sense be compared to a sun, it is the 
 sun in eclipse, 
 
 "shorn of its beams, 
 "Shedding disastrous twilight. n 
 
 Let no denomination of Protestant christians imagine that it can 
 accomplish its work without the aid of the college. It may overrun 
 territory, but it cannot hold it. It may mark men with its name, but 
 it cannot penetrate them with its spirit. The religion of true Prot- 
 estantism is not a mere impulse; it is not the transit of a mere wave 
 of excitement over the mind; it is the religion of intelligence, the 
 religion of principle, the religion of truth, discussed, digested, defend- 
 ed, understood. This religion will stand, for it has lodged itself in 
 the noblest and most enduring attributes of the soul. The next wave 
 of counter excitement, the next gust of fanaticism, of error, or temp- 
 tation, will sweep the other away. To propagate a religion of prin- 
 ciple the pulpit must be furnished with workmen who need not be 
 ashamed; men who can grapple with mind, who understand its laws; 
 men who can not only capture the soul, but who can seize its helm 
 and bring it into port, and then anchor it forever, with cables of an 
 iron logic, upon the rock of eternal truth. The college is the natural 
 ally, the necessary auxiliary of the Protestant pulpit. The same is 
 true of its relation to the press. It is equally true of the academy 
 and the school. Wherever the great principle of Protestantism has 
 prevailed, it has prevailed by employing these agencies. In the very 
 nature of things, it cannot accomplish its blessed triumphs without 
 them. 
 
 I hold it therefore as a principle not to be confuted; that every 
 Protestant church is bound by the law of its existence to sympathize 
 with the college. The support of the college is just as obligatory as 
 the support of the pulpit. It should place that support, I do not say 
 upon its list of charities, for it needs other support than mere pecu- 
 niary aid from the church, but upon its list of essential and inviola- 
 ble duties. I do not move the question of the mode in which the ex- 
 ternal relations of the college to the church shall be adjusted. On 
 this point there may be room for a diversity of judgment. With 
 some collegiate institution, I solemnly believe every Protestant 
 church is bound, by the very law of its being, to sympathize and co- 
 operate. The true prosperity of the one is the measure of the true 
 prosperity of the other. The church must throw upon the college 
 the influence of her prayers. She must breathe into it, her own spirit- 
 ual life, else it is not truly prosperous. She must throw into its bosom 
 her most promising youth, else it cannot be truly prosperous. She 
 
2a 
 
 must be willing to spare, in order to officer it, her best and strongest 
 men, else it cannot be truly prosperous. She must provide them 
 with the necessary means for disciplining, developing and furnishing 
 mind; with books, with apparatus, and with the means of progress in 
 every field of intellectual labor, else it cannot be truly prosperous. 
 In a w T ord, she must take the college, with the pulpit, into her heart 
 of hearts ; watch over the welfare of both, with the same unsleeping 
 love, baptize them both with the same spirit, invoke upon them both 
 the same blessings, and throw around them both the shield of the same 
 holiness. The healthful action of the college is essential to popular 
 intelligence, and popular intelligence is essential to Protestantism. 
 The watchword of every Protestant should therefore be, religion and 
 intelligence. These elements are to the constitution of the Protestant 
 church, what liberty and union are to the constitution of our country. 
 With a mere substitution of terms, I may with equal emphasis apply 
 to the one, if indeed it is allowable to quote them at all, the words 
 which a great man has employed in regard to the other. I may ex- 
 press the fervent desire, " that my eyes may never behold the banner 
 of the Protestant church bearing for its motto the miserable inter- 
 rogatory — what is all this worth? nor those other words, of delusion 
 and folly, religion first and intelligence afterwards ; but every where, 
 spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample 
 folds, that other sentiment, dear to every true Protestant heart, re- 
 ligion and intelligence, now and forever, one and inseparable." 
 
 Gentlemen of the Board of Trustees : 
 
 The first presiding officer of the institution 
 committed to your charge has been removed, by the Providence of 
 God, from your service to another sphere of usefulness. He is one 
 whom I honor as a father, whom I love as a man, and whom I vener- 
 ate as an able and faithful minister of Christ. Were my personal 
 relations to him other than they are, I "might speak with more free- 
 dom than would now be proper, in bearing testimony to the self- 
 sacrificing zeal and fidelity with which for ten years he discharged 
 the duties of the office to which you had called him. In resigning that 
 office, he acted in obedience to a necessity which he considered im- 
 perative. But whilst the reasons of the step have commended them- 
 selves to your judgment and received your sanction, I doubt not that 
 you, that this community, that all the friends of the institution, will 
 sympathize with me in expressing a feeling of deep regret for hia 
 loss. His love for the college, however, and his confidence in it* 
 success remain unabated, and no one regrets more deeply than him- 
 
24 
 
 self his inability to be present to-day, in order to give expression to 
 these sentiments, and to bid a final and affectionate farewell to 
 yourselves, to his brethren in the ministry, and to a community 
 among whom he has so long labored and prayed, and from whom he 
 has received so many tokens of approbation and respect. 
 
 In assuming the post to which you have seen lit to call me, having 
 been already for thirteen years in your service, I have little to say, per- 
 sonal to myself, save that in consenting to be transferred to it, from 
 a more secluded sphere of labor, as grateful to my taste and feelings, 
 as it was better suited to my capacities, I have, perhaps unwisely, 
 obeyed the judgment of others rather than my own; and I now ap- 
 proach its solemn responsibilities with faltering footsteps and a 
 trembling heart. 
 
