COMMEMORATION SERMON TRINITY COLLEGE CHAPEL, C'A M HIM ixi I-! 184C. PR1CJ TH E COMMEMORATION SERMON PREACHED IN TRINITY COLLEGE CHAPEL, CAMBRIDGE, DECEMBER 15, 1848, BY JOHN GROTE, M.A., ONE OF THE FELLOWS. FeVot* oios eVcrt CAMBRIDGE : JOHN DEIGHTON. LONDON: JOHN W. PARKER, WEST STRAND. M.DCCC.XLIX. Otambrfoge : erlntelr at t&e fflnibrrsfts ss. TO THE MASTER, THE FELLOWS, SCHOLARS, AND STUDENTS OF TRINITY COLLEGE, THIS DISCOURSE PUBLISHED AT THEIR DESIRE, IS, WITH MUCH RESPECT AND AFFECTION, I X S C R I R R I). 2107607 PSALM CXLIII. 5. Yet do I remember the time past ; I muse upon all thy works : yea, I exercise myself in the works of thy hands. TT is a thing of much importance to men, -*- and to associations of men as well, how they look upon the life and history through which the providence of God has led them. They may so look at it as to make it a drag on the wheels of present action, or, again, so that it shall rather be a stimulus to action more vigorous : empty self-complacency must be deadening and profit- less; so too may be uncalled for shame. The past gives us its lessons and its directions for our future road : but to read them we need to look at it with unwarped and true-seeing eye, because we ourselves are formed what we are by that our past history, and the lessons we draw, to apply and fit to us thus formed, must be true impressions and transcripts of it. c It is because our past history thus so con- cerns our present action, and because in order that it may influence that action rightly, we must look upon it steadily as it is ; and because, again, our history as an associated body here is peculiarly a history of blessing from God, through the religiousness and beneficence of man : it is for this that we observe, according to the law and custom of our Foundation, this day of retro- spect, wholesome as much, and hallowing to ourselves, as due to the honoured remembrance of others. For them are our feelings of thank- fulness, who have each in their day done their part to make our College what it is and set us in this our place : and because they are departed from us away, and no voice of thankfulness will avail to reach themselves over the fathomless gulf of separation, therefore we direct our thoughts rather to the Great Mediator between all the worlds whom He has made, Him who fills and unites them all, Him to whom all the dead are living still ; and the way we honour our Founders and Benefactors is to give our thanks for them to God. In this we cannot be wrong: the earthly benefactors themselves may have been good or evil, done God's work in their generation, or the work of His enemies but we give Him thanks for them for that, under His directing Spirit, they have done good for us, and given us new means of honouring Him. And as their works in the one way have followed them to the judgment, so in another they have remained in life and power below, to produce still glory to God, and subject of thank- fulness to us. Only such variety among those of earth we have to honour should make this day specially religious, by calling off our thoughts in some degree from them to Another: to Him who was the Author of all in them right and noble, who gave them their so much of good, and controlled, if perhaps it needed, their evil, and both, so as to honour Himself and to do benefit to us. Nor is it only in character of men, but in every form of action, that our united history, like all history, is full of the hand of God : and full as well, to shew that forth the more, of varied fortune and vicissitude, of evil mixed with good. We look this day over the past year which makes our foreground, with numbers un- diminished in it by any occasion of separation mournful and entire: a year marked in the world around us by unexampled change, and thoughts of men called off from nobler interests to a present all insecure ; a year in our country and our own University only of more sanguine hope and more vigorous schemes than before, of im- provement. Beyond this year our retrospect of 8 thankfulness must run over the two periods of our College's existence, measured by their cen- turies each ; and halting not even at the Refor- mation, and our Royal Founder, who gave our present shape, must acknowledge his humbler predecessors in the good work, and his ancestor who set to him the example. Along all this period are strewed the lessons of the past : the object and design of our Founders, the spirit in which their foundation has been carried on, the consequences which have grown from the form they gave it, the modifications it has re- ceived in form or purpose, from change in the world without these all concern us, and such glance at them as time and circumstance allows, may well befit this day. For the greater clear- ness of thought, though in such division there is much that is arbitrary, we may divide the feel- ings and obligations the day suggests into such as regard our first foundation ; such next as re- gard our history ; and, again, such as regard our position now : in the first we deal with the pur- pose of our Founders ; in the second, with our traditionary feelings, our historicalness and our growth; in the third, with our relation as a brotherhood to each other, and as an active and influential body to the world around. And first to mount to the origin, and to the idea of a College as in the minds of those who 9 first established such it may have existed : if by keeping up such remembrances, we may aid the unity of our College life, and the consistency and keeping of our own proceedings with it. When we speak of those years of our original birth as dark