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 From tlif raiiiliiig by J. Culiii Forbes. 
 
CORNELL UNIVERSITY 
 
 MEMORIAL EXERCISES 
 
 IN HONOR OF 
 
 HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE 
 
 OF THK 
 
 UNIVERSITY ; 
 
 ITHACA, N. Y. 
 
 PUBI,ISHED BY THE UNIVKRSITY 
 
 1898 
 
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INTRODUCTORY 
 
 Henry Williams Sack died on Satur- 
 day, the eighteenth of September, 1897. 
 
 At a meeting of the executive committee 
 of the Board of Trustees of Cornell Univer- 
 sity, on the same day, called for the purpose of 
 making the sad announcement, it was resolved 
 that the famil}^ of Mr. Sage be requested to 
 permit his interment in Sage Chapel, and 
 that the\' be further requested to permit the 
 removal of the remains of Mrs, Sage to the 
 same place ; that all University exercises be 
 suspended on the day of the funeral services 
 of Mr. Sage, and that all the University build- 
 ings be closed ; and furthermore that the Pres- 
 ident be requested to telegraph the members 
 of the Board of Trustees residing outside of 
 Ithaca, notifying them of the death of Mr. 
 Sage, and calling a special meeting of the 
 
 OK THK 
 
Board for the purpose of attending the funeral 
 services. 
 
 At this special meeting, held on the twen- 
 tieth of September, the daj' of the burial of 
 Mr. Sage, the following was presented and 
 adopted : 
 
 " The Board of Trustees have learned with deep 
 sorrow of the death of their venerable and venerated 
 Chairman, and they desire to conve}' to the members of 
 his family the assurance of their sympath}- with them 
 in tlieir great bereavement. 
 
 The lifelong friend of the Founder of Cornell Uni- 
 versity, Mr. Sage became a Trustee on June 30, 1870, 
 and on June 16, 1875, he was elected to succeed the 
 Founder in the Chairmanship of the Board of Trustees. 
 At that time he was resident in Brooklyn, but in 1880 
 he removed to Ithaca — the home of his boyhood and 
 early manhood — where with ever-increasing delight in 
 the beauty of the scenery he spent the remaining years 
 of his life. He had thus for seventeen 5-ears been 
 locally associated, and for twenty-seven jears ofhcially 
 connected with Cornell University. And the record of 
 his labors and services and gifts to the University dur- 
 ing that period constitutes a chapter which will long 
 be remembered in the historj- of higher education in 
 this country. 
 
 It is impossible for anyone who has not seen Mr. 
 Sage day after day, year in and year out, driving about 
 
the Campus, while he directed the erection of buildings, 
 the laying out of grounds, and the innumerable and 
 multifarious details of repairs and alterations, to fonn 
 any just conception of the enormous amount of work 
 which the material face of the University, as we see it 
 to-daj-, owes to his skilled and experienced hand. At 
 the same time he kept himself as thoroughly conver- 
 sant with the financial condition and operations of the 
 institution as wath his own personal business, and in 
 large part he bore the responsibility' of financial man- 
 agement and control. Nor was he, man of aiTairs 
 though he was, unacquainted with the needs and aspi- 
 rations of the various departments of instruction, whose 
 heads always found him an intelligent, a sympathetic, 
 and a helpful patron. 
 
 The objects of Mr. Sage's benefactions coincide 
 with the supreme ends of civilization. Sage College is 
 the embodiment of the ideal of justice to womajikind , 
 which few of the most progressive races have yet suc- 
 ceeded in realizing. To tr^dh, to bcajcty, and to goodyiess 
 he has erected enduring monuments in the Sage School 
 of Philosophy, the Museum of Casts, and that Chapel 
 which the piety of his wife first suggested to his willing 
 mind. But, while Mr. Sage was pre-eminently devoted 
 to those highest spiritual ends and fostered with peculiar 
 care the departments most directly charged with them, 
 his wide intelligence and comprehensive sympathies 
 embraced the University, in the entirety of its ends, 
 functions, and appointments. While his total gifts 
 aggregated $1,175,290.79, more than half of that sum 
 
Avns devoted to the Library building and endowment, 
 which is, as he meant it to be, the radiating centre of 
 tlic intillcctual life of the I'niversity. 
 
 Greater even than his gifts, was the boon which 
 Mr. Sage conferred by his management of the lands 
 which the foresight of the Founder had saved for his 
 University. It seems more than accidental, we may 
 in all reverence describe it as providential, that while in 
 all the States of the Union only one man — Ezra Cornell, 
 of New York — had the prescience to foresee the event- 
 ual appreciation of the value of the lands granted by 
 Congress for educational purposes, and at the same 
 time the wisdom to devise the means for husbanding 
 them, in this State also, among his friends, in the per- 
 son of his successor as Chairman of the Board, there 
 was a man whose training and experience, whose imag- 
 ination and judgment, qualified him to realize for the 
 University out of that landed estate more than even 
 the Founder ever dreamed of. 
 
 By his services and donations, Mr. Sage has writ 
 his name large in the historj' of Cornell University. 
 They entitle him to per]:)etual recollection as our Second 
 Founder. And they will often be recalled by the gen- 
 erations who follow us as they continue to enjoy the 
 fruits of this benefactor's liberal sowing. But we over 
 whom Mr. Sage presided in this Board, and all who 
 knew him personally, cannot help feeling that more 
 precious even than his gifts and labors was the spirit in 
 which he performed them — the absolute disinterested- 
 ness of the man, unalloyed by any taint of self-seeking 
 
or egotism, his deep and solemn sense of duty, the 
 breadth and tenderness of his sympathies, his unquench- 
 able hopefulness, his piety, his faith in the moral and 
 intellectual progress of mankind, his earnest and effec- 
 tual interest in the cause of education, and his love and 
 devotion to this University as a great and beneficent 
 agency for promoting the highest ends of civilization 
 and the best welfare of the Republic. In this spirit of 
 our departed friend, and in all the noble qualities of 
 his heart and mind and character, he has left us a her- 
 itage of priceless worth as a model and exemplar for 
 successive generations of Cornellians. ' ' 
 
 It was then resolved that the Board of 
 Trustees attend the funeral services of Mr. 
 Sage in a body ; and, furthermore, that a com- 
 mittee of five be appointed to report at a future 
 meeting recommendations and plans for a suit- 
 able memorial to be erected to the memory of 
 Mr. Sage. 
 
 At the regular fall meeting of the Board 
 of Trustees, on October thirtieth, this commit- 
 tee reported their recommendations, which 
 were, first, that at a suitable time memorial 
 exercises in honor of the memory of Mr. Sage 
 be held at the University ; secondly, that a 
 portrait of Mr. Sage be painted for one of the 
 Sage buildings ; and, thirdly, that for the recep- 
 
tion of the remains of Mr. and Mrs. Sage a 
 memorial chapel be added to the east end of 
 the Sage Chapel. It was thereupon resolved 
 that this report be accepted, and the recom- 
 mendations therein adopted. 
 
 On November second, at a meeting of the 
 executive committee of the Board of Trustees, 
 it was resolved that the report of the commit- 
 tee on a memorial to the late Chairman of the 
 Board of Trustees, which was referred by the 
 full Board to the executive committee, be 
 referred to a special committee, with full 
 power as to the memorial exercises and por- 
 trait, and to perfect plans for the enlargement 
 of the Chapel and for the Sage memorial. 
 
 February twenty-second, 189S, was fixed 
 upon for the memorial exercises. They took 
 place in the great hall of the University Ar- 
 mory, and included the acceptance of the por- 
 trait of Mr. Sage, painted b}' Mr. J. Colin 
 Forbes, The programme, in full, was as 
 follows : 
 
 Chorale — "Wie schon leucht uiis der Morgenstem" 
 
 University Band 
 
 Hymn — "O worship the King" (haut 
 
Prayer 
 Rev. Professor Charles Meixen Tyler 
 
 Address 
 Opening Remarks President Schurman 
 
 Memorial Address 
 Henry Williams Sage Judge Francis M. Finch 
 
 Hj'mn — "Lord of all being ; throned afar" Holmes 
 
 Address 
 Mr. Sage and Co-education at Cornell 
 
 Miss M. Carey Tho^l\s 
 
 Address 
 Mr. Sage and Liberal Culture at Cornell 
 
 Professor Goldwin Smith 
 
 Address 
 Mr. Sage and the Religious Life at Cornell 
 
 Rev. Dr. Lyman Abbott 
 
 Hymn — "O God, our help in ages past" Watts 
 
 Benediction 
 Rev. Dr. Stephen H. Synnott 
 
 Chorale — "Ein' feste Burg ist uuser Gott" 
 
 University Band 
 
MEMORIAL EXERCISES 
 
 PRAYER 
 
 P.Y THE REV. CHARLES MELLEN TYLER, D.D. 
 
 Almighty and ever-blessed God, Creator, 
 Father, whose temple is the universal heart of 
 man, whose revelation is clearly made in the 
 reason, affections, and aspirations of human- 
 ity, we rejoice that all peoples of the earth are 
 Thy people, and no one nation is dearer to 
 Thee than another. Thou art careful not of 
 Th}^ greatness, but of Thy love ; Thy majesty 
 is not that of dominion, but that of a Father 
 whose incessant and inevitable purpose to bless 
 us is the inspiration to all progress, to all 
 quest of truth and all righteous conduct. 
 
 How blest are we, O God, to live under the 
 empire of infinite Goodness, to be called to 
 
II 
 
 liisfli thouoflit and sublime action in alliance 
 with Thee who hast committed to us the des- 
 tinies of the world, and wilt aid us in advanc- 
 ing them ! Thou hast summoned us to the 
 difficult but illustrious privilege of building 
 the structure of human knowledge and of fos- 
 tering the social, moral, and religious welfare 
 of our race. 
 
 We desire in humility to accept this high 
 and holy mission, not exaggerating our wis- 
 dom or sacrifices, not rating too highly our 
 importance as being finite, to the Infinite, yet 
 not unmindful of the dignity of thought and 
 free will which Thou hast conferred. 
 
 And as, to-da}^, personal gratitude and 
 public gratitude unite in paying our tribute to 
 the memories of the good who have departed 
 from earth, as in thought we live again in 
 their presence, and feel the pulsation of their 
 unselfish and benevolent energy, we ask that 
 we may have grace to justify their hopes, to 
 rightly administer the trusts they have com- 
 mitted to us, and carry to grateful fulfilment 
 the high ideals they have cherished. 
 
