Go forth and join in the labor you are fitted for. If you have a truth, utter it; if you have had superior privileges, impart to others; if you have an insight into principles of conduct, stand for them; if you have a trained eye and a deft hand, use your skill. Externalize the powers of your being; find outward expression for your inward thought.
Thank God for a courageous man, a true Anglo-Saxon man, a man whose convictions are deeply rooted, and who guards them as his very life. Heroes, philanthropists, and martyrs are his exemplars. He has a work to do, and he enters upon it as his fathers battled for the right. The sensualist, the dreamer, and the fatalist lie supine, are lulled by the summer breeze, and gaze upon the drifting panorama of clouds with playful imagination. The man of duty marches forth and takes the fixed stars for his guide.
The educated young man of to-day has every reason to thank the stars under which he was born. Behind him is the teaching of the civilized world—the poetry and art of Greece, the laws and institutions of Rome, the growth of Christianity, the Mediæval commingling of forces and evolution of rare products, the Renaissance, the religious and political emancipation, invention, science, art, poetry, and philosophy. Behind him is the history of the Anglo-Saxon race, its courage and deeds of valor, its profound earnestness, its stern ideals. Behind him is Puritan New England and liberty. Around him lies the new land of promise with its natural blessings of air, sun, mountains, and plains, with its mineral wealth and industrial possibility, with its people of pride, energy, intelligence, and high enthusiasm. Before him lie the development of a great and unique civilization, a wonder of material progress, a rare growth of poetic power and free spirit under new and fostering conditions. Before the youth of this State is the possibility of success in any pursuit, of rise to influence, of contributing to the formative period of a new commonwealth. There is every inducement to be a courageous, energetic, and ideal man. Those who have made our history, most of them, are still living, but their work is nearly accomplished, and you will take up the responsibility. May our great system of public instruction contribute to fill the State in coming decades with noble men and women who are not afraid of ideals.
Man may deceive others, but is shamed at the tribunal of his own better judgment. A celebrated lecturer describes what he calls the “Laughter of the Soul at Itself,” “a laughter that it rarely hears more than once without hearing it forever.” He says: “You would call me a partisan if I were to describe an internal burst of laughter of conscience at the soul. Therefore let Shakespeare, let Richter, let Victor Hugo, let cool secular history put before us the facts of human nature.” We may refer to one illustration: Jean Valjean, one of Hugo’s characters, an escaped and reformed convict, was about to see an innocent man condemned for his own act, through mistaken identity. He tried to make himself believe self-preservation was justifiable, and as the mental struggle between Self and Duty went on he seemed to hear a voice: “Make yourself a mask if you please; but, although man sees your mask, God will see your face; although your neighbors see your life, God will see your conscience.” And again came the internal burst of laughter. The author proceeds: “Valjean finally confessed his identity; and the court and audience, when he uttered the words, ‘I am Jean Valjean,’ ‘felt dazzled in their hearts, and that a great light was shining before them.’”
Science does away with superstition and many an error, it makes known the laws of nature, it applies them to practical ends, it is the handmaid of civilization, it emphasizes the welfare of humanity, it shows the working of the mechanism within the field of demonstrative knowledge, the finite, knowable land of the real. Science exceeds its purpose only whenever it proclaims that there is no field of spiritual knowledge, glimpses of which may be seen by souls that dwell upon the heights. Some would measure the earth with a carpenter’s rule, forgetting Him “Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, and meted out Heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance.”
Carlyle says: “Religion in most countries is no longer what it was, and should be—a thousand-voiced psalm from the heart of man to the invisible Father, the fountain of all goodness, beauty, truth, and revealed in every revelation of these; but for the most part a wise, prudential feeling, grounded on mere calculation, a matter, as all others now are, of expediency and utility; whereby some smaller quantum of earthly enjoyment may be exchanged for a larger quantum of celestial enjoyment.” But again and more truly he says: “Religion cannot pass away. The burning of a little straw may hide the stars of the sky, but the stars are there and will reappear.”
Once a pupil asked to be excused from exercises in which choice extracts from the Bible were sometimes read, simply because they were from the Bible; but he listened with pleasure to good thoughts from other books, though these books contained many a palpable error. Aside from the view which makes the Bible the Sacred Book of the Christian believer, he had not thought of its value to a large portion of the human race. He had not regarded it in the light of history and philosophy. The ideals for which the Hebrew race has stood, the wonderful prophecies of great and far-seeing men, the grand poems of faith and promise, the words of condensed wisdom, the maxims for right living, the Beatitudes, the teaching of the Parables, the spirit of adoration, the moral code, the allegorical wisdom never had been contemplated apart from the religious view, against which he had imbibed a prejudice.
Permit me to speak from the standpoint of history and philosophy. The Christian religion is a chief source of our peculiar civilization, of the character of our institutions, of the growth of altruism, of the equality of man, of the supreme worth of the inner motive, of charity, of liberty. It has given the world the highest examples of pure and devoted lives.