"If wisdom was not born with us, neither will it die with us. There will be something left to know. Our facts will be tested, our theories probed, and our assertions exploded by better minds than ours. If it be true, as Bacon says, 'prudens interrogatio dimidium scientiæ,' it is also true, 'imprudens assertio excidium scientiæ.' We are in these days treated to 'demonstrations' which scarcely rise to the level of presumptions, but, rather, of presumption. There is an accumulation of popular dogmatism that is very likely doomed within a century to be swept into the same oblivion with the 'Christian Astrology,' of William Lilly and the 'Ars Magna' of Raymond Lully—a mass of rubbish that is waiting for another Caliph Omar and the bath-fires of Alexandria.
"It will not answer to mistake the despotism of hypothesis for the reign of law, nor physical law for the great 'I AM.' True thinkers must respect other thinkers and God. They cannot ignore the primal utterances of consciousness, the laws of logic, nor the truths of history. Foregone conclusions are not to bar out the deepest facts of human nature, nor the most stupendous events in the story of the race. Hume may not rule out the settled laws of evidence the moment they touch the borders of religion; nor may Strauss, by the simple assertion that miracles are impossible, manacle the arm of God. Comte may not put his extinguisher upon the great underlying verities of our being, nor Tyndall jump the iron track of his own principles to smuggle into matter a 'potency and promise' of all 'life.' Huxley cannot play fast and loose with human volition, nor juggle the trustiness of memory into a state of consciousness, to save his system; nor may Haeckel lead us at his own sweet creative will through fourteen stages of vertebrate and eight of invertebrate life up to the great imaginary 'monera,' the father and mother of us all. It will be time to believe a million things in a lump when one of them is fully proved in detail. We have no disposition, even with so eminent an authority as St. George Mivart, to denominate Natural Selection 'a puerile hypothesis.' We will promise to pay our respects to our 'early progenitor' of 'arboreal habits' and 'ears pointed and capable of movement,' when he is honestly identified by his ear-marks, and even to worship the original fire-mist when that is properly shown to be our only Creator, Preserver, and Bountiful Benefactor.
"Meantime, as a late king of Naples was said to have erected the negation of God into a system of government, not a few eager investigators seem to have assumed it as a basis of science. And so we reach out by worship 'mostly of the silent sort' toward the unknown and unknowable, the 'reservoir of organic force, the single source of power,' ourselves 'conscious automatons' in whom 'mind is the product of the brain,' thought, emotion, and will are but 'the expression of molecular changes,' to whom all speculations in divinity are a 'disregard of the proper economy of time,' and to whom, also, as one of them has declared, 'earth is Paradise,' and all beyond is blank. But it was Mephistopheles who said,—
"'The little god of this world sticks to the same old way,
And is as whimsical as on creation's day;
Life somewhat better might content him,
But for the gleam of heavenly light which thou hast lent him.
He calls it Reason—thence his power's increased
To be far beastlier than any beast.
Saving thy gracious presence, he to me
A long-legged grasshopper seems to be,
That springing flies and flying springs,
And in the grass the same old ditty sings.
Would he still lay among the grass he grows in.'
"But even the man of theories might grant that the scheme of one great, governing, guiding, loving, and holy God is a theory that works wonders in practice for those that heartily receive it, and is a conception of magnificence beside which even a Nebular Hypothesis with all its grandeur grows small. And the man of facts may as well recognize what Napoleon saw on St. Helena,—the one grand fact of the living power of Jesus Christ in history, and to-day; a force that is mightier than all other forces; a force that all other forces have in vain endeavored to destroy, or counteract, or arrest; a force that has pushed its way against wit and learning and wealth and power, and the stake and the rack and the sword and the cannon, till it has shaped the master forces of the world, inspired its art, formed its social life, subsidized, its great powers, and wields to-day the heavy battalions; a force that this hour beats in millions of hearts, all over this globe, with a living warmth beside which the love of science and art is cold and clammy. Surely it would be not much to ask for the docility to recognize such patent facts as these. And I must believe that any mind is fundamentally unhinged that despises the profoundest convictions of the noblest hearts, or speaks lightly of the mighty influence that has moulded human events and has upheaved the world. It has, in its arrogance, cut adrift and swung off from the two grand foci of all truth, the human and the divine.