 Though dead they yet speak to us b}-- 
 their generous deeds. The curtain of mystery 
 
12 
 
 which divides them from our sight sways ready 
 to part and admit us to a reunion with them 
 in far higher scenes of happiness and service. 
 
 And may the thought of him who was the 
 latest to be called home to the skies, whose 
 loving service has imposed upon us so great a 
 debt of gratitude, inspire in our breast a true 
 and lasting pathos, and exalt to eloquent com- 
 memoration this hour's discourse. 
 
 We implore Thy perpetual blessing upon 
 the President of the University, that he may 
 have granted to him health, strength, and long 
 life, and upon the whole corps of instruction and 
 administration, that all things may be so or- 
 dered in Thy governance, that this institution 
 may be a source of perpetual blessing to hu- 
 manity, that eminent men may look back with 
 pride and affection to this Mother of learning 
 which has sent them forth to the high service 
 in church and state in which they are engaged. 
 
 And we beseech Thee also that over the 
 youth who are now within these halls the arch 
 of Divine favor may be extended, that their 
 future lives may be as prosperous and happ}- 
 as their hopes to-day are radiant. Through 
 Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 
 
INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS 
 
 BY PRESIDENT SCHURMAN 
 
 On this day which marks the birth of 
 Washington it is a general custom to commem- 
 orate the heroes of the nation and to draw 
 from their example lessons of political wisdom, 
 of patriotism, and of civic virtue. In this place 
 we last year listened to an address on Chief 
 Justice Marshall by a distinguished member 
 of that august tribunal over which in his day 
 Marshall so grandly presided and in which 
 through the weight of his opinions Marshall's 
 genius has ever since been dominant. It is 
 good for us thus to hold converse with the 
 makers of the nation ; it is stimulating and 
 elevating to recall the wise principles, the 
 noble sentiments, the mighty deeds of the 
 men of old. It is not only a lesson in good 
 citizenship, but an inspiration to become good 
 
14 
 
 citizens. The vital essence of the Republic — 
 "its quickening and sustaining energ}- — is con- 
 centrated in its great men. It is a gift of 
 Providence for which we cannot be too devoutly 
 grateful that in the course of one short century 
 the American people should have been favored 
 with a Washington, a Jefferson, a Marshall, a 
 Lincoln, and a Grant. May the spirit of these 
 immortal patriots animate us who enter into 
 their heritage ! Ma}^ the students of this 
 Universit}' — who possess, with the aspiration 
 and hopefulness, the strength and energy, of 
 youth — here highly resolve that our Republic 
 shall be no mere name, but in fact a divine 
 commonwealth, a veritable civitas Dei ! And 
 to that end let me entreat you to cultivate in 
 yourselves the virtues of wisdom and magna- 
 nimity, of justice and liberty, of truth and 
 honor, of courage, self-sacrifice and self-control, 
 which alone have power to exalt a human 
 society above the herds of brutes and to invest 
 the history of nations with the interest and 
 pathos of a divine drama. 
 
 But it is not to laud the fathers of the Re- 
 public we have assembled to-day. Since our 
 last celebration of Washington's birthday, a 
 
private citizen, the friend and helper of ns all, 
 has been called from the bonnteons and benign 
 life he led here into the Unseen World. Onr 
 kind and generons patron was, I have said, a 
 private citizen. Yet his services and benefac- 
 tions to this University, of which he had been 
 for twenty-seven 3'ears a Trnstee and, since the 
 death of the Founder, the Chairman of the 
 Board of Trustees, made him in a sense a pub- 
 lic character, as they will certainly commend 
 his name and fame, among the nation's noblest, 
 to the grateful recollection of future genera- 
 tions. We owe it to posterity to preserve, so far 
 as art can render life, the visible appearance of 
 such a man. And the picture now before you, 
 which has been painted by Mr. J. Colin Forbes 
 on the commission of the Trustees, shows that 
 we have not been unmindful of this obligation. 
 I venture to remark that this admirable por- 
 trait, in which for the first time an artist has 
 succeeded in reproducing on canvas the min- 
 gled strength and geniality of the original, will, 
 as those who remember his features pass away, 
 become one of the most precious possessions of 
 the University. 
 
 We have assembled this morning to honor 
 
i6 
 
 the memory of our departed friend and patron. 
 We desire to review his life and character, to 
 picture the manner of man he was, and to recall 
 the service he rendered to this University. It 
 is not so much a public celebration as an occa- 
 sion for voicing the sentiment of our academic 
 fraternity. The new Chairman of the Board 
 of Trustees — ex-Governor Flower — is, unfor- 
 tunatel}^ for us, and to his own great regret, 
 separated from us by many thousands of miles ; 
 but he writes of his predecessor that he has 
 erected at this University "a monument that 
 will last for all time, continually doing good and 
 making the world better." The speakers whom 
 we invited to participate in our commemoration 
 are all connected with the University and all 
 friends of its late benefactor. Judge Finch and 
 Professor Goldwin Smith, honored members of 
 our Faculty, were both fellow laborers with the 
 Founder. Dr. Lyman Abbott has long been 
 one of our Universit}^ preachers, and he is now 
 pastor of that Brooklyn Church of which, dur- 
 ing the ministry of Henry Ward Beecher, our 
 departed friend was for many years an active 
 member. Miss Thomas, the President of Bryn 
 Mawr College, is a filial witness to the value of 
 
17 
 
 the higher education of women which the foun- 
 dation of Sage College made possible at Cornell 
 University. i.\s I have said it is a domestic 
 commemoration ; the speakers are all members 
 of the household. Onl}' one other person was 
 invited to join with us — a former Trustee of the 
 Universit}^ who has since been President of the 
 United States. But Mr. Cleveland answers 
 that it is impossible for him to be present "to 
 participate" (if I may read from his letter) "in 
 the manifestation of affectionate appreciation 
 of Mr. Sage's magnificent aid to higher educa- 
 tion and American culture." 
 
 And now I should yield this place to the 
 speakers of the day. It would be obviously 
 improper for me to forestall their remarks by 
 any reference to the themes assigned them. 
 But affection and friendship will not permit 
 me to be altogether silent ; and I crave your 
 indulgence for libert)^ of brief, if all too inade- 
 quate, utterance. It is now nigh thirteen years 
 since I first saw Mr. Sage. Though seventy 
 winters had already whitened his locks, he was 
 then a powerful and commanding personality ; 
 and it was manifest that his strength and tal- 
 ents had been enlisted by his heart in the ser- 
 
i8 
 
 vice of Cornell University. The last time I 
 saw him was on Tuesday, September 14th, 
 three days before his death. His form and 
 figure were somewhat reduced, and his physi- 
 cal strength much abated ; but his mind was 
 clear, his intelligence had something even of 
 its old keenness ; and his countenance — oh ! 
 how shall I describe the expression it bore ? 
 Purged of everj^thing temporal and earthl}^ 
 that face seemed to reflect the chastened and 
 mellow beauty of a soul touched already with 
 the dawning radiance of the celestial world. It 
 was a picture of glorified old age which I shall 
 never forget. In our conversation he opened 
 his heart in a way which it would not be proper 
 to speak of, but which was very touching at the 
 time, and which, with other manifestations of 
 his esteem and affection, I shall always treas- 
 ure among my most precious recollections. 
 
 I utter no vain regrets that a long and un- 
 usually active life has come, in the order of 
 nature, to its divinely appointed goal. 
 
 Men must endure 
 Their going hence, even as their coming hither : 
 Ripeness is all. 
 
 And indeed there was a kind of victorv over 
 
19 
 
 time and oblivion in the halo of our friend's old 
 age and in the honor, reverence, and affection 
 which crowned it. Yet the long day's work 
 was done ; the place of business and of coun- 
 sel knew him no more. If, therefore, I do not 
 moiirn over the final consummation, I cannot 
 but remember the man I knew and loved. It 
 was my privilege for a number of 3'^ears to en- 
 joy the intimate friendship and confidence of 
 Mr. Sage and to be in some measure his fellow 
 laborer in a work which we both believed to be 
 the highest that man can undertake. The edu- 
 cation and elevation of the race seems to be the 
 aim of human existence. For that supreme 
 object Mr, Sage wrought in this institution, I 
 was permitted to share his labors and his hopes. 
 And now that he is no longer here, I cannot 
 go about my daily occupation as though the 
 world were just the same. It is really poorer. 
 It has been impoverished by the withdrawal of 
 a noble and heroic soul, — a man wise, strong, 
 brave, loyal, sincere, friendly, and helpful. 
 Never again shall we rejoice in the light of 
 that eager eye, or draw inspiration from that 
 commanding presence, or feel the outflow of 
 that affectionate and tender heart. Yet I can- 
 
20 
 
 not forget that such things liave been and were 
 most precious. Dear Friend ! thy image is en- 
 shrined in the sacred places of memory. 
 
 "The souls of the righteous are in the 
 hands of God, and there shall no evil touch 
 tliem." 
 
 But on us who remain behind devolves the 
 weight of a heavier responsibility. The entire 
 existence of this University is measured by 
 the span of a single generation of mankind. 
 Planted thirty years ago, it was first nourished 
 by the self-sacrifice of the Founder and then 
 revivified by the afflatus of a larger life from 
 the self-devotion of him whom men will here- 
 after call the Second Founder. Under the 
 happy influence of these forces, with the co- 
 operation of Trustees and Faculties, and from 
 the initial and long continued impulse given 
 by the directing hand of the first President, the 
 University has, in the good providence of God, 
 attained a scope and achieved a distinction of 
 which I suppose no one had foreseen the 
 magnitude. This great trust is now committed 
 to us. Whether we are engaged in adminis- 
 tration, teaching, or studying, each one of us 
 is a sharer in it. And if we are to augment, 
 
21 
 
 or even to maintain, our fair inheritance, we 
 must be single-eyed, diligent, and faithful ; we 
 shall need great wisdom and prudence ; unity, 
 loyalt}^ and friendship are indispensable ; and 
 the end of our solicitude would be wanting 
 if this were not a school of good manners and 
 morals, of wisdom and reverence, of scholar- 
 ship, culture, and high intelligence. Let us 
 then, while the hour is fragrant with the mem- 
 ory of our great benefactor, dedicate ourselves 
 anew, \vith a union of minds and hearts and 
 hands, to the service of this University which 
 he served with such perfect devotion, such 
 undying love. 
 