 I believe the college to have been established upon correct prin- 
 ciples, and in obedience to unmistakable indications of the Provi- 
 dence of God. I believe therefore that it will live, and accomplish 
 a work of high beneficence to man. I have been present and wit- 
 nessed your management of the institution from its origin. That 
 management, as a whole, has my most hearty approbation. You 
 have ever aimed to make it, in fact, what it professed to be. 
 You did not call it a college, by name, till it possessed, in reality, 
 all the necessary attributes of such an institution. And in giving 
 it these attributes, none who have not been engaged in a similar work, 
 can fully appreciate the anxieties, the expenditure of time, the men- 
 tal labor, and the pecuniary sacrifice to which you have been subject- 
 ed. The trial has been severe. It has been long protracted, and it 
 is not yet terminated. But faint and fatigued, though you may be, 
 you will not abandon it. When Zeuxis was asked, why he was so 
 long in painting a picture, he replied, I paint in along time, and for 
 a long time. Gentlemen, I know you do not forget, you never will 
 forget, that you are laying colors upon the canvass of time to be 
 gazed at by posterity. The men of the present may not be fully ap- 
 preciate your labors; but the men of the future will bless them. 
 They who are laboring judiciously and successfully to found a college 
 upon correct principles and with large and sober views, are leaving 
 "foot-prints on the sands of time;" foot-prints pointing towards 
 heaven, which the lapse of a single generation will harden into im- 
 perishable rock. 
 
 What nobler indications of having lived, lived usefully, lived for 
 man, lived for God, can any man leave behind him, than you, and 
 those who are co-operating with you, are now tracing, not upon the 
 stony pages of the earth's strata, but upon the adamantine leaves of 
 
human civilization. Neither the review of the past, nor the aspect 
 of the present, should discourage us. If our progress has been slow, 
 there has been progress still. And, all things considered, it has not 
 been slow. In thirteen years, the institution under your care has 
 risen from a simple school to a college, which in the annual average 
 of its graduates, I believe, ranks as second in the state. It can point 
 already to a goodly company of alumni. Their sympathies are with 
 you in your work. I can see, in this audience, the familiar faces of 
 many of them, who have made their annual pilgrimage to greet the 
 mother whom they love, and to receive afresh her blessing. God 
 of that mother, bless them one and all ! 
 
 The sympathy of the people of this r.om milT1 it y j s w i t h you. They 
 have given you a recent and noble demonstration of it. The rising 
 walls of yonder edifice present a monument of that sympathy, a sym- 
 pathy none the less cheering that it was self-prompted. Am I wrong 
 in saying that I know the people of Washington county too well not 
 to believe, that in another year, an iron tongue from its conspicuous 
 tower, will proclaim, every hour in the twenty four, that this noble 
 and much needed work of charity is complete? The sympathies of 
 the good and benevolent throughout the land, so far as a correct 
 knowledge of your labors and plans has extended, are with you. I 
 surely need only recall to your mind the humble offerings of multi- 
 tudes of true hearted friends, the noble charities of a Train, a Wil- 
 liams, a Williston, without which your undertaking would long since 
 have perished, to beget in you the assurance that the finger of God is 
 touching and will touch other hearts; that in addition to the benefac- 
 tors whom he has already given to your enterprise at the west, whose 
 names, for fear of misconstruction, I forbear to mention, he will call 
 other servants of his to your support, just as many and just as mu- 
 nificent as its true interests shall require; that he can and will, if 
 need be, summon to your aid, even from our own state, the Law- 
 rences and Willistons and Appletons of the west. 
 ^ By a recent appointment you have filled the chair of chem- 
 istry and the natural sciences with one who, I doubt not, will prove 
 himself a diligent and successful laborer in the field of science, and 
 an acquisition and honor to the college. With the single exception 
 of the department of rhetoric, whose duties, for the present, can be 
 easily distributed, the remaining chairs of the several professorships 
 are now filled, filled with men sincerely devoted to the interests of 
 the institution, with men whose hearts are bound together by the 
 sympathies of a long companionship of labor in your service, by a 
 friendship of mutual confidence never, for a moment, interrupted by 
 
2G 
 
 a jar; men whom I know, and honor, and whose zeal and ability, as 
 teachers, have ever commanded my most sincere respect. 
 
 Well indeed do I understand that the means to meet the necessary 
 expenditures of such an establishment are not now at your command. 
 But remember the Orphan House of Halle. Remember the prayers 
 of Francke. They are at the command of that God for whose glory 
 in this enterprise you are laboring. Courage, then, honored fathers. 
 Courage, beloved brethren. We may not live to see the college re- 
 lieved from all pecuniary embarrassments. The sun of life of the 
 youngest in the boards of trust and instruction is already burning 
 in mid-heaven; and those of the elder already project around them 
 the shadows of evening from the mountains of death. We shall not 
 live to see the institution reach even the zenith of its usefulness — 
 but let us have faith in God, and rest assured that neither shall we 
 live to see it perish. 
 
 " Let us then be up and doing, 
 " With a heart for any fate; 
 " Still achieving, still pursuing, 
 " Learn to labor and to wait." 
 
 ERRATA. 
 
 On page 7, in the 5th line from the top, for "sow" read sew. 
 
 On page 12, in the 19th line from the bottom, for "that a poet," 
 read than. 
 
 On page 13, in the 11th line from the top, for "whenever" read 
 where ever. 
 
 On page 15, in the 20th line from top, for "menas" read means. 
 

 K>1 
 
 o= 
 
 Ol =