and ignorant, we too much forget how much of the power and reality of knowledge lies in the vigorous search after it, and how much the activity of the mind, stirred up by deficiency of materials, may in many cases be a higher intellectual state than the palled weari- ness with which we read book after book, and lose our desire with the very sight of the abund- ant means of satisfying it. Those were days in which to gain knowledge required exertion and pilgrimage, involved moral difficulty and moral resolution : and while what was gained was too often but husks and chaff, the time was yet not of necessity thrown away. Men learnt to learn, to gain from each teacher whatever he could give them or read before them : and scanty as this was, then to build upon and draw from it for themselves, and fill up the void of necessary ignorance by the vigorous, if often vain, inge- nuities of reason. And thus an University in those early times was more than we have ever seen them since, a confused mass of eager learn- ers from far and near, fermenting with mind, full of personal regards and party teaching : the 10 only market for knowledge, and all that would have it swarming thither. Yet then, as now, it was a picture of the world and society without, that world's youthful energy and as yet lawless confusion, which an University presented : and the Colleges gradually rising up in it were, like the legal institutions in society, the growing crystals of system and discipline and continuance in the anarchic chaos. They gave a home to the stranger among those of his own country and his own religious order; they presented him a rule of life, and a companionship in observing it ; they aided to prepare and direct his learning- according to what he had been, and was to be ; they gave him support to rise to the place his powers should mark him for, and leisure and quiet to put out those powers if he had them, in higher regions and loftier thoughts. And thus if we are to take the idea of a College as it might have been in the mind of a priest and a statesman when Hervey of Stanton founded Michael House, our first and real birthday ; we might imagine in it three leading points to be by such foundation furthered and secured ; sys- tematicalness of teaching, discipline of life, ex- tent and elevation of learning and knowledge. These we may perhaps mark as the objects of our foundation, the principles of our beginning; and if it be so, it is well we should keep them 11 in mind as such : but still as having specially to that beginning time their relation. We are not now at our beginning: we have a long his- tory behind us, and it is not too much to think, that the man of wisdom and benevolence, who planted then for future ages, knew well that anything so planted, to bear fruit and to be use- ful, must live arid grow and change, and take forms and figures which he could never foresee. Everything is changed and changing ; methods of teaching, manners of life, objects of study : the test of life in a working power like ours is its ability of adapting itself to the climate around, of using the means at each time which best will do its work, and of extending, and per- haps changing its operation in all that concerns that work, to new action if it needs, and influ- ence, in methods which none could have de- signed or contemplated before. It is in no degree our province to prove that these our primary objects, systematical teaching, regular discipline, lofty study, would be of ne- cessity best secured by a Foundation such as ours in these times, were Hervey of Stanton and Henry VIII. to live again : though perhaps it might not be difficult to go far towards esta- blishing even this. But what we are concerned to feel ourselves, in order that we may rightly give thanks this day to God, and to show to 12 others, if need be, that we may set in due honour our Founders and those who have gone before us, is, that our Foundation has at each time, and does now, answer the purpose for which its Founders meant it ; even supposing that in quiet times and with wide-spread intel- ligence, that purpose might be answered also by other means. It is but a small part of what we may say of Trinity College, that there have never been wanting in it, nor are want- ing now, men with clear view of the field of knowledge in their time, and the best way of fixing its impression in the minds of those whom they have to teach ; and others too, or perhaps the same, with views as clear of that field's boundaries and the way to widen and enlarge them, and with powers also and reso- lution to do it; and last but chief of all, a body of teachers and learners united together in one bond of considerate lead and attentive following, a discipline throughout sanctified by religion, and therefore blessed by God. We may surely say that not only is this our origi- nal work done now, but that it is done in association with feelings, and under guidance of laws and customs, which give to it double power and value. We have the experience of five centuries since Hervey of Stanton plan- ned his good work, the practice of instruction, 13 the tradition and custom of discipline, the in- spiring examples within our own walls since then of high and disinterested study : we have been surely wanting if we have not grown, and made useful these five centuries for the cultivation of our minds and the advancement of our instructing duty. Other forms of foun- dation in these perhaps better times, planned beforehand with this experience and greater knowledge, might do as well in scheme and machinery, what we were directly meant to do : but our past