MEMORIAL ADDRESS 
 
 BY JUDGE FRANCIvS MILES FINCH 
 
 We realize to-day that the choicest lesson 
 of humanity is a life well lived. It is our com- 
 mon experience, and so has been often said, 
 that no abstract theory ever wields the impres- 
 sive force of a concrete example. We ma}^ 
 reason about the elements of a noble charac- 
 ter, — as we do and must, — we may paint them 
 vividly with the brightest coloring of words, 
 we may set in array around them every argu- 
 ment for their excellence, and press home the 
 truth with warmth of enthusiasm and energy 
 of conviction, and yet when the words are said 
 the thought fades and blurs until some obvious 
 life gathers and masses it all into the steady 
 pressure of a constant example. I often think 
 that history is but massed biographies, for 
 those who investigate an age and seek to dis- 
 
23 
 
 cover and reproduce its essential character in- 
 variably seek out and study the typical lives 
 which crystallized into action the thought and 
 purpose of the time. They stand out on the 
 background of events living representatives 
 of their age, for all its good and evil, its tone 
 and temper, its color and mould, ran with their 
 blood, and were radiated out from the activities 
 of their lives. 
 
 But it is not always nor often that the 
 men who dominate an age, men of exceptional 
 genius or marvelous power, who absorb the 
 watch and wonder of the masses and tempt the 
 historian from his sober duty, — it is not these 
 who best represent their era, but the plainer and 
 average folk, — peasant and burgher, scholar 
 and citizen, — whose lives we try to understand 
 as types of their time. One cannot help watch- 
 ing the white foam flying from the crest of the 
 storm-wave, but it is the black-green mass of 
 the surge beneath that topples the iceberg and 
 wrecks the steamship on its way. There was 
 but one Washington. On this anniversary of 
 his birth we cannot remember him too well, 
 or shrine him too high, or recall too seriously 
 the grave and wise words of his Farewell. But 
 
24 
 
 though lie dominated the scene he did not con- 
 stitute it. Beneath him and upholding him 
 was the solid massing of the people ; their love 
 of liberty and determined will to have it ; the 
 cool daring which lined the fences of Lexington 
 and Concord with rustic rifles ; the unfaltering 
 patience which dragged bloody feet through 
 the snows of Valley Forge, 
 
 And so to-day it is not the life of a scarred 
 soldier or weary statesman which we have met 
 to remember, but the typical life of an Ameri- 
 can boy and an American man whose memory 
 is very dear to us all. 
 
 On a sad day of the autumn, when the vine 
 leaves were turning crimson and the ripe fruits 
 were falling and the skies sobbed with inclem- 
 ent tears, we followed to his grave one of the 
 Fathers of this University, — Henry Wil- 
 liams Sage. He is said to have come of a 
 sturdy and vigorous ancestry, blending the 
 brave and choleric blood which defended the 
 mountains of Wales with that of the Puritan 
 landing on the New England rocks that he 
 might worship God in his own sober and serious 
 way. If the Christianity planted among the 
 Britons under the protection of the Roman 
 
25 
 
 eagles fled for safety to the Welsh mountains, 
 there came a time when under the first Edward 
 that tempestiious little state, fringing the 
 stormy coast and fighting behind the fortress 
 of its rocks, was driven to submission, and 
 yielded a reluctant obedience to the British 
 crown . Thence onward it shared in the pressure 
 of that ecclesiastical tyrann}^ which drove to 
 Holland and then to Plymouth those stern 
 and devout and unsmiling dissenters who fled 
 from the domination of the bishops to the free- 
 dom of their Bibles. One of these is described 
 as the founder of the family in America, land- 
 ing on our shores more than two centuries ago, 
 and settling at Middletown in the valley of the 
 Connecticut. His descendants in a long line 
 seem at first to have kept near that locality ; 
 and it is not strange to find among them one 
 who led the charge of his company in the fight 
 on Bunker Hill, where an obstinate squad of 
 rustic rebels taught the unexpected lesson to 
 the contemptuous regulars from over the sea, 
 that a man might be an effective soldier though 
 a total failure on dress parade. 
 
 Among these descendants was born in 1 795 
 the father of him to whose memor}' we have 
 
26 
 
 devoted this day. That father was long settled 
 at Bristol, in Connecticut, and married the 
 daughter of another Puritan family whose de- 
 scendants are all about us, showing in their 
 lives the vigor and intelligence of their ances- 
 tral line, and whom we are glad to number 
 among our friends. In 1814 while our second 
 war was raging, more on the sea than on the 
 land, and in the first month of that stormy 
 year, Henr}^ W. Sage was born and began the 
 life which has recently ended. 
 
 I think I can see the boy as he grows 
 toward manhood, for there is a very serious 
 strain in his blood. Doubtless he had the love 
 of play like other boys, and looked into the 
 future with their magnificent confidence and 
 trust ; but we find him earh^ at the Academj^ 
 of his home taming down his high spirits and 
 the flashing of his ancestral temper to the 
 calmer duty of a preparation for Yale. How 
 well he did it I can guess — but do not know : 
 still less what might have been the trend of his 
 life if that early purpose had been fully accom- 
 plished. But something else was in store for 
 him better suited to the energ}^ and courage of 
 which as vet he mav have been but dimly con- 
 
27 
 
 
 scions. His plans of study and of a college 
 life were frustrated by the removal of his father 
 to the small but bus}^ village then nestling in 
 the valle}'^ below us, and little dreaming of 
 what in the future was to crown its overlook- 
 ing heights. Wh\' that change was made I 
 can imagine. The hard and unhopeful New 
 England life looked harder in the light shining 
 from the west, where more of opportunity was 
 supposed to await the builders who were push- 
 ing civilization beyond the lakes. Then, too, 
 the boy's maternal uncles were already here, 
 building up with Puritan economy and preci- 
 sion fortunes deemed large for those modest 
 days ; masters of an opportunity which they 
 thoroughl}' understood and through whose 
 doors lay the road to the activities of a business 
 life. But this New England 3'outh, fresh from 
 the charm of his books and from Academic 
 hopes and air, did not easily surrender his pur- 
 pose. He never surrendered one. Always it 
 had to be wrung from him. Here in his new 
 home he began the study of medicine. But 
 persistent Fortune, having its own aim and fol- 
 lowing its own road, though seeming to move 
 iDlindly, a second time intervened to thwart his 
 
28 
 
 professional plans. His health failed him. 
 His great strong lungs were cramped over his 
 books and demanded open air and freer play • 
 his muscles craved room to stretch themselves 
 and vigorous work to swell them into strength : 
 and his e3^es — perhaps a little weary — coveted 
 a wider sweep over broader zones than the 
 pages he forced himself to read. That settled 
 it. Accident and rebellious nature met him at 
 the forks of the road, as they often do. He had 
 reached that interesting and fateful moment 
 in a young man's life when he chooses his 
 work ; when of all the roads radiating from 
 his feet and ending far apart he must select 
 out one while yet unable to trace an^^ Some 
 open pleasantly, with lawn and roses at the 
 wayside : some rough and rugged, blocked by 
 boulders and cut by gorges : but all winding out 
 of sight, lost in the hills or blinded b}^ the for- 
 est, and leading to the unknown. Little wonder 
 that his eyes grow thoughtful and his step falls 
 slow, for he is saying farewell to his sheltered 
 youth and choosing his doubtful wa}- into the 
 stern world, not likely to pet him, more certain 
 to pound him into his allotted place. How- 
 much the pressure of circumstances, how much 
 
29 
 
 the instinctive bent of his disposition had to do 
 with his choice perhaps even he was never able 
 to say, but choose he did, and putting by his 
 books even if with some regret, he took the 
 chances of a business life, and began it with 
 his uncles on the docks and in the \varehouses 
 of what we still call the Inlet of the Lake. 
 
 It is difficult for us now to realize the old 
 stir and enterprise of that locality. We have 
 so grown accustomed to the slow decay of the 
 abandoned wharves, to a silence broken onh' 
 by the puff of the steam-tug bearing the sum- 
 mer citizen to the sleepy laziness of his cottage 
 on the lake, as to hear with surprise that it 
 was once all alive with the bustle and hurry of 
 a large internal commerce. It was ver}^ much 
 alive when the youth who had abandoned the 
 study of medicine entered there upon his busi- 
 ness career ; and we must bring it back to our 
 memories if we would understand many traits 
 of his character coming to the surface in this 
 formative stage of his life. 
 
 Let me tr}^ to recall the situation as it 
 existed in 1832 when his choice was made. It 
 was only three years earlier that the first loco- 
 motive on this Western Continent had come 
 
30 
 
 into use. In the State of New York, where 
 now one can hardl}^ go a mile without watch- 
 ing for possible death, there was but one rail- 
 road, and that onl}'' sixteen miles in length, 
 and joining the Mohawk at Schenectad}'- with 
 the Hudson at Albany. The sole reliance and 
 the grave problem of the da}- was water-car- 
 riage. Alread}' the grain and the plaster and 
 the farm products and even tar from the abun- 
 dant pines of this lake region, drawn over the 
 turnpike to Owego, were there loaded on ba- 
 teaux and floated down the Susquehanna till 
 the}-- found an Atlantic port at Baltimore ; but 
 the boats could never come back ; where they 
 stopped they were sold and stayed. The genius 
 of Clinton had built the Erie Canal and tied 
 with a thread of brown water the great lakes 
 to the great river and opened a way to the 
 metropolis. There came courage at last, as the 
 Mohawk had been bound to the Hudson with 
 a ribbon of iron, to link the Cajaiga with the 
 Susquehanna in the same manner and for the 
 same purpose ; and so the second railroad in 
 the State was built and led from the docks at 
 Ithaca to the river margin at Owego. You will 
 readilv observe that the only understood use 
 
31 
 
 of a railroad in those earl}' daj^s was to supple- 
 ment nature b}' joining separated waterways. 
 Nobody then dreamed that the iron rail was to 
 master and supersede the water channels which 
 had cut their way to the ocean with the wash 
 and grind of patient centuries. 
 
