cation with the people at large. Yet their ideas do at last permeate with more or less thoroughness every class of society and modify the thoughts and lives of men, to whom their names are unknown. This work of disseminating ideas is largely accomplished by those, who may not be, perhaps generally are not, entitled to the name of original thinkers, but who are properly called educated men. These are the intermediaries between the great original thinkers and the busy men who have not had the opportunity to secure a generous education. How many men in active business life know at first hand any of the works of Newton, Laplace or Gauss in mathematics, of Kant or Hegel or Locke in philosophy, of Stubbs or Ranke or Guizot in history, of Cuvier, of Asa Gray in science, or even of Darwin whose name is on almost every lip? And yet there is hardly one of these noted men whose thoughts cannot be traced in the common speech of plain men whom we meet every day in nearly every walk of life, even though the speakers themselves may be quite unconscious of the fact that their thinking is shaped and colored by the ideas of the illustrious investigators we have named. It would be most interesting to trace, if we were able, the course of a new idea as it flows out from the mind in which it originated and gradually makes its way through all the strata of society until it has affected more or less the mode of thinking of nearly every intelligent mind in our western nations which share each other's intellectual life. It were in vain to attempt this in detail. But one thing seems certain, that the new idea is taken up by men sufficiently educated to appreciate its worth, and proclaimed and repeated by them in manifold forms and in its varied relations to other thought and to every-day life until presently in whole or in part it has become more or less familiar to thousands. Every newly discovered truth, thus like a gospel, finds disciples ready to run with swift feet and loving hearts to spread it through the nations.

This useful work of the popular diffusion of the benefi

cent thoughts of the great masters has been largely accomplished by men who like you have been bred in the higher institutions of learning, in college or in university, somewhere "in the still air of delightful studies." It is a work which truly belongs to you, and to which you may properly aspire as one of the worthiest functions of the educated man of our times. You should "stir up the gift" which is in you in order to accomplish this task. You may well be generous with whatever learning you may have gained, because learning is one of the few things, the giving of which to others does not impoverish, but rather enriches the giver. Every one of you is called to be a teacher, a preacher, a distributor of learning to others who may not have had access to it. To do this successfully requires a measure of tact and skill. It calls for a modest bearing on your part and a quick and warm sympathy with the everyday life of those whom you are to reach. An assumption of great wisdom is as fatal to your influence as it is without foundation in fact. What you can yet have learned, however valuable it may be, is after all nothing to be vain about. And one of the first and most helpful lessons which you will learn in actual contact with the world is that plain and unlettered men have by experience learned many things of consequence, of which you are ignorant and for which you might be glad to exchange some of your book learning. Do not be ashamed to confess this to others and to learn of them what they can well teach you. By this very act you will find the way open to render to them whatever assistance you can furnish them in their intellectual training. Of what inestimable service has one scholarly man or woman often been to a neighborhood by the stimulating and refining influences incidentally extended in the ordinary intercourse of life. The horizon of how many minds has such a person enlarged! How many has he fired with zeal for broader culture! How many children has he incited to secure a generous education! Who does not know what a part the clergymen of New

England played in the intellectual as well as in the moral development of the country towns? Their association with the boys of the rural parishes filled the classrooms of the colleges with eager students. Hardly less marked was the influence of the college bred lawyers in diffusing everywhere that broad knowledge of political history and of constitutional law which has made the country town meetings the safeguard of our national liberty and virtue. Who can fail to recognize the salutary agency of the country physician in kindling in many a household an enthusiasm for the sciences, which constitute the substance of medical knowledge? And how largely does the teacher have in his hand the making of all the children who are under his care! An argument against the support of a university by the State is sometimes based on the fact that in the very nature of things only a very small portion of its people can study in its halls. But really there are few who do not reap the benefits of its instructions through the many who are trained under its roof. There is hardly a school in this State which is not the better nor a township in it which is not the more intelligent, because this University has for nearly half a century been sending out its graduates into every part of this commonwealth. This institution would not, if she could, and she could not, if she would, confine the benefits of her work to those whom she has matriculated. She exhorts and charges you as her representatives to perform the high duty of sharing with others the gifts you have received from her hands, so that through you she may teach and leaven the communities in which you may be called to work.

VI. In what I have said thus far I have especially dwelt on stirring up and using for the help of others the intellectual gift, though the importance of developing true character has been implied. But I wish now to direct attention particularly to stirring up the moral and spiritual gifts, with which you have been endowed. This is as imperative a duty as the development of your mental gifts

and a more important one, if indeed these duties can properly be separated and compared. I fear that many who do set out in active life with a purpose to enlarge and stimulate their mental growth, yet cherish no very distinct purpose to rise to loftier moral and spiritual heights. When they come in contact with the world, their experiences are very apt to quench any faint aspirations which they may have cherished for attaining a higher plane of character. They often find that their ideals of conduct are already more exalted than those of the great mass of men with whom they have to do. They hear men who have become hardened and blunted in the fierce competitions and conflicts of business life ridiculing the high aims of the young as too nice and too delicate for the stern trials of ordinary experience and predicting that such aims will soon be abandoned by them. They hear much said of the unpractical moral theories of teachers and preachers which are pronounced to be good enough for recluses and missionaries and women and children, but which cannot be applied to the exigencies of men in the court house, on change, in professional rivalries, in politics. There are few things more painful and trying to a man of high moral ideals and of sensitive conscience than the shock which his moral nature often receives when he first encounters these disparaging comments on the ideas and purposes which he has cherished as his best treasure and when he finds that men of influence and power, whose names he has always heard spoken with respect, conform to usages, which he with his notions of right and wrong cannot but condemn. The temptation to him to lower the standards of action rather than to raise them is very sore. "What am I" he may naturally ask himself, "that I should assume that I am wiser or better than these men of experience and of recognized position? Have I not possibly been in error? At any rate, since I am to make my way, if at all, in a community whose standards are practically determined by them, am I not compelled to accept their maxims? If I

attempt to swim against the stream, shall I not wear myself out and accomplish nothing? If I am as good as most of the men about me, is that not about all that can be asked of me?" We know the answers that too many are easily led to give to these questions which are forced upon their minds. Men are too often inclined to accept the ethical standards which they find prevailing about them rather than to apply a searching test to those standards and to abandon them when found to be wrong.

Sad as it is to see the intellectual development of men stop at the time of their graduation, it is yet a sadder spectacle which we are sometimes called to witness, of the moral decline of men, who in their University career cherished the noble and ingenuous aims, which so often brighten with promise the years of early life. One sometimes meets such, whose faces have grown hard in expression, whose souls have grown pinched and greedy and selfish, whose lives that once gladdened our hearts with the apparent predictions of generous fruitage for the world, have shrivelled up into a narrow existence and have yielded little that is worthy to themselves or to any one else. They may by sharp ways have heaped up riches or by intrigue and chicanery have gained place or power, but their lives are failures, and when they are gone, no one rises up to call them blessed.

The experience of the ages has been continually adding fresh emphasis to that startling question of our Lord, which he meant should ring in men's ears throughout all the centuries, "what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own life," his spiritual being. It is an appalling fact, which we have only to open our eyes to recognise, that men do so starve out their spiritual nature that practically here and now it becomes dead, responding not even to the appeals of God himself, kindling with no holy desires or aspirations, being without hope and without God in the world. Our pitying hearts build hospitals for those whose physical nature is wrecked, they