history, if we have fitly used it, gives us an advantage over anything unsanc- tioned by time, which to dwell on in words may seem vain, but which in practice and fact we all know cannot be too highly thought of. We have all the magic of a traditional name investing with interest the lifeless stones around us, we have our household heroes and the fathers of our nobler being : and, what is not name but reality, we have the spirit of them diffused among us through young we trust as through old, the spirit of discipline to learn, of power and perseverance to discover, of clear- ness, patience, sympathy, to teach. The in- struction then and power of our histories we need to cherish, for it is what we have to set off against possible advantage which we cannot have in others : or rather for it is not in regard of others, but of our own work, that we should act because it is needed to enable us to do, in this our own generation, our duty as we ought. And accordingly, to come more particularly to the feelings and obligations suggested by such history, this very historicalness at all of our position here, of all that surrounds us and that we have to do with, is full therefore of advantage in this manner to our work, because it is full to ourselves of thought and duty and instruction. If the real charm and power of high birth be in the consciousness of a histori- cal name, and the stimulus to action, the guid- ance to some special line of duty, the rising, in the nobly born, above the everyday self- regard of the present, all these generated in the mind by the ingrained and habitual power of a past which is theirs, and which marks out them and their path from others; if, again, it be time more than space which associates men together, and consciousness of an united history, not nearness of place, which makes them fel- low-countrymen and gives them public spirit : then, if we, with a history of our own here, live together but like an accidental assem- blage or an ephemeral company, we are neg- lecting a mighty means for the cultivation of our own natures, and not less neglecting many 15 particular duties which such history brings to bear upon us. It is the movement on of time, and the perpetual change and progress in man which this movement measures, that makes every ancient work of man instinct with inter- est and instruction, and full of speech to the understanding ear : which makes too in each monument of literature a double teaching, first, of what is its special purpose to tell us, and next, through the light which it throws on the progress of knowledge and the mind of man. And so of our own social and literary history. Let us take our stand for a moment at the time when with the old system of religion crashing down all around, and the new as yet scarce seen to fill up its place, in an almost deserted University, and the general dread that colleges would for destruction be monasteries, Henry VIII. our second and special Founder, did that his deed of good : and let us look behind and before from thence. We see the holiness and usefulness of the age past now become superstition, and our foundation set up as it were to seal here the change : built up in lands and possessions, and even in visible mate- rials, from the ruined work of those Founders of an earlier time, whom still we honour as Benefactors; from confiscated lands of other societies dedicated to God's more special ser- 16 vice, and tithes set apart at first to maintain His ministers. These must carry their duties with them : not as if there were or could be anything divine or holy attached to lands and stones, irrespective of human use and purpose, by the arbitrary will of one transient possessor ; but because we entitle ourselves a Religious as well as a Royal Foundation, and own ourselves founded for the good of others and of our country, not for our own : and because in such case as religious men and lovers of England we should be ashamed that for our private behoof the good designs of holy men even so long ago should be frustrated, and that we should be the interceptors of what was meant for God and for our country. And therefore we dare to avow ourselves a Religious founda- tion in the full and special meaning of that word : and while our very being bears witness and calls on us to do it, to the need and ad- vantages of the Reformation, we do not think it our place to be ashamed of our first origin, to cast from our thoughts the unreformed and monastic beneficence of Hervey of Stanton, or to confess that even as founded by Henry VIII., our College belongs to the progressing, not to the completed, change. It is not for us to forget that the providence of God has made us the depositaries of ancient duties and obli- 17 gallons, which we a public body like those to whom we have succeeded, we to whom our history is a part of our corporate being, and with whom what is entrusted to us remains unchanged, cannot let drop in the advance of time and vicissitudes of possession, as private persons may. With us the religious character of our Foundation and our possessions is our privilege and our honour: we keep alive our corporate nobility by keeping alive, in feeling, the duties and the services from which that nobility, like all other in its origin, sprang : and the special responsibility upon our indivi- dual selves to honour God and to serve men because we inherit the duty, now left by change of times to our own care and conscience, of such a service, may be to us a subject of joy, a stirring up to action of our inmost spirits. It is ours to show that what is come to us is not lost to God's service and our country's ; to justify the Reformation changes, and those who made them, in the special way in which it con- cerns us to justify them, by showing that they have put us in a position in which the devo- tion and beneficence of the early times may be united with the mental and spiritual freedom of the new, and that at least one outgrowth of those troubles and convulsions, our own Re- foundation, is no disgrace or injury to England. 