 And now we can see into what our New 
 England lad suddenly plunged when he began 
 the training of his business life. Something 
 new and con fusing surely. Boatmen and boats ; 
 boxes and bales ; barrels and bags ; coming and 
 going ; loading and unloading ; the ripple of 
 grain, the rumble of wheels, the crowding of 
 drays, the tangle of ropes ; not a moment to 
 spare and the days too short ; — these were 
 the young man's busy welcome. It took him 
 but a little while to see that somewhere there 
 w^as and must be a master, a brain and will to 
 command, an inflexible order and system de- 
 manding implicit obedience, a guiding force, 
 stern, severe, and implacable, to which every- 
 thing must bend and before which all must 
 bow. Success was possible on no other terms. 
 Usually the gray-blue of his eyes was sunny 
 and pleasant, and the dawn of a smile hung 
 about his lips ; I can see it lurking in every pho- 
 
32 
 
 tograph of his face ; — but even the roughest 
 boatman, with explosive temper and emphatic 
 adjectives and brute strength, drew back when 
 the lines of the young face hardened and the 
 glitter of steel came into its determined eyes. 
 Yes, he learned his lessons thoroughly ; every 
 man in his place and ever}^ clut}^ at its time ; 
 perfect method and rigorous system ever}'-- 
 where ; the rule of a master, kindly but resolute 
 and unflinching ; nothing too small to be over- 
 looked ; never an atom of waste in any direc- 
 tion ; tireless industry ; utter devotion to the 
 task in hand ; no pardon for laziness ; no en- 
 durance of careless neglect ; every moment 
 utilized and every hour brimmed with its work ; 
 that was the training which he had and the 
 lesson of manhood that he learned. It left in- 
 delible marks upon his life sure to show them- 
 selves in his after career. How well he mas- 
 tered that lesson is apparent in the fact that 
 in 1837 his employers, attracted to other avo- 
 cations, transferred the whole business to him 
 and left him to work out his own results. 
 He was ready for the responsibilit}' and not 
 afraid of the risk. Life for him was serious. 
 He was not one of those who laugh at it as 
 
33 
 
 a farce or amuse themselves with it as a com- 
 edy when at the best, — at its very best, — it is 
 an inevitable traged3^ Its clouds gathered 
 over him. His father, shipwrecked on the coast 
 of Florida in the drive of a southern storm, 
 was slain b}- the Indians of the Everglades, 
 and there came to the son an added care as 
 head of the famih^ and guardian of its comfort 
 and safety. Another cloud began to darken 
 over his business. Iron tracks were supersed- 
 ing waterways. They were tunneling through 
 rocks, clinging to hillsides, following river 
 banks, climbing slopes in spirals, screaming 
 along valleys. They had speed far beyond that 
 of the slow toiling boat. They were changing 
 the channels of traffic, opening new markets 
 and ruining old ones. But he, this thoughtful 
 man of business, had foresight for the emer- 
 gency, an instinctive judgment of the future 
 rarely at fault, and now he turned to the forests 
 for his fortune. First on one of the Canadian 
 lakes he built a mill for the manufacture of 
 lumber, and later another in Michigan, and 
 began cutting the pines of the northern pen- 
 insula. He loved that mill. It was his pride. 
 And well it might be, for it was a perfect type 
 
34 
 
 of its master. Here was power, enough and 
 to spare. Here was an order and system in- 
 variable and tyrannical with the tyranny of a 
 machine. Here was no waste ; the fragrant 
 sawdust even went to feed the fires and every 
 despicable slab had its use. Here was intelli- 
 gence adapting means to an end. Here was 
 obedience, discipline ; every tooth of the saw, 
 every band on its wheel, every clang of the 
 metal knew and acknowledged its master. No 
 wonder that he loved it and fed it with the lords 
 of the forest floated to its gates, for it was a type 
 of the man, framed in iron and steel. And now 
 a broader field opened before him. To track the 
 pine in the shadow and silence of its northern 
 home, to know what land to take and what to 
 leave, to study the water channels down which 
 the crowding logs could find their way, to organ- 
 ize the lumber camps lonely in the woods, to 
 dictate the drive, to loosen the jam, to fight 
 fire and thieves, to watch and foil unfair and 
 destructive taxation, to choose and guide his 
 men, and then to know where and when to sell, 
 and how to wait bearing the hard burden of 
 patience, — all this loaded brain and nerves 
 almost to the breaking strain. 
 
5:) 
 
 The strong, absorbed, masterful business 
 man ! — I have tried to set him before you, per- 
 haps in a lingering way, myself captured by the 
 theme. But if that had been all there was of 
 him you and I would not have been gathered 
 here to-day. If that had been all there was of 
 him we might indeed have admired his busi- 
 ness energy and thrift, we might as citizens 
 have been proud of his financial strength and 
 success, we might have enjoyed his friendship 
 and the beauty and serenity of his home, but 
 that warm and deathless gratitude which opens 
 in our hearts as we think of him, as we speak 
 of him, and which follows his footsteps all over 
 this hillside would have scarcely bloomed be- 
 yond his family and friends, and in the wider 
 area of our educational interests and activity. 
 Our respect he would have had, but our grati- 
 tude would have slept till awakened by a touch 
 which brought some kindly help in its hands. 
 Fortunately for him and for us that business 
 capacity and energy which characterized his 
 prime was not all there was of him. There 
 was something else, another side of his life, a 
 different trait of his character, waiting the fit 
 occasion for its development and display, lurk- 
 
36 
 
 ing iu the dark till the coming of its chosen 
 hour, and then manifesting itself to complete 
 the perfected nature and rounded outline of the 
 man. What I have so far said of him was but 
 the growth and the climbing of the vine, mix- 
 ing defensive thorns with the over-hang of its 
 leaves, until in its own appointed hour it 
 should show us that for which it grew, — the 
 beauty of its blooming, the sweetness of its 
 fruit. There had been and there were those 
 who charged their fortunes with a dut}' to Hu- 
 manity and to a just extent held them in trust 
 for the good of the race. Into this class, — men 
 whose memories are imperishable and whose 
 names live on, — Mr. Sage soon made his way. 
 Already under the crust of his business activ- 
 ity had broken out traces of the fires beneath 
 the surface, of a half unguessed tenderness of 
 heart, revealing itself freely to his nearest and 
 dearest, but rather proudly concealed from the 
 outside world. Already, and as far back as 
 1868, we can see how his thoughts and plans 
 were beginning to converge upon some effort 
 for the culture and lifting of the race, for we 
 find him at the very opening of the University 
 urging upon its \^oung President, willing to act 
 
37 
 
 but cautiously determined on delay, the admis- 
 sion of women to its privileges and offering to 
 bear the bulk of the added burden. Two years 
 later he became a member of the Board of Trus- 
 tees. What he did then is to you a familiar 
 history. You saw him use more than a quar- 
 ter of a million of his fortune in building a 
 woman's college on our grounds and giving it 
 a permanent endowment : you saw the struc- 
 ture rise, the doors flung wide, the swift gather 
 of the girls, the bright happiness with which 
 they took possession of their heritage, the mar- 
 vellous composure with which they set them- 
 selves at work, and suggested to the boys that 
 they had better look to their laurels. All this 
 that you so well know you think I may leave 
 unsaid. Perhaps. But one's habit of thinking 
 grows as his years grow, and possibly I may 
 get somewhat closer to the heart of this gen- 
 erous giver, nearer to the workings of his mind, 
 and nestle down among his thoughts and 
 emotions. 
 
 You knew he was brave. One only needed 
 to look at him to be sure of that ; but have 
 you even a faint comprehension of the amount 
 of rare and resolute courage which it required 
 
38 
 
 to push his perilous experiment upon us in 
 those nervous and trying da3^s ? It looks easj' 
 now, but it looked hard and dangerous then. 
 The University had only just caught the 
 breath of life. It was born in the vortex of a 
 storm which was raging yet. Two or three 
 lonesome buildings stood bare and shadeless on 
 the hillside. The paths were mudways, the 
 rooms full of shivers, the professors few and 
 learning hard lessons of patience. The in- 
 come on which we depended was small and in- 
 adequate and the outlook dubious and dark. 
 A great hurricane of obloquy and abuse blew 
 about us almost without a lull. Because we 
 respected all creeds but would own no one for 
 a corporate master we were sweetly classed as 
 infidels, and the mothers of the land were 
 warned to fence in their boys from the wolves. 
 The mothers were not much frightened. For 
 many years this industrious nagging went 
 cheerfully on, and possibly has not yet entirely 
 spent its force, although the principle which 
 brought us so much of blame has been im- 
 bedded in the Constitution and become a funda- 
 mental law of the State. And besides : we had 
 ventured to carry instruction beyond the ven- 
 
39 
 
 erable and established lines ; to give to historj' 
 and science a wider field ; and even to plan 
 workshops and teach the mechanic arts. That 
 was unpardonable. We were promptly honored 
 with the contemptuous comment of the gradu- 
 ates of older and extremely respectable insti- 
 tutions, in quantities larger than we could con- 
 veniently carry about with us, and described 
 as rustic, reckless, and dangerously radical. 
 That unpleasant opinion lasted long. We had 
 to wear it out by slow degrees. I hope at last 
 we have earned the right to kindlier comment. 
 Now, what do you think of the man's marvel- 
 ous courage which in such a state of things 
 could dare to add to our other innovations that 
 of co-education, and bring down upon us a 
 greater burden of care and a new deluge of 
 criticism ; and not only that, but could nerve 
 him to stake a respectable fortune on the 
 result, — he who hated waste with a mortal 
 hatred and always measured his risks ? Real- 
 ize, I pray you, the wonder of that confident 
 courage which could dare such an enterprise 
 at such a time. Realize too that he had to 
 furnish it to others in measure large enough to 
 win them over to his purpose. I suspect, — I 
 
40 
 
 think I remember, — that we drew close to him 
 to absorb his courage and faith, as one hugs a 
 fire for its warmth. 
 
