Now, to be able to desire to see things as they are, whatever their relations to ourselves may be, and to speak of them simply as they appear to us, is one result of the best training of the intellect, which in the world of thought and opinion gives us that sweet indifference which is the rule of saints when they submit the conduct of their lives wholly to divine guidance. Why should he whose mind is strong, and rests on God, be disturbed? It is with opinion as with life. We cannot tell what moment truth will overthrow the one and death the other; but thought cannot change the nature of things. The clouds dissolve, but the eternal heavens remain. Over the bloodiest battlefields they bend calm and serene, and trees drink the sunlight and flowers exhale perfume. The moonbeam kisses the crater's lip. Over buried cities the yellow harvest waves, and all the catastrophes of endless time are present to God, who dwells in infinite peace. He sees the universe and is not troubled, and shall not we who are akin to him learn to look upon our little meteorite without losing repose of mind and heart? Were it not a sweeter piety to trust that he who made all things will know how to make all things right; and therefore not to grow anxious lest some investigator should find him at fault or thwart his plans? As living bodies are immersed in an invisible substance which feeds the flame of life, so souls breathe and think and love in the atmosphere of God, and the higher their thought and love the more do they partake of the divine nature. Many things, in this age of transition, are passing away; but true thoughts and pure love are immortal, and whatever opinions as to other things a man may hold, all know that to be human is to be intelligent and moral, and therefore religious. A hundred years hence our present machinery may seem to be as rude as the implements of the middle age look to us, and our political and social organization may appear barbarous,—so rapid has the movement of life become. But we do not envy those who shall then be living, partly it may be because we can have but dim visions of the greater blessings they shall enjoy, but chiefly because we feel that after all the true worth of life lies in nothing of this kind, but in knowing and doing, in believing and loving; and that it would not be easier to live for truth and righteousness were electricity applied to aerial navigation and all the heavens filled with argosies of magic sail. It is not possible to love sincerely the best thoughts, as it is not possible to love God when our aim is something external, or when we believe that what is mechanical merely has power to regenerate and exalt mankind.
"It takes a soul
To move a body; it takes a high-souled man
To move the masses ... even to a cleaner sty;
It takes the ideal to blow a hair's-breadth off
The dust of the actual—Ah, your Fouriers failed,
Because not poets enough to understand
That life develops from within."
He who believes in culture must believe in God; for what but God do we mean when we talk of loving the best thoughts and the highest beauty? No God, no best; but at most better and worse. And how shall a man's delight in his growing knowledge not be blighted by a hidden taint, if he is persuaded that at the core of the universe there is only blind unconscious force? But if he believe that God is infinite power working for truth and love, then can he also feel that in seeking to prepare his mind for the perception of truth and his heart for the love of what is good and fair, he is working with God, and moves along the way in which his omnipotent hand guides heavenly spirits and all the countless worlds. He desires that all men should be wiser and stronger and more loving, even though he should be doomed to remain as he is, for then they would have power to help him. He is certain of himself, and feels no fear nor anger when his opinions are opposed. He learns to bear what he cannot prevent, knowing that courage and patience make tolerable immedicable ills. He feels no self-complacency, but rather the self-dissatisfaction which comes of the consciousness of possessing faculties which he can but imperfectly use. And this discontent he believes to be the infinite God stirring within the soul. As the earthquake which swallows some island in another hemisphere disturbs not the even tenor of our way, so the passions of men whose world is other than his, who dwell remote from what he contemplates and loves, shake not his tranquil mind. While they threaten and pursue, his thought moves in spheres unknown to them. He knows how little life at the best can give, and is not hard to console for the loss of anything. There is no true thought which he would not gladly make his own, even though it should be the watchword of his enemies. Since morality is practical truth, he understands that increasing knowledge will make it at once more evident and more attractive. Hatred between races and nations he holds to be not less unchristian than the hatred which arms the individual against his fellow-man. It is impossible for him to be a scoffer; for whatever has strengthened or consoled a human soul is sacred in his eyes; and wherever there is question of what is socially complex, as of a religion or a civilization, there is question of many human lives, their hopes, their joys, their strivings, their yearnings, disappointments, agonies, and deaths; and he is able to perceive that in the ports of levity there is no refuge for hearts that mourn. Does not love itself, in its heaven of bliss, turn away from him who mocks? The