2 18 For, what we are led next to think of when we put ourselves back into those ages, we are the offspring of a time of change : of change, reli- gious, social, and literary, but such change in all these things as English reform and reformation has ever been and we trust still will be. Such change is not really, however at the first seem- ing so, one of mad quarrel with the past ; but rather one of growth and progress, arising out of that past, and throwing off, in its wildest convul- sions of destruction, only what was good no longer, the unneeded scaffolding, the skin and shell which had done its duty of protection ; to give room and expansion for the truth and reality hitherto hidden indeed in its growth and working, but not dead and powerless, within that which the change removes. The vast system of scholasticism which the activity of men's minds had constructed, in the chaos of reviving civili- zation, out of ill-examined and ill-understood religious and classical traditions and fragments this was taught in quiet in our earlier founda- tions ; few dreaming how beneath and around, the wide field of nature and history was open- ing before men, and with increasing knowledge the old ingenuity of reason was being turned in another direction. Then criticism began to ana- lyze language, and philosophy to reason with closer examination and more fearless consistency . 19 on the facts of morality and the appearances of nature : and a new literature as well as a re- formed religion, was born and burst forth from the old. This change makes our second begin- ning : and if on the one side, our history alto- gether throws back our thoughts to the old, yet on the other hand, our new springing forth, as the firstfruits of that great change which has made England what it is, should suggest to us that whatever there may have been in the old of good, this was covered by an accumulated weight of wrong and evil ; and that power to throw off such weight and develope the growing good beneath, change and progress like this, is the condition and law of life. The salt of religion is the activity of men's minds, and its influence for good in each age is according to the force with which it can take hold of their intelligence, employ their thoughts, and set in action their feelings : God, who made the mind to be active and to go on in knowledge, and made religion to be that mind's noblest food, made the two, we may be sure, well fitted to each other. The course of religious feeling is the same as of intel- lectual ; it is not he who tramples on the old that will find the new, but he who is willing to be taught first that he may build afterwards upon that teaching, and if it be his lot, discover for himself: who is able to understand how tradition 22 20 . and custom cling round us as of necessity, do what we will, and how it is equal falsity of mind to force ourselves to acquiesce in traditional teach- ing which we feel to be imperfect, and to fancy we can cast off all garments of the past, and stand in the nakedness of primeval ignorance to clothe our minds by discovery for ourselves. Knowledge as it is handed down, religious or other, carries with it, through its perpetual ex- pansion when brought into contact with other knowledge, its own changeableness : the words in which it is conveyed have depths of meaning in which one generation after another may still pierce deeper, the characters it paints to us may go on varying their hues as observation and expe- rience of man's nature is multiplied, the facts it deals with in ever fresh comparison may tell to us ever more and more. And thus there is a history of Christian teaching as of other know- ledge : not a history of continual and inevitable degeneracy from a once golden age, nor again a history of sure and unbroken growth and pro- gress : but a history of change ; of change in respect of knowledge, as the ancienter monuments and materials drop off, and what is left becomes through the glass of criticism more truly and reflectively understood; of change in respect of moral influence and customary forms, as all things change around us. That this change pro- , 21 ceeds usually, or in past times has proceeded, by fits of quiescence and of energy, by sleeps of unenquiring indolence and starts of volcanic ac- tivity this is what in some degree belongs to the progress of all knowledge ; it is the course which God's Providence has impressed upon His world and His creatures, perhaps to make us less vain of our nature and our powers when we see how growth and good comes in appearance by chance as in truth from Him, and how those who enlarge our mind's view, or help to purify our reli- gious feeling, are gifts, when he pleases, of His. To one such time of start and convulsive progress belongs our Refoundation: sudden start, long prepared in darkness, from scholasticism and traditionary forms and feelings, to criticism, new worlds, new languages, new arts and new ideas. In this we cannot but see and feel, that however the necessity for the change then were so great, and the truth of our religious worship as it now is to us so mighty, as to justify the fearful con- vulsion, and recompense the uncounted