 But a question occurs to you, as it did at 
 the time to me, why this astute and trained 
 business man, who knew so well when to push 
 his plans and when to wait, should have chosen 
 a moment seemingly so unpropitious in which 
 to launch his enterprise and send it on its 
 way. You have not fathomed the man at all 
 if you do not see how the shrewdness of his 
 thought flew at once to the conclusion that it 
 was then or never. From incidental and pithy 
 words strewn along the line of his talk I began 
 to see how wisely he had chosen the favorable 
 moment. His purpose was an innovation in the 
 older States. Well, we ourselves were an in- 
 novation. There were no moss-grown, iron- 
 bound doors of surly conservative strength to 
 be broken through. If he waited there might 
 be. His purpose was sure to bring down upon 
 us a new flood of sneers and sarcasm. What 
 matter ! Already wet through to the skin we 
 could bear the drench of a new shower more 
 easily than if we had been altogether dry. We 
 were young and weak, just taking shape and 
 
41 
 
 becoming organized. So much the better. The 
 tender vine-shoot he would plant could be 
 easily trained among the rest and take its 
 uncrowded place on the lattice where the grapes 
 were to ripen in the sun. The law which com- 
 pelled us to a large degree of gratuitous educa- 
 tion made no distinction of sex. Already — 
 and as early as 1870 — one woman, armed with 
 her certificate under the law, had knocked at 
 the hesitant doors. You are bound to admit 
 them, he said : do you prefer to have them 
 forced upon you ? We had no home for the 
 girls, no money to spend upon their care. 
 Then came his final blow. I will give it if you 
 act now ; and there was a shrewd significance 
 in his refusal to indicate that he would ever 
 again repeat the generous offer. He could 
 make a point by silence as effectively as any 
 man I knew. Obviously his astute business 
 training never did any finer work than this. 
 What seemed to be the most unfavorable and 
 unfortunate moment for his purpose, to his 
 clear vision was the best time of all, and the 
 perfect hour when success was attainable and 
 the end within his reach. 
 
 Ma}'^ I search further for his ultimate 
 
42 
 
 thought ? He had no daughters in his home 
 ■dependent on his care and love, and so his large 
 heart reached out to adopt the daughters of 
 all the land. In the very deeps of his nature, 
 where no man could see, rose a fountain of 
 almost fatherly love for those shut out from 
 the halls of learning, denied the chance so 
 freely given to their brothers, too weak to 
 seize justice for themselves, and all his tender- 
 ness and courage rose together for their relief. 
 But I must hasten on, passing for the 
 moment matters to which I may presently' 
 recur, and drawing your memories at once to 
 that long lawsuit over the will of his partner's 
 daughter which led him to build the library 
 of which we are so fond and proud. She was 
 a favorite of his. He always had a smile and a 
 pleasant word for her, and talked with her often 
 over her wish to add to the resources of the 
 University. Her heart was full of two things — 
 2l library' for the well, a hospital for the sick, 
 food for the mind and rest for the body, good 
 books, good care. Struck with a mortal disease 
 in a cold rain of Normandy, she came home to 
 die in the sight of her father's gift to us, with 
 the tones of her own bells mingling with the 
 
43 
 
 last sounds she was to hear. I saw her not 
 long before she left us, lying close to a south 
 window into which the sun was shining as if 
 to warm her back to health, looking out on the 
 lawn, on the buildings, on the trees, with an ex- 
 pression of face and the faintest of faint words 
 which I shall never forget. We all mourned 
 her death ; to all of us her memory was very 
 dear ; but no one felt her loss more deeply than 
 Mr. Sage, and when the gift in her will of the 
 large residue of her estate, — large enough to 
 have accomplished fully her own expressed 
 desires, — was diverted from its purpose and 
 carried over to collaterals we felt a disappoint- 
 ment of which the loss of the mone}^ was b}^ 
 far the smallest part. It is a curious thing in 
 legal histor}^ how a statute or a rule survives 
 long after the reason for it has utterly disap- 
 peared. It clings to the line of legislation as 
 a deserted bird's nest to the bare branches 
 of a winter tree. It was well enough in the 
 time of the first Edward and the second Richard 
 that the idle wealth of religious houses should 
 have led to statutes of mortmain and be fol- 
 lowed by restraint upon the capacity of corpo- 
 rations to take, but that the habit should con- 
 
44 
 
 tinue when the reason did not apply, and that 
 there was any imagined danger that educa- 
 tional institutions in this land of ours would 
 ever get capital beyond their needs is only to 
 be accounted for by the persistent habit of 
 legal rules. Every college in the nation, how- 
 ever rich or strong, remains a pauper relatively 
 to its necessities. But the old custom had put 
 a restraint in our charter and the court en- 
 forced it. Pending the litigation Mr. Sage 
 grew both indignant and uneasy. Those who 
 talked with him could see that the emergency 
 worried him. His strong regard for the dead 
 lady whose washes were being resisted was 
 supplemented b}^ another thought, and that a 
 conviction that a good library was the chief and 
 urgent need of the University. He himself was 
 more a lover of books than most men knew. 
 Absorbed in business as he was he found time 
 to read them and freshen his mind with their 
 lessons. He realized that a library is the heart 
 of the University, the pivot on which its prog- 
 ress swings, the measure of its utility, and at 
 last, out of the two blended motives, his love 
 for the memory of the woman who had left 
 us, his consciousness of our educational needs. 
 
45 
 
 he built and endowed the library, promising 
 if the litigation should end in disaster to 
 make it his gift as a memorial of his departed 
 friend. You may read his thoughts in the 
 words of the tablet which he affixed to its 
 walls, and get very deep into his heart as you 
 read. 
 
 For always it was not merely money that 
 he gave but himself as well. With it went the 
 heart to conceive and the brain to execute ; a 
 watchful oversight that doubled the value of 
 the gift ; a guardian care that would suffer 
 no dollar to be wasted but drive every one to 
 its allotted place and its fullest result. And 
 this personal devotion to any enterprise that 
 he deemed worthy of his aid was manifested 
 most clearly and completely in his masterly 
 management of the pine lands resulting from 
 the Founder's unselfish and most courageous 
 contract with the State. His death left them 
 a heav}^ burden upon the resources of the 
 University to whose ownership they had been 
 transferred. The load was almost crushing 
 in its weight. The strong man who had car- 
 ried it so patiently was gone. Some of us 
 would have been glad to sell the whole tract 
 
46 
 
 from under its taxes and fires and timber 
 thieves for a million and a quarter of dollars, 
 and so ended, at least with safety, the almost 
 ruinous pressure : but capital shrank away 
 from us frightened, and left us to what it 
 deemed an impending destruction. In this 
 emergency Mr. Sage did two things. He put 
 at our service his invaluable business training 
 and experience ; he brought it to bear vigor- 
 ously upon every detail of the enormous enter- 
 prise ; he taught us how to be patient and to 
 wait, and hold up the load even while our bones 
 cracked under it. He did a second thing at a 
 somewhat earlier period. When nobod}^ else 
 would buy and not a purchaser could be found 
 on earth, he joined his partner in a purchase 
 of fifty thousand acres. We had enemies who 
 criticised both him and us. They said he made 
 a profit out of it. I hope that he did : I pra3^ed 
 that he might : for ever}^ dollar of his profit 
 added just so much to the market value of the 
 large mass which remained to us, and the fact 
 of his successful venture brought purchasers 
 to us at last. Some one had to lead the way 
 and demonstrate by actual business results the 
 value of our land investment. But that is not 
 
47 
 
 all. I say to you that this one act of his prob- 
 ably saved the University from total and 
 wretched destruction ; that but for that, to all 
 human appearance, on one October day its 
 doors would have been closed, its students scat- 
 tered, its teachers dismissed, and its lawn left 
 to the weeds. I may not tell you the story : 
 perhaps some one will, — long after I am gone, 
 as well as that faithful Treasurer, — George W. 
 Schuyler, — who bore with me the strain and 
 the ache of that perilous emergency. Enough 
 to say that I know, better than any living man, 
 that the purchase by Mr. Sage and his asso- 
 ciate was the one sole fact which enabled us, 
 with the temporary help of some of the trus- 
 tees, to save the institution from impending 
 wreck ; gave us the one only spot of firm ground 
 on which it was possible to stand ; proved itself 
 to be the one thing alone which brought safety 
 out of danger and life out of death. How well 
 he did his work and how wisely the Founder 
 had planned finds its conclusive demonstration 
 in the fact that while the sales of scrip which 
 the State was making would have yielded less 
 than $700,000, the actual results have fur- 
 nished an addition to our capital from the entire 
 
48 
 
 land grant and estimating the nnsold lands, of 
 about five and a half millions. 
 
 There are other incidents of his life over 
 which it would be interesting to linger. I 
 would like to study the road which his 
 thought and his heart travelled when this man 
 of business endowed a Preacher's chair at 
 Yale, a School of Philosophy with us, a mod- 
 est library where his mill was running. But 
 the temptation must be put aside. 
 
 I have kept for my last thought of him 
 one of his gifts to this University in which he 
 took a special delight because his wife and 
 children shared in it, and it became a memo- 
 rial of them all. I mean the Sage Chapel with 
 its endowment, bringing to us the purest wis- 
 dom and the strongest eloquence of the pulpit, 
 whose organ fills the air with the h3^mns of 
 the Christian Church, whose ver}' existence 
 indicates how easily narrow creeds might leap 
 their fences and solidif}^ in one harmonious 
 thought and worship. The suggestion came 
 from his wife, ere long to be torn from him in 
 the whirl of one swift and terrible instant, 
 which threw a shadow upon all of his after 
 life. When the Chapel was finished she wrote 
 
49 
 
 for it a Dedication Hymn, simple in its words, 
 perfect in its rhj^thm, and devotional in its 
 tlionglit : and then with shrinking and mod- 
 esty, and a needless donbt of the merit of the 
 lines, withheld them from their place in the 
 exercises of the Dedication and sought to con- 
 fine them within the narrower limits of the 
 home circle. They escaped her control, how- 
 ever, and found their way into print, and I have 
 kept my own copy of them from that da}'- to 
 this, and, out of respect to her wishes, in the 
 silence to which she condemned them. Even 
 now I hesitate to break that silence, but two 
 of the stanzas so fit the solemnit}^ of this hour, 
 have in them such prophetic tones, that she 
 herself might forgive if I take them out of the 
 shadow and set them in the memorial light of 
 this occasion. 
 She sang : 
 
 When sorrowing hearts are gathered here 
 
 To la}' within the grave 
 The dear one whom no earthlj^ power 
 
 Nor earthly love can save, 
 
 Speak comfort to the stricken ones 
 Thou who on earth hast trod 
 
 The way of suffering. Show them each 
 That Death is life with God. 
 