lover of the intellectual life knows neither contempt nor indignation, is not elated by success or cast down by failure; money cannot make him rich, and poverty helps to make him free. His own experience teaches him that men in becoming wiser will become nobler and happier; and this sweet truth has in his eyes almost the elements of a religion. With growing knowledge his power of sympathy is enlarged; until like Saint Francis, he can call the sun his brother and the moon his sister; can grieve with homeless winds, and feel a kinship with the clod. The very agonies by which his soul has been wrung open to his gaze visions of truth which else he had never caught, and so he finds even in things evil some touch of goodness. Praise and blame are for children, but to him impertinent. He is tolerant of absurdity because it is so all-pervading that he whom it fills with indignation can have no repose. While he labors like other men to keep his place in the world, he strives to make the work whereby he maintains himself, and those who cling to him, serve intellectual and moral ends. He has a meek and lowly heart, and he has also a free and illumined mind, and a soul without fear. He knows that no gift or accomplishment is incompatible with true religion; for has not the Church intellects as many-sided and as high as Augustine and Chrysostom, Dante and Calderon, Descartes and Da Vinci, De Vega and Cervantes, Bossuet and Pascal, Saint Bernard and Gregory the Seventh, Aquinas and Michael Angelo, Mozart and Fénelon? Ah! I behold the youthful throng, happier than we, who here, in their own sweet country,—in this city of government and of law with its wide streets, its open spaces, its air of freedom and of light,—undisturbed by the soul-depressing hum of commerce and the unintellectual din of machinery, shall hearken to the voice of wisdom and walk in the pleasant ways of knowledge, alive, in every sense, to catch whatever message may come to them from God's universe; who, as they are drawn to what is higher than themselves, shall be drawn together, like planets to a sun; whose minds, aglow with high thinking, shall taste joy and delight fresher and purer than merriest laughter ever tells. Who has not seen, when leaden clouds fill the sky and throw gloomy shadows on the earth, some little meadow amid the hills, with its trees and flowers, its grazing kine and running brook, all bathed in sunlight, and smiling as though a mother said, Come hither, darling?
Such to my fancy is this favored spot, whose invitation is to the fortunate few who believe that "the noblest mind the best contentment has," and that the fairest land is that which brings forth and nurtures the fairest souls. When youthful friends drift apart, and meet again after years, they find they have been living not only in different cities, but in different worlds. Those who shall come up to the university must turn away from much the world holds dear; and while the companions they leave behind shall linger in pleasant places or shall get money, position, and applause, they must move on amid ever-increasing loneliness of life and thought. Xanthippe would have had altogether a better opinion of Socrates had he not been a philosopher, and the best we do is often that for which our age and our friends care the least; but they who have once tasted the delights of a cultivated mind would not exchange them for the gifts of fortune, and to have beheld the fair face of wisdom is to be forever her votary. Words spoken for the masses grow obsolete; but what is fit to be heard by the chosen few shall be true and beautiful while such minds are found on earth. In the end, it is this little band—this intellectual aristocracy—who move and guide the world. They see what is possible, outline projects, and give impulse, while the people do the work. That which is strongest in man is mind; and when a mind truly vigorous, open, supple, and illumined reveals itself, we follow in its path of light. How it may be I do not know; but the very brain and heart of genius throbs forever in the words on which its spirit has breathed. Let this seed, though hidden like the grain in mummy pits for thousands of years, but fall on proper soil, and soon the golden harvest shall wave beneath the dome of azure skies; let but some generous youth bend over the electric page, and lo! all his being shall thrill and flame with new-born life and light. Genius is a gift. But whoever keeps on doing in all earnestness something which he need not do, and for which the world cares hardly at all, if he have not genius, has at least one of its chief marks; and it is, I think, an important function of a university to create an intellectual atmosphere in which the love of excellence shall become contagious, which whosoever breathes shall, like the Sibyl, feel the inspiration of divine thoughts.
Sweet home! where Wisdom, like a mother, shall lead her children in pleasant ways, and to their thoughts a touch of heaven lend! From thee I claim for my faith and my country more blessings than I can speak,—
Our scattered knowledges together bind;
Our freedom consecrate to noble aims.
To music set the visions of the mind;
Give utterance to the truth pure faith proclaims.
Lead where the perfect beauty lies enshrined,
Whose sight the blood of low-born passion tames.
And now, how shall I more fittingly conclude than with the name of her whose generous heart and enlightened mind were the impulse which has given to what had long been hope deferred and a dreamlike vision, existence and a dwelling-place,—Mary Gwendolen Caldwell.