"Of the several qualities,—the wakefulness, precision, fullness, equipoise, and docility—that form, in other words, the motion, edge, weight, balance, and direction of the forged and tempered intellect,—I might give many instances. Such men as Thomas Arnold and Mr. Gladstone instantly rise to the thoughts,—the one by his truth-seeking and truth-finding spirit moulding a generation of English scholars, the other carrying by the sheer force of his clear-cut intellect and magnanimous soul the sympathies of a great nation and the admiration of Christendom. But let me rather single out one name from the land of specialties and limitations,—Barthold George Niebuhr, the statesman and historian. Not perfect, indeed, but admirable. See him begin in his early youth by saying,—'I do not ask myself whether I can do a thing; I command myself to do it.' Read the singular sketch of his intellectual gymnastics at twenty-one, spurring himself to 'inward deep voluntary thought,' 'guarding against society and dissipation,' devoting an hour each day to clearing up his thoughts on given subjects, and two hours to the round of physical sciences; exacting of himself 'an extensive knowledge of the facts' of science and history; holding himself alike accountable for minute 'description,' 'accurate definitions,' 'general laws,' 'deep reflection,' and 'distinct consciousness of the rules of my moral being,' together with what he calls the holy resolve—'more and more to purify my soul, so that it may be ready at all times to return to the eternal source.' How intensely he toiled to counteract a certain conscious German one-sidedness of mind, visiting England to study all the varied phenomena of its robust life, and yet writing home from London, at twenty-two,—'I positively shrink from associating with the young men on account of their unbounded dissoluteness.' His memory, not inferior to that of Macaulay or Scaliger, he made strictly the servant of his thinking. Amid all the speculative tendencies of Germany, he became a man of facts and affairs. Overflowing with details, he probed the facts of history to the quick, and felt for its heart. Fertile in theory, he preserved the truth of science so pure as 'in the sight of God,' not 'to write the very smallest thing as certain, of which he was not fully convinced,' nor to overstrain the weight of a conjecture, nor even to cite as his own the verified quotation he had gained from another. Practicing on his own maxim to 'open the heart to sincere veneration for all excellence' in human act and thought, not even his profound admiration for the surpassing genius of Goethe could draw him into sympathy with the heartlessness and colossal egoism of his later career. In the midst of public honors he valued more than all his delightful home and literary life, and his motto was Tecum habita. Surrounded by Pyrrhonism, and bent by the nature of his studies toward skeptical habits, how grandly he recovered himself in his maturity, and said,—'I do not know what to do with a metaphysical God, and I will have none but the God of the Bible, who is heart to heart with us.' 'My son shall believe in the letter of the Old and New Testaments, and I shall nurture in him from his infancy a firm faith in all that I have lost or feel uncertain about.' And his last written utterance, signed 'Your Old Niebuhr,' contains a lament that 'depth, sincerity, originality, heart and affection are disappearing,' and that 'shallowness and arrogance are becoming universal.' After all allowances for whatever of defect, one can well point to such a character as an illustrious example of true and manly culture.