50 
 
 While she lays her wreath of song upon the 
 new-made grave, and we can almost hear the 
 sound of wings, let us be silent till they pass. 
 And now we are to grow accustomed to 
 the loss of our benefactor and enshrine him 
 among those whom the scholars will not forget. 
 Fast, indeed, is Death filling the halls even of 
 this young University with the statues of its de- 
 voted friends. Cornell, Sibley, McGraw, Sage! 
 Is the generous line to end ? Is that Provi- 
 dence exhausted which at the perfect moment 
 has always come to our aid ? I have faith in 
 its watch and care. The destined successor 
 will arrive. I may not live to greet him, but 
 some time he will appear. I do not know who 
 he is ; I do not know where he is ; I cannot 
 tell what he is thinking about ; but I hear his 
 footsteps climbing the hill ; he is coming, in 
 his own good time, in his own sure way, to give 
 to this institution a new impetus of solid force, 
 a new swing in the arc of its duty, a new power 
 in the wheels that are driving it to the harbor 
 of its destiny. And when he does come, con- 
 sciously or unconsciously, his heart will be 
 full, as ours must forever be, of the example 
 set by that life well lived, the just and manly 
 and generous life of Henry Williams Sage. 
 
MR. SAGE AND CO-EDUCATION 
 
 BY MISS M. CAREY THOMAS 
 
 When you asked me, Mr. President, to 
 speak on this occasion of Mr. Sage and co- 
 education you doubtless so honored me because 
 you believed that on such a subject added 
 weight would be found in the words of a loyal 
 and grateful alumna of this University who 
 was at the same time a representative of an- 
 other and, in popular belief, opposing form of 
 women's university education. 
 
 The great revolution in human thought 
 and practice known for the lack of a better 
 name as the higher education of women has 
 been begun and completed within the last four 
 decades, and from the vantage ground of the 
 closing years of the nineteenth century it is 
 
52 
 
 possible to-da}'^ to look back and review what is 
 in all probability its most far-reaching move- 
 ment. When, in 1872, Mr. Sage advocated those 
 principles of right and justice, expediency and 
 economy, that in each successive year since 
 then have opened university after university 
 at home and abroad to women, not onl}^ co- 
 education but the whole higher education of 
 women was still but an impassioned idea. The 
 first attempts to educate women on au}^ large 
 scale were then beginning onl}' and even such 
 few practical results as had been obtained were 
 obscured, as always in the first years of any 
 great reform, by the vehemence of controver- 
 sial opinion. Abroad, Zurich in Switzerland, 
 with the eyes of all Europe upon her, had 
 admitted women only four years before ; the 
 little nucleus of women students afterwards to 
 develop into Girton College had in 1869 begun 
 to study at the English university of Cam- 
 bridge, but were to wait as yet twelve 3'ears for 
 official recognition ; in America Vassar, in its 
 curriculum the first woman's college in our 
 modern sense, had opened onlj'- seven 3'ears 
 previously. Men and women w^ere studj'ing 
 together only in the normal schools and in 
 
53 
 
 some smaller western colleges, notably in the 
 Ohio colleges of Antioch and Oberlin, none 
 of these colleges being then, however, of 
 strictly university grade. The great Univer- 
 sity of Michigan did not follow the example of 
 Zurich until 1870, and only two years later the 
 Universit}^ accepted Mr. Sage's noble gift of 
 $266,000, and thereby committed itself irre- 
 trievably to co-education. 
 
 To all the other problems that beset a 
 four years old university already competing 
 for students with the mighty educational foun- 
 dations of the east, the courage and foresight 
 of Mr. Sage, Mr. Cornell, and President White, 
 the three men who were then shaping its des- 
 tiny, added the untried problem of co-educa- 
 tion, as yet only an experiment in the west. 
 No one of the three could then have ventured 
 to predict that during the next twenty-five 
 years almost ever}'- great university of the 
 world would be committed to some form of 
 co-education. Such a step taken at such a 
 time argues the passionate conviction which 
 we find in Mr. Sage's speech at the laying of 
 the cornerstone of Sage College. Mr. Sage 
 himself once told me that early in his boy- 
 
54 
 
 hood, as far back as he could remember, he 
 had been possessed by a longing to help 
 women, and that as he had come to value edu- 
 cation more and more he had come to believe 
 it all important for women ; but that not until 
 after his gift to Sage College had he met more 
 than one woman who believed in women's 
 higher education. He told me that he had 
 happened to be away from home when the 
 newspapers announced that the University 
 had accepted his gift and established co-educa- 
 tion at Cornell and that on his return his wife, 
 who was afterward to approve so fully of this 
 action, said as she greeted him : "You have 
 meant to do women a great good, but you have 
 ignorantly done them an incalculable injur3\" 
 A great change in opinion has taken place 
 since then, and, what is more, this great change 
 has been brought about by the very considera- 
 tions that weighed with Mr. Sage. He asked 
 for women's education as a condition of race 
 progress. "The efficient force of the human 
 race," he said, "will be multiplied in proportion 
 as woman by culture and education is fitted 
 for new and broader spheres of action." "Any 
 limitation upon the development of woman 
 
55 
 
 reacts and retards the development of a whole 
 race." He exorcised with a word — the only 
 word there is to say — the fantastically lying 
 spirit which declares that education will trans- 
 form educated women into educated men. 
 "God," he said, ''established these (the nature 
 and functions of women) from the beginning, 
 and his purposes do not change." "Every grace 
 and virtue which adorn her nature, every ele- 
 ment of usefulness and helpfulness, may be 
 increased without limit by education and cul- 
 ture." "Will she be less woman," he asked, 
 "with riper development of all her faculties ? 
 As wife and mother, as sister, companion, and 
 friend, will she be less true to faith and duty ? 
 Is man made dwarf or giant by increase of 
 moral and intellectual power ?" He did not 
 pause a moment to discuss whether women's 
 capacity be equal to man's. In the light of his 
 tender and magnanimous sympathy with wo- 
 men he saw that if they were inferior men- 
 tally there was so much the greater need for 
 insisting on their right to the strengthening 
 and enriching of such faculties as they might 
 possess. And finally Mr. Sage urged, in words 
 that to-day set every generous soul aflame, the 
 
56 
 
 necessity of fitting women for self-support ; he 
 instanced the surplus of women in many of the 
 older civilized countries of Europe, a condition 
 then beginning to repeat itself in our Northern 
 States, there being at that time in three of 
 them alone over sixty thousand more women 
 than men of marriageable age, and in Great 
 Britain over one million, and he emphasized 
 the fact that these women could not hope to 
 marry and must in the immediate future either 
 starve or work. He might have added that 
 even in countries where the numbers of men 
 and women are more nearly equal, one-fourth 
 of the whole number of marriageable women 
 are not married. To use his own words : 
 "Women in large masses must be dependent 
 upon their own efforts for daily bread, and 
 often, for the support of helpless families. 
 To fit them for these trials and duties the 
 doors of opportunity must be open wide," 
 "There should be no restriction upon a woman's 
 right to sustain herself in any honest calling ; 
 and she should, as much as man, be fitted by 
 education to use the faculties God has given 
 her where they will avail her the most." 
 
 Mr. Sage went to the very heart of the 
 
57 
 
 question of woman's future education when he 
 said that until then wherever woman had been 
 educated with man in universities it had been 
 by favor, but that here in the building of Sage 
 College was recognized for the first time in the 
 world her rights to education/'to all the educa- 
 tion she will ask." It was to him a source of 
 the deepest satisfaction that Cornell University 
 had "pledged itself to the policy and duty" of 
 forever maintaining equal facilities for the 
 education of men and women ; and that, in 
 his own words, "the structures now standing 
 here, and those which shall hereafter be added 
 to them" — how many and fair he who was to 
 give another, and the fairest of them, the great 
 librar}', did not then know — "are to be used 
 forever for the education of woman with man, 
 to whom God gave her as an help-meet, and as 
 the mother and chief educator of his race." 
 Very amply was the progress of co-education 
 to justify these words of Mr. Sage. In England, 
 Scotland, Ireland and Wales, in Holland, Bel- 
 gium, Norway, Sweden and Denmark, in Spain 
 and Italy, in France and Austria, and in Can- 
 ada, virtually all men's universities are now 
 open to women and except perhaps in some of 
 
58 
 
 the Italian and Spanish universities women are 
 studying in all of them. In the United States 
 all the state universities of the West and 
 almost all of its important colleges are now 
 co-educational. In the Southern States the Uni- 
 versity of Virginia, and in the Middle States 
 Princeton, are almost alone among the great 
 foundations of America in their exclusion of 
 women from any share whatsoever in the bene- 
 fits of their instruction and endowments. Yale, 
 Harvard, Columbia, and the Universit}^ of Penn- 
 sylvania admit women freely to their graduate 
 instruction, and in the greatest school of the 
 Johns Hopkins Universit}', its medical school, 
 there is no distinction made. Within the last 
 3^ear most of the universities of German}'- have 
 admitted women unofficiall}'-, and onl}^ a few 
 weeks ago the minister of the Interior an- 
 nounced in the German Reichstag the decision 
 of the authorities that women henceforth should 
 be allowed, with the permission of the rector 
 and universit}' professors, to attend universit}- 
 lectures. On the first of next April the first 
 city gymnasium or high school for girls will 
 be opened in Breslau, which means that in the 
 immediate future girls, like boys, are to be 
 
59 
 
 prepared b}' the government schools for the 
 universities. 
 
 In this great movement Cornell has been 
 among the foremost, thanks to the wisdom, 
 the insight, the love of kindness, the love of 
 justice of Mr. Sage. It has been foremost, too, 
 in a movement within that movement, which 
 is of great importance to-day. Mr. Sage laid 
 stress, as I have said just now, on the rights of 
 women to equal facilities, equal advantages, in 
 the institutions in which they studied. There 
 is one respect in which these equal rights are 
 as yet for the most part unrecognized ; and it 
 is because of this remaining inequality, I 
 think, that in our Eastern States, where sepa- 
 rate women's colleges exist, women are so much 
 disposed to prefer them. There has been hith- 
 erto as a rule no place for them on the gov- 
 erning boards of the great co-educational 
 institutions, no place for them on faculties. 
 Exclusions such as these leave women on the 
 whole in the position of foreign residents. 
 Exclusions such as these affect even the kind- 
 liest relations between professors and students. 
 The professor feels that the woman student, 
 however swiftly she may respond to his influ- 
 
6o 
 
 ence, will not pass his influence on ; it is with 
 something like regret that he finds himself 
 compelled by her achievements in the present 
 to award her a fellowship meant to train the 
 scholars and professors of the future. Her 
 brother student, working side by side with her 
 in the classroom, feels that, however she ma}' 
 equal or even outstrip him now, the prizes of a 
 scholar's life are all for him. Education does 
 not end when the last degree is taken ; it is 
 not to have equal facilities for education, for 
 scholarship, to be debarred from just those 
 posts in which alone a scholar may devote to 
 scholarship the working hours of life and not 
 its playtime merely. 
 