loss, which attended the bringing of that change about : yet that a religious system mightier far in appear- ance than ours has fallen to make way for us, fallen, because it was found wanting; because the unceasing flow of man's mental activity was at work to eat away the support which was beneath its soil, instead of to fertilize that soil 22 and make it teem with fruits of real knowledge pleasant to God and useful to man. The revived philosophy and the fresh-known history, joining with the intoxication of new natural discoveries, and the critical investigation, instead of tra- ditional quoting, of the monuments of religion ; these pushed out the old religion, and we must make good room for these in our minds, and have them good friends with our religion, if we would not have them push that out too. Let us keep fast the religion, the religion, too, as it has been associated with our country's history and all its institutions : if we would drain out all mental sap and spirit in ourselves and our countrymen, we have but to repaganize ourselves to become Greeks without Greek simplicity or patriotism, and Romans without Roman virtue, empty ad- mirers and imitators of what we cannot with whole heart enter into, and what cannot in its na- tural reality come into us. But we of this College, with our remembrances and monuments around and in us, cannot cast off our Christianity and our country ; and it is because we cannot do so, that these ancient words of Greece and Rome may speak really to our highest feelings. If we have convictions and public spirit of our own to begin with, we shall understand in some measure how nobleness and simplicity of feeling and the same public spirit created the poetry and the 23 philosophy and the eloquence of Greece, and animated to perpetual conquest the law-revering citizens of the former Rome; and the deeper we feel our own religion, the better shall we be able to appreciate and learn from that lofty philosophy and moral endurance which wanted but one thing, one thing which we can bring to it, the live coal of God's Spirit, the knowledge of Christ. But, on the other side, if we can carry a religious heart into studies of themselves not religious, and make them, because we are pure and right-minded, right and pure to us; then we may not perhaps be afraid to say, that those true and simple earlier records of history and philosophy are more valuable for our study, than history and philosophy even of Christian times, where rhetoric has overlaid true feeling, and imitation disguised reality. Then too, this our wider range of view, and our tracing even in ages when yet Christianity was not, so much to admire and honour, may well prevent our home traditions and our own religious history, while they form the foundation, from absorbing our whole feelings, and from making us in this way imitators of another kind ; imitators of dead forms and obsolete fashions which have had their day, and done their good, and helped to make us what we are, but which now can only hinder our action, and lead us off from the 24 straight way of duty into eccentric paths of fruitless enterprise. It is thus that our history, and our traditional course of studies, may remind us afresh of that duty which we ow r e to those around us who are absorbed more than we in the world of action ; the duty namely of making our religion intelli- gent, of verifying it as it were to our inmost con- sciousness, of associating it with all the cultiva- tion of our mind, and all the advance of our knowledge : that religion shall not become, so far as we are concerned, ever an undermined and superficial crust of usage, or be deserted by ad- vancing truth. Nor will it then be from us, bound not more to honour the past than to wel- come the future, that will lightly proceed the brand of rationalism or heresy against any who try, in good faith and with fitting reverence, to pierce more deeply into the meaning of the Bible and of the Church's history, or to correct our religious theories, if they need it, by a truer knowledge of our moral being, and a more ex- tended experience of man. But, more, as our Foundation, made in a time of change, teaches us to accept the past for what is good in it, but to acknowledge change still and progress as the law of life progress indeed, very often rather effected by a wise return upon the past, and taking up again of thoughts and feelings 25 once neglected and repudiated, as the Reforma- tion change so much arose from the revival to Christianity of the once anathematized literature of Greece and Rome so the spirit, not of neu- trality, but of moderation and quietness, which such feelings would engender, we think we may consider as having been ever the ruling spirit of our College. Our province has been to give true ideas of the past and the present of our country, by comparing them with a farther receding past and a more widely-extended present scene : and to look upon the future from our post beside and in some degree out of the hurrying stream of events, as men whose business is rather in most cases to find out and to test truth for others, than to come forward in perpetual interference and action ourselves. The high and eternal interests of increasing knowledge, the observation of that outward and inward nature which goes on the same through revolutions and through tyrannies, the learning and teaching to see in the present what there is in it of historical and enduring and pregnant meaning, in the midst of the whirl and confusion which each day brings of news and care ; these are our part, our help to those who have to act and rule : and to go forth