lectual progress has done something indirectly, yea, has done much, to arouse and guide your moral nature too. Besides the special training that some have had, you have all enjoyed more or less of general culture, in which you have come in contact with the words and thoughts of some among
Our spirits from their urns."
You have surely done more than arrive at a bare intellectual apprehension of their meaning. You have caught something of their spirit too. To you has been unlocked that treasury of invigorating thought of which Shakespeare and Milton stand the guardians. The very tongue that they and their fellows have ennobled, is a channel whereby moral life must flow into those who study it with sympathy. Some portions too of the wide field of history you have traversed. There you have met with men that have contended for freedom and for truth at the danger of life or at the cost of it : with those too that amidst perplexity and peril, unsupported by any breath of popular applause, have toiled on in some righteous cause until its worth grew clear to all, and empires ennobled became the memorials of their lives. Such are the men you have admired, not those whose self-centred existence brought them it may be wealth, or ease, or power, but came to an end without a single impress left for good on the destinies of mankind.
It cannot be all in vain, the acquaintance that you thus have made with
Those starry lights of virtue, that diffuse
Through the dark depths of time their vivid flame."
In the light that streams from them you perceive it to be the lofty thing it is, to labour and to wait for great unselfish aims. Thus we would have you live, according to the pure and holy instincts that these bright examples have from time to time called forth within you. Thus we would have you live, for whether your influence be great or small, and even if little success attend your most devoted efforts, you will thus in inmost spirit "claim kindred with the great of old."
Such then, gentlemen, are the duties arising from your present position that I would exhort you to discharge:—to labour for the acquisition of knowledge and of wisdom, in order that your intellectual being may grow into the glorious thing it is fitted to become; then to see to it that you employ in the service of men and for their good, all the skill and all the influence that through your own development you thus will gain.