 Great and real as is, and as I believe long 
 will be, the need of separate colleges for 
 women, separate education for men and women 
 cannot ultimately prevail. It is a mad waste 
 of educational endowments at a time when all 
 that we can spend is needed to keep anarchism 
 and ignorance at bay. It is a still madder waste 
 of scholarly power. The great teacher, like 
 the great poet, is born, not made. Among 
 scholars, as among poets, or prose writers, or 
 painters, or musicians, there can be in each 
 
6i 
 
 generation a few only that approach the high- 
 est level of human efficiency, only a few great 
 men, only a few great women ; and to these 
 all the students in their special field of knowl- 
 edge must have free access. At the close of 
 the twentieth century it will seem as absurd 
 that only men should be taught by men and 
 only women by women, as it would seem at the 
 close of the nineteenth century that only men 
 should read Thackeray and only women 
 George Eliot. 
 
 Slowly the stream of the world is moving 
 toward a perfect system of co-education. Mr. 
 Sage lived long enough to see the first woman 
 elected a trustee of Cornell University and the 
 first course of lectures by a woman included 
 in the courses leading to its Bachelor's degree. 
 I remember well that on the day when I was 
 to attend for the first time the meeting of the 
 trustees his kindly interest led him, though 
 his strength was even then beginning to fail, 
 to call on me at Sage College to welcome me 
 to the governing councils of the University. 
 It was then that he told me with much emo- 
 tion of those early years when he had first 
 introduced co-education at Cornell. 
 
It has been said that "glory is after all 
 the thing which has the best chance of not 
 being altogether vanity ;" but of all things 
 worth living for it seems to me the most worth 
 while, like Mr. Sage, to have responded with 
 one's whole heart to the summons of a reform 
 as yet far off but destined to prevail, to have 
 aided mightil}^ a great movement, to have 
 seen, as he must have seen through year after 
 year of a long and honored life, men and 
 women coming to think his wa}-. 
 
MR. SAGE AND LIBERAL CULTURE 
 AT CORNELL 
 
 BY PROFESSOR GOLDWIN SMITH 
 
 To the noble and generous character of 
 Henry Sage in all its aspects full justice has 
 been done by those who have already spoken. 
 His regard for Liberal Culture this hillside 
 proclaims through the monuments of his mu- 
 nificence more eloquently than it could be 
 proclaimed by any words of mine. Commerce, 
 on the large scale and worthily pursued, is in 
 itself liberalizing. It had that effect on Mr. 
 Sage's mind. He felt and munificently showed 
 his sympathy with the broadest and highest 
 interests of his country and of humanity. Our 
 department of philosophy owes its name to his 
 conjugal affection, and its endowment to his 
 bounty. He gave us our new Library build- 
 
64 
 
 ing. His object in creating the department of 
 philosophy, as our register says, was to provide 
 permanently at Cornell University for instruc- 
 tion and investigation of the most varied kind 
 and of the highest order. It is needless to 
 say more. 
 
 For my part I confess I come here specially 
 to honor the memory of a man who made 
 wealth honorably and used it well. In both 
 ways he did good. In both ways he strength- 
 ened the foundations of industrial and com- 
 mercial society. In both ways he helped to 
 establish the fundamental principle of the 
 American Commonwealth, which is, that every 
 one is to do the best he can under the law for 
 himself, because in doing the best for himself, 
 he will be doing the best for the community. 
 
 Americans are looking with anxiety to 
 the political future. They have reason. The 
 constitution founded by men who were very 
 wise, but still were men, is being tried in cir- 
 cumstances very different from any which the 
 founders could have foreseen. It is being 
 tried in a community which has received a 
 large infusion of foreign elements ; which in- 
 cludes great bodies of wage earners ; which 
 
65 
 
 presents marked inequalities of wealth ; and 
 which is now being brought under the influ- 
 ences of European revolution. It may well 
 be thought that a political crisis is at hand. 
 All will come right so long as societ}'' is sound. 
 And that societ}^ is sound, in the old settled 
 states at least, we may feel pretty well assured. 
 If I ever am inclined to despond about the 
 American Commonwealth, I have only to call 
 up in my mind the image of a village beside a 
 lake in the state of New York, where I landed 
 one dark November morning thirty years ago, 
 and where I spent two or three of the happi- 
 est, and certainly of the best years of my life. 
 I see there a community thoroughly law-abid- 
 ing, needing no police but a constable, edu- 
 cated, intelligent, and patriotic. In it there are 
 two men who have become wealthy by their 
 industry, their shrewdness, their enterprise, 
 their integrity, working their way up from the 
 ranks of labor. One of them has founded the 
 University ; the other gives that University 
 a Library building. Both of them preserve in 
 wealth simplicity of life. At the head of the 
 University there is a third rich man, who has 
 not made, but inherited his wealth, and who 
 
66 
 
 takes advantage of it to devote himself, not 
 without much labor, privation, and sacrifice of 
 his literary ease, to the service of the com- 
 munity. Presently, there comes a fourth rich 
 man, he whose memory we honor this day, who 
 like the first two has made his own fortune 
 and leaves the monument of his public spirit 
 and his munificence on this hill. With such 
 a community as this, though there may be 
 political trouble for an hour, all is likely to 
 come right in the end. 
 
 Accumulated wealth, the result of rapid de- 
 velopment, is a feature, some think a danger- 
 ous feature, of American society. Wealth 
 must do its social duty. To say that it must 
 pay ransom for its existence, when it has been 
 fairly made, is to give the signal for social 
 plunder. But it must do its duty. It must 
 shoAv that it is useful to society. Ever}' man 
 who has a heart is touched by the inequal- 
 ities of the human lot. We cannot be sur- 
 prised if those whose place is the lowest want 
 to equalize, even by measures of violence, mis- 
 taken and ultimately suicidal as such measures 
 are. There is no use any longer in talking 
 about divine ordinance or compensation for 
 
67 
 
 Lazarus in the next world. Wealth must 
 show that it is useful. Useful it may be. In- 
 equality to a certain extent seems to be a con- 
 dition of progress. In China, you have a 
 dead level, only one man in ten thousand, as 
 we are told, being above manual labor. There 
 is nobody with leisure or means to start any- 
 thing, or try an^^hing, and the result is stag- 
 nation. If wealth is to be spent in the osten- 
 tation of luxury, the sight of which makes 
 poverty doubly bitter, in aping European aris- 
 tocracy, in buying European titles or admis- 
 sion to European courts, there will be a crash, 
 and there ought to be. That all American 
 millions are not so spent, this hill covered 
 with monuments of munificence bears noble 
 witness. The best men, we are told, that is 
 those who are best fitted to serve the state, are 
 excluded from politics. It may be so, though 
 perhaps there is sometimes among men of 
 refinement rather too much fastidiousness and 
 too much love of ease. But if a man cannot 
 be eminent in political life, he may be eminent 
 in social and municipal life ; he may be a 
 good and a great citizen, and such a man was 
 Henry Sage. 
 
MR. SAGE AND THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
 AT CORNELL 
 
 BY THE REV. DR. LYMAN ABBOTT 
 
 The topic assigned to me is "Mr. Sage 
 and the Religious Life at Cornell." What is 
 the religious life ? What do we mean b}- 
 religion ? 
 
 Philosophy appears to me to afford no 
 better definition of religion than that which is 
 furnished by Max Muller in his volume on 
 Natural Religion. "Religion consists in the 
 perception of the Infinite under such manifes- 
 tations as are able to influence the moral 
 character of man." If this be a correct defini- 
 tion, then an unreligious man is one who has 
 no perception of the Infinite. He may be in 
 many respects a good man, — honest, just, 
 
69 
 
 kindly, though not large, nor truly far-seeing. 
 The horizon of the present bounds his vision. 
 The visible world is all which he consciously 
 perceives. He sees men as mechanics, as 
 merchants, as lawyers, as doctors, but he does 
 not see them as men. He sees the phenomena 
 of nature, but not the noumenon behind the 
 phenomena. Like the fabled figure in Plato's 
 cave, he perceives the phantasmagoria of life 
 which passes before him, the shadows cast 
 upon the screen, but he is unable to turn his 
 head and see the reality which casts that 
 shadow. 
 
 An unreligious system of education, like 
 an unreligious man, concerns itself only with 
 the sensuous and the temporal. An unreli- 
 gious university, like an unreligious man, 
 has no perception of the Infinite and the 
 Invisible. A great university may be com- 
 pared to an individual, and the various fac- 
 ulties in this great university to the various 
 portions of the brain. There may be that in 
 this university which sees and deals with 
 mechanics, with chemistry, with biology, with 
 engineering, with agriculture, with the ma- 
 terial side of earthly life ; there may be that 
 
70 
 
 which deals with the material or scientific side 
 even of higher phases of life, with philology 
 in literature, with isolated events or with 
 arrangement of dates in history, or even with 
 the mechanical aspects of art and of music. 
 Such a university may make mechanics, civil 
 engineers, chemists, it may make philologists 
 and annalists, it may even make skillful cop}^- 
 ists and skillful mechanical performers, but it 
 cannot make true scientists, nor true histo- 
 rians, nor true musicians and artists, nor give 
 a true understanding of life, because it cannot 
 make true men and true women. It cannot do 
 this because it does not perceive the Infinite in 
 any such relations as afifect the moral character 
 of man. 
 
