1871.—Rev.William Miller.
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lamp of knowledge, and that in the midst of a land that, much as we may wish it otherwise, we cannot deny to be comparatively a land of darkness.
These duties divide themselves naturally into two classes: those that you still owe to yourselves upon the one hand, and those that you owe to your country and your fellow-men upon the other.
With regard to yourselves, remember that your work as seekers after truth is not ended. We say indeed, Your duty as seekers after truth. and it is rightly said, that you have completed your education; but there are different kinds of completeness, and the sense in which you can deem yourselves completely educated requires to be attentively considered. There is a completeness like that of the giant tree, around whose blossoms myriad tribes of insects sport and whose pyramid of leaves spreads wide a welcome shade from the fierceness of noonday sun. That tree has reached the highest development of which its nature makes it capable. It stands complete. But there is a completeness too like that of the seed, which, whatever it may become hereafter, is far from having realized the ideal of its being. Yet in its own fashion, the seed too is complete It has so drawn in the life of its parent stem that it is fitted to become in the common course of nature such in all respects as that parent is. The germ of all is already in it. Every organ that is needed to make it complete even in the fullest sense, may now be developed out of it. Let it only be placed in the proper conditions, let it only in these conditions preserve its own vitality, and it is certain to grow into all that it was designed to be, without any new external aid. It is the latter completeness, not the former, that can be affirmed of your education. Complete in the widest sense it certainly is not; but we trust that you have within yourselves all that is essential for enabling it to become so. The years you have spent under the care of this University have left in you, as we hope, not only a certain small stock of information, but a certain love of knowledge for its own sake, a certain receptivity to truth, and above all the aptitude to grasp and to make your own whatever may become the subject of your thoughts hereafter. If indeed there be among you any whose only care has been to keep in mind the bare facts they have been instructed to attend to, and who are satisfied now to let study drop, because their trials have been sustained and their position is secure, for such these bye-gone years have been, at all events in the highest sense, useless if they have not been worse. Such may,