effected in all the leading high schools of that country clearly demonstrate both the practicability and the efficacy of such a union.

I shall offer but a single consideration more. No people on the face of the earth is so much indebted to the Bible as our own. It has always been the friend and guardian of freedom, the Magna Charta of civil and religious liberty. Whenever it has been permitted to exercise its legitimate effects in forming public opinion, that opinion has been on the side of equal rights, and all the powers of despotism could not prevail against it. It was one of the chief agents that prompted the early settlement of this country, and has always exerted a controlling influence in her councils. De Tocqueville, in his great work on America, observes, "the greatest part of British America was peopled by men who, after having shaken off the authority of the Pope, acknowledged no other religious supremacy; they brought with them into the New World a form of Christianity, which I cannot better describe than by styling it a democratic and republican religion. This sect contributed powerfully to the establishment of a democracy and a republic; and from the earliest settlement of the emigrants, politics and religion contracted an alliance which has never been dissolved." Again, he says, "In France, I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other; but in America, I found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country."+ Says Mr. Webster, "the American colonists brought with

* The religion of France is Roman Catholicism; hence its opposition to liberty.

† De Tocqueville's Repub. U. S. A., vol. 1, pp. 328 and 337.

them from the Old World, a full portion of all the riches of the past in science, in art, in morals, religion and literature. The Bible came with them, and it is not to be doubted, that to the free and universal use of the Bible, it is to be ascribed that in that age, men were much indebted for right views of civil liberty. The Bible is not only a book of faith and of doctrine, but it is also a book which teaches man his individual rights, his dignity, and equality with his fellow men."* It is to this "free and universal use of the Bible," that we are indebted for the most perfect civil and religious liberty the world has ever witnessed, and which no other nation ever could have possessed without abusing it. It was the Bible that inspired the colonists with courage to resist aggression, with fortitude to bear up under the hardships of a protracted and unequal contest, and when they had secured an acknowledgment of their rights, it dictated that mutual concession and fraternal regard, which united them, with all their jarring interests, into one great brotherhood; it has preserved them hitherto, united, prosperous and happy; and nothing less than its conservative power can perpetuate, in its beauty and glothe majestic temple of the American Union.

ry,

The consequence of a general-a national disregard of the Bible and its religion, by a people whom it had contributed to make free, is a matter of history; for almost within our own day, a great nation-great in power, in wealth, in commerce, in arms; great in learning, in science, and in every art, abandoned her religion, and cast the Bible, with its stern requirements and sacred obligations, "to the moles and the bats;" and behold her now! a beacon and a warning for us,

*Bunker Hill Address.

for the world:-a nation with too much intelligence to be enslaved, with too little virtue to be free. She has more than once wrested the cup of freedom from the incautious hand of power, and pressed it to her eager lips, but speedily intoxicated with the draught, dashed it to earth again. And now she is reeling like a frantic bacchanal, and when the wild delirium. shall have passed, she will perhaps relapse once more into the torpor of monarchy, or of empire. "France," exclaimed the dying Prime Minister, Perrier, "France must have religion!" And Cousin, one of her ablest advocates of popular education, affirms "religious and moral instruction to be the first want of a people. Without this, every other education is not only without real utility, but in some respects dangerous."

A free people must be a religious people; a sacred regard for justice, for their own rights and the rights of others, for truth as it is revealed from heaven, can alone moderate the fierce passions of the human heart, subdue the animosities of conflicting interests, and secure that unanimity of purpose and of action which is indispensable to the perpetuity of free governments.

"He is the freeman whom the truth makes free,

And all are slaves beside."

The Bible, then, claims the careful attention and study of the student, as an aid to mental discipline, and as a book of ancient and oriental literature; for its exhaustless treasures of history, poetry, and eloquence; for its superior excellence as a standard of useful and polished literature; for its deep and pervading influence upon the language, laws, institutions and customs, of all Christian nations; and for the purity of its morality, and the unsullied sanctity of its religion. Who then will deny it the rank of a classic, in every system of education?

YOUNG GENTLEMEN OF THE GRADUATING CLASS:

The period of your pupilage having now terminated, you are about to leave the halls of science, to abandon, in some measure, perhaps, the peaceful pursuits of literature, and participate in the more stirring affairs and sterner realities of active life. The diligence and success with which you have prosecuted your studies, the upright deportment and gentlemanly demeanor which have marked your college course, inspire the hope that you carry with you minds well trained to study, and moral characters moulded to the high standard of firm religious principle. I shall not, therefore, indulge in protracted advice; but perhaps a suggestion or two will be remembered hereafter.

1. In whatever pursuit you may engage, bear in mind the familiar aphorism, "industry is the secret of success." When the necessity of conning stated lessons no longer exists, one powerful incentive to intellectual effort is removed, and the mind often recoils from vigorous and systematic exertion. It also suffers many a golden moment, many a fleeting hour to pass unimproved. Whatever profession you may choose, prosecute it with untiring energy, and success will certainly crown your labors. Patient industry will reach the goal, and win the prize, while inconstant genius lags behind.

But what I would especially urge is, the careful husbanding of time-the scrupulous improvement of odd moments, those fragments of eternity, which ordinarily elapse unawares, unemployed. They are but fractions, to be sure, of little value separately, but collectively, they make up life, and constitute the sum of existence. The want of time for mental improvement is a common complaint, even among educated And it is a remarkable fact, that men of the least actual business, always have the least leisure for any valuable

men.

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purpose. Whereas, men of industrious, business habits, and well regulated minds, have a time for toil, a time for recreation, and a season for every duty. The professional man must seize upon these intervals of business, these broken hours, which people in general esteem of no value, for the purpose of acquiring that miscellaneous information which college text-books, and the ordinary routine of business cannot give, and which is indispensable to every individual who aspires to the reputation of an intelligent man. Endeavor to gather information from every source within your reach, from books, from experience and observation, from the records of the past and the indications of the present, from the volume of nature and from the Book of books,

"Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait."

2. Again, young gentlemen, endeavor to consecrate all your talents and attainments to the service of society, your country and mankind. To live exclusively for one's self, is a sordid aim, unworthy the aspiration of a soul endued with sympathy for others' woe. A heathen poet could say, "homo sum, et humani a me nil alienum puto;" and shall those whose minds have been illumined by the pure radiance of Christianity, cherish a benevolence less expansive? Those who have enjoyed the advantages of education, are presumed to know its value, and to be capable of appreciating its effects on mankind. And is the scholar, he who is reveling in all the pleasures a chastened and refined intellect can yield, excusable for lying supinely by, and basking in inglorious ease, without making any effort to improve the moral and intellectual condition of others? Is such a course in accordance with the spirit of benevolence which pervades the whole circle of letters? Surely not. Knowledge is diffusive as the light of the