"Shall I say that such a culture as I have endeavored to sketch, it is, and will be, the aim of Dartmouth College to stimulate? I cannot, at the close of this discourse, compare in detail its methods with the end in view, and show their fitness. The original and central college is surrounded by its several departments, partly or wholly professional, each having its own specialty and excellence. The central college seeks to give that rounded education commonly called Liberal, and to give it in its very best estate. It will aim to engraft on the stock that is approved by the collective wisdom of the past, all such scions of modern origin as mark a real progress. By variety of themes and methods it would stimulate the mental activity, and by the breadth of its range it would encourage fullness of material, both physical and metaphysical, scientific and historic. It initiates into the chief languages of Europe. By the close, protracted concentration of the mathematics, by the intuitions, careful distinctions, and fundamental investigations of intellectual and ethical science, and by the broad principles of political economy, constitutional and international law, as well as by a round of original discussions on themes of varied character, it aims to induce precision and mastery. And all along this line runs and mingles harmoniously and felicitously that great branch of study for which, though often severely assailed because unwisely defended or inadequately pursued, the revised and deliberate judgment of the ablest and wisest men can find no fair substitute,—the study of the classic tongues. Grant that it may be, and often is, mechanically or pedantically pursued. Yet, when rightly prosecuted, its benefits are wide, deep, and continuous, more than can be easily set forth—and they range through the whole scale, rising with the gradual expansion of the mind. It comprises subtle distinctions, close analysis, broad generalization, and that balancing of evidence which is the basis of all moral reasoning; it tracks the countless shadings of human thought, and their incarnation in the growths of speech, and seizes, in Comparative Philology, the universal affinities of the race: it passes in incessant review the stores of the mother tongue; it furnishes the constant clew to the meaning of the vernacular, a basis for the easy study of modern European languages, and a key to the terminology of science and art; it familiarizes intimately with many of the most remarkable monuments of genius and culture; and it imbues with the history, life, and thought which have prompted, shaped, and permeated all that is notable in the intellectual achievements of two thousand years, and binds together the whole republic of letters. To such a study as this we must do honor. We endeavor to add so much of the esthetic and ethical element throughout as shall give grace and worth. And we crown the whole with some teaching concerning the track of that amazing power that has overmastered all other powers, and stamped its impress on all modern history. The college was given to Christ in its infancy, and the message that comes down through a century to our ears, sounds not so much like the voice of a president as of an high-priest and prophet—the 'burden of Eleazar:' 'It is my purpose, by the grace of God, to leave nothing undone within my power which is suitable to be done, that this school of the prophets may be, and long continue to be, a pure fountain. And I do, with my whole heart, will this my purpose to my successors in the presidency of the seminary, to the latest posterity; and it is my last will, never to be revoked, and to God I commit it, and my only hope and confidence for the execution of it is in Him alone who has already done great things for it, and does still own it as his cause.' God has never yet revoked the 'last will' of Wheelock. The college is as confessedly a Christian college as in the days of her origin; and in the impending conflict she sails up between the batteries of the enemy with her flag nailed to the mast and her captain lashed to the rigging.
"The college stands to-day in its ideal and the intention of its managers, representative of the best possible training for a noble manhood. And I may venture to say, here and now, that if there be anything known to be yet lacking to the full attainment of that conception, if anything needs to be added to make this, in the fullest sense, the peer of the best college in the land, it will be the endeavor of the Trustees and the Faculty to add that thing.
"Dartmouth College is fortunate in many particulars. Fortunate in its situation, so picturesque and so quiet, fitted for faithful study, and full of healthful influences, physical and moral; fortunate in being the one ancient and honored as well as honoring college of this commonwealth; fortunate in enjoying the full sympathy of the people around and the entire confidence of the Christian community of the land; fortunate in the great class of young men who seek her instruction, with their mature characters, simple habits, manly aims, and resolute purposes; fortunate in a laborious Faculty, whose well-earned fame from time to time brings honorable and urgent calls to carry their light to other and wealthier seats of learning; fortunate in her magnificent roll of alumni, unsurpassed in its average of good manhood and excellent work, and bright with names of transcendent lustre. The genius of the place bespeaks our reverence and awe. For to the mind's eye this sequestered spot is peopled to overflowing with youthful forms that went forth to all the lands of the earth to do valiantly in the battle of life. Across this quiet green there comes moving again invisibly a majestic procession of the faithful and the strong, laden with labors and with honors. In these seats there can almost be seen to sit once more a hoary and venerable array of the great and good whose names are recorded on earth and whose home is in heaven. And over us there seems to hover to-day a great cloud of witnesses—spirits of the just made perfect. It is good to be here. I only pray that the new arm may not prove too weak to bear the banner in this great procession of the ages."