 If it is really to be a university, if it 
 is to make men and women, not merely me- 
 chanics, merchants, lawyers, and doctors, if it 
 is to deal with life in all its complex relations, 
 if it is to incite youth to the largest living, 
 and give them a clear perception of the most 
 fundamental and vital relations, it must have 
 faculties which deal with the unseen and the 
 eternal. It must look, and it must teach its 
 students to look, for that which is unseen and 
 
71 
 
 eternal, manifested through that which is vis- 
 ible and temporal. It must study men — not 
 merely the body — the liver, the stomach, the 
 blood vessels, the nerves, the muscles, in a word, 
 the mechanism which man uses ; it must also 
 study the man himself, his observation, his 
 memory, his reason, his imagination, his hopes, 
 his impulses : in other words, this university 
 must have a chair of Mental Science. It must 
 study man's relation to his fellow-man ; not 
 merely the relation of body to body, — that is 
 hygiene and sanitary science ; not merely the 
 financial relation of employer to employed, — 
 that is economic science ; it must study the mor- 
 al relation of man to his fellow-man : in other 
 words it must study Moral Philosophy and 
 Ethics. 
 
 It must also recognize those phenomena 
 which, whatever our estimate of them may 
 be, have been the most influential and the 
 most striking in the history of the human 
 race, the religious phenomena. I do not stop 
 here to consider whence they come or what 
 they mean. Whencesoever they come and 
 whatever they mean, they are an integral and 
 influential factor in human history, and any 
 
72 
 
 university which ignores them, ignores one 
 of the chiefest elements in human life. This 
 religious university must therefore have a 
 chair, or chairs, which teach Comparative Reli- 
 gion, and the Philosophy of Religion. 
 
 This universit}' must also furnish an op- 
 portunity to men to put into practice the the- 
 ories which in the class rooms they are acquir- 
 ing. Do they study the classics ? They must 
 learn how to translate the Greek and the Latin. 
 Do they study chemistry ? They must learn how 
 to perform in the laboratory the chemical ex- 
 periments. Do they study mechanics ? They 
 must learn how to make in the shop the tool 
 or the engine. Do they stud}^ religion ? The}'- 
 must have some opportunity to apply the les- 
 sons which they are learning, to express the 
 life which they are receiving. There must be 
 some church or temple, where they ma}^ come 
 together to express their reverence for the 
 Infinite, their faith in the unseen, their hope 
 for a diviner future, and where they may hear 
 the lessons of religion applied to the practical 
 problems of their life, by men who have studied 
 religion rather from the practical than from 
 the theoretical point of view. In other words, 
 
73 
 
 the religious university must have both the 
 Sage School of Philosophy, in which logic and 
 metaphysics, ps3''chology and moral philoso- 
 phy, comparative religion and the philosophy 
 of religion, theoretical ethics and practical 
 ethics, will be taught, and it must also have a * 
 Sage Chapel, and a Barnes Hall, where the 
 religious life may have an opportunity to ex- 
 press itself in the utterance of worship and in 
 the activities of spiritual service. 
 
 I find in the Cornell "Sun" a sentence which, 
 since it is in one of your own publications, 
 I dare to read, though as a guest I should have 
 hesitated myself to say what is here said : — 
 "Mr. Cornell was personally interested in prac- 
 tical education, on the farm and in the shop ; 
 Mr. Sibley gave for technical training ; but it 
 is owing to Mr. H. W. Sage that Cornell's repu- 
 tation is as strongly developed on the side of 
 the humanities. Remove the Library, Sage 
 College, and the Chapel from the Campus, and 
 although it would be visibly maimed, it would 
 be a poor symbol of what would be subtracted 
 from Cornell's standing among the Universi- 
 ties of the world, w^ere Mr. Sage's gifts lack- 
 ing. Indeed, without them, we should not be 
 
74 
 
 a University at all, but only a Polj^technic 
 Institute. '"'' I believe this is profoundl}^ true. 
 Without the Sage School of Philosophy and 
 the Sage Chapel and the influences which are 
 connected therewith and go out therefrom, 
 Cornell would not be a University at all, but 
 only a Polytechnic Institute. 
 
 It is indeed possible to have an education 
 without religion, an education which makes 
 simply a mechanic or a chemist or a civil engi- 
 neer, but it is not possible to have a universit}^ 
 which is not profoundly religious. And a uni- 
 versit}'^ is not made religious by morning 
 prayers, whether compulsorj' or voluntar}'. It 
 is not made religious by attaching a fringe of 
 worship to a garment of instruction. It is made 
 religious only by bringing into the university, 
 and into every department of the universit}', 
 the perception of the Infinite under such mani- 
 festations as influence the moral character of 
 man, so that all its instruction shall be pervaded 
 by the spirit of faith and hope and love, and shall 
 minister in turn to that spirit. Without this 
 perception of the Infinite, without this recog- 
 
 *Editorial in Cornell Daily Sun for Friday, January 
 31st, 1896. 
 
75 
 
 nition of faith and hope and love, without this 
 infilling of education by that spirit, and this 
 ministry to that spirit by education, there is 
 no real education. The process, whatever it 
 may be, from which this spirit is absent, is 
 not worthy to be called education. Does this 
 seem to you radical ? Let me read then the 
 statement of this principle from one w^ho will 
 not be accused of having prejudices against 
 purely scientific instruction, Professor T. H. 
 Huxley.* 
 
 "Education is the instruction of the intel- 
 lect in the laws of Nature, under which name 
 I include not merely things and their forces, 
 but men and their ways ; and the fashioning 
 of the affections and of the will into an 
 earnest and loving desire to move in har- 
 mony with those laws. For me, education 
 means neither more nor less than this. Any- 
 thing which professes to call itself education 
 must be tried by this standard, and if it fails 
 to stand the test, I will not call it education, 
 whatever may be the force of authority, or of 
 numbers, upon the other side." 
 
 * "A Liberal Education and Where to Find it :" Science 
 and Education Essays, page 83. 
 
76 
 
 Without this spirit which seeks to fashion 
 the affections and the will into an earnest and 
 living desire to move in harmon}'- with the 
 eternal and invisible laws, mechanics becomes a 
 mere equipment for money-making and an in- 
 spiration to greater greed ; science a mere curi- 
 ous collocation of unrelated phenomena, without 
 purpose and without significance ; history a 
 mere record of dates and facts, bringing from 
 the past no lessons for the present, nor hopes 
 for the future ; literature ceases to be the inter- 
 preter of life, and the study of literature degen- 
 erates into the study of philology ; art becomes 
 skill in copying, and music a subtler form of 
 mechanic skill. It is the perception of the invis- 
 ible in man and in nature, which inspires me- 
 chanics to be a servant of civilization, science to 
 be a student of law, history to be the tracing of 
 human progress to an ever larger and better 
 life, literature to be an interpreter of the strug- 
 gle out of which the divine in man is emerg- 
 ing and in which it is winning its victory, 
 and music and art the discernment of beauty 
 which transcends the seeing of the eye and 
 hearing of the ear, though interpreted b}^ eye 
 and ear to the spirit of man. 
 
77 
 
 To Henry Williams Sage, more than to 
 any other one man, Cornell owes the fact that 
 it is a University, — not a mere Polytechnic 
 Institute ; — that it has faculties which perceive, 
 and seek to make others perceive, the Infinite 
 under such relations as affect the moral char- 
 acter of man. To him Cornell owes its Susan 
 Linn Sage School of Philosophy, with its 
 chairs of Pedagogy, Logic and Metaphysics, 
 Psychology, Moral Philosophy, Ancient and 
 Mediaeval Philosophy, Comparative Religion, 
 Philosophy of Religion, Christian Ethics. And 
 to Mr. Sage and to his sons it owes the fact 
 that it has a chapel, and an endowed preach- 
 ership, wherewith to apply its perception of 
 the Infinite to the practical and moral life. 
 
 To be generous to the dead, it is not neces- 
 sary to be unjust to the living, and it would be 
 unjust to the living to intimate that all this 
 study of the invisible life, all this incoming of 
 the religious spirit into Cornell University is 
 due to one man. I look into the faces of men 
 before me who have shared with Mr. Sage in 
 thus transfusing into this great University that 
 life which inspires and ennobles, this sense of 
 the Infinite and Eternal which illumines and 
 
78 
 
 elevates whatever it pervades. But they will 
 be ready, and none more so than they, to bear 
 witness to him who has so co-operated with 
 their work, so made possible the achievement 
 of their desires, so enabled them b}' the reser- 
 voirs of spiritual life which he has created, to 
 carry on all their work in a trul}'' religious 
 spirit. 
 
 To him also, more than to any other 
 man, Cornell owes the fact that it is such an 
 illuminating object-lesson to the world. We 
 have long tried in this country to divide men 
 into sections and educate them in fragments ; 
 to put all the religious instruction in the 
 church and the Sunda3^-school, and all the 
 secular instruction into the public school, with 
 the result that the first has too often been un- 
 intelligent, and the second has too often been 
 unmoral. Cornell University has proved and 
 is proving not only that we may have religious 
 instruction without sectarianism, but that we 
 may have instruction more truly religious 
 when we are not sectarian. It has proved and 
 it is proving, that there is a religious life that 
 is higher than ecclesiasticism, and far more 
 pervasive and inspiring. It has proved and is 
 
UNIVERSITY 
 
 79 
 
 proving that it is possible to transfuse all 
 life with that spirit of faith which perceives 
 the invisible, and that spirit of reverence which 
 bows before the Deity without groveling before 
 man. It has proved and is proving that it is pos- 
 sible to preserve the spiritual in a system of edu- 
 cation uncorrupted by sectarianism and freed 
 from church control. It has proved and is prov- 
 ing the spirit in which our public school educa- 
 tion must be carried on before it becomes worthy 
 of this great nation or able to equip the people 
 for a great future. Nor could he who had the 
 prevision to see and the courage and generos- 
 ity to provide for this religious need of a great 
 University, have done what he has done for 
 Cornell if he had not himself been a pro- 
 foundly religious man, if he had not lived as 
 one who sees the invisible, if he had not pos- 
 sessed that foresight which is faith, that 
 strong will which is loyalty to the Divine 
 will, and that life whose greatest joy was serv- 
 ing others. And what is religion but just 
 this ? — A foresight that is faith, a will that is 
 loyalty, and a life that is service. 
 
 
8o 
 
 BENEDICTION 
 
 BY THE REV. DR. STEPHEN H. SYNNOTT 
 
 May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ 
 and the love of God and the fellowship of 
 the Hol}^ Spirit be with us and abide with us 
 forever. Amen. 
 

 .^<,^? 
 
 
 
 P i-S 
 
 ^ ,■*