from this, to bring within our walls those struggles and swayings of party, which are as unbefitting our place as they are necessary and useful in other places to our 26 country, this is to be false to our trust and our calling here. Of course we dare not say but that our walls and gates have often been powerless to keep out ephemeral politics and personal disputes, and that the thoughts of those within have some- times forsaken the great interests of science and wisdom, to dwell on the mere struggles of the day : but this of the past history of our College we may say, and thank God for it, that through England's much-troubled history of the last three hundred years, we have had here ever students willing to learn, and not a fresh element of dis- turbance in every political confusion, and men to teach them, not private politics of their own, but true knowledge and enduring principles, to build thereupon their future action. It was during the heat of the troubles ensuing on our fiercest civil war, that the youth of Barrow was here employed in sowing the seed, for whose noble fruits to-day and at other times we honour him : and those who guided and promoted him along our College- course were men whose political sympathies, in times when to restrain such was really an effort, were all opposed to his. It has ever been ours to look upon the investigation of truth as our happi- ness and our noblest work, to be ready to go forth to put that truth into action when we are called to it, but till then not to anticipate truth by traditional prejudices, accidental politics, undi- 27 gested opinions, narrowness of mind, and action unsuitable, short-sighted, and premature. So far we have spoken of the moral obliga- tions and guidance which the facts of our history set before us : we have now to say a little of the thoughts and feelings of thankfulness, the duty and direction, which our actual position calls on us for, and which would be, had we no history at all. And, first, how we are a brotherhood in know- ledge, and in our moral and scientific efforts and endeavours ; a brotherhood in that in which gene- rally, and more generally perhaps in these times, when books abound, and personal discipleship less abounds, similarity of studies is likely rather to be rivalry than aught else ; a brotherhood and so- ciety also, as this day specially witnesses, not only with our present companions here, but with many who have gone before, with many that shall come after. Surely full of teaching to us is the view which this communion offers to us of the course of knowledge. We honour to-day the remem- brance of Bacon, of Barrow, and Newton, and of so many more their colleagues and their disciples, because without them we could none of us have been what we are, have known what we know, or felt what we feel : our own College-history reminds us that, be we disciples or discoverers, we succeed to an inheritance of knowledge, which will allow us no pride of making all for ourselves ; and which, 28 like any other inheritance, we had better take as a boon and try to use well, than pretend to throw away as a hindrance or a dishonour. This again, that we have not predecessors only here but col- leagues and associates, may figure to us how after all in his own time any one of us can do or dis- cover but his part, and that part, large or small, depending in many ways, and many more than he knows, on the contemporary work and help of others : it may teach us how it is as foolish in our own day to try to disown what we must owe to them, and work, except for quarrelling, as if we were alone in the world, as it is to throw off our like obligations to those who have gone before. And, further, we look forward too ; we are but of short time, and our successors will soon be here ; successors to whom, by imagination and interest, we must, as it were, extend our own being, if we would have any worthy fruit in enjoyment from the widening by us of the fields of knowledge ; for such increase must come out of ourselves, and is so much laid out of our own strength and powers for others. But if it be so, others have done the same for us : we were their successors, and they were most of them, at least for the best things they did, comparatively unhonoured in their times, and looked forward to us to do them justice and to cherish their remembrance. And in us, there- fore, they still in some measure live, and it is our 29 honour that they do so : what we do or feel is done by them, so far as they have helped to make up and form our real selves the thinking spirit within us ; and our association with them in ima- gination, as we see their resemblances around us, and fill our senses and minds with objects and images which filled theirs too, is a figure of our communion with them in the tradition and growth of science and learning ; calling upon us with voice of power to continue to those to come not only the outward imaginary tradition and con- nexion of pictures and buildings, but the real transmission from mind to mind of received and discovered knowledge. And not only is it in regard to our view of knowledge that this our brotherhood together may be to us of such moral use ; but also in that it may tend to impress upon us a public and unselfish spirit, or rather gives us something to put forth that public spirit upon. It is a feeling which may be to some a correction, to others a comfort, and specially in days of vanity and show, that they can in some degree sink their own indivi- duality in a wider, take to themselves without usurpation some share in the honour of others, and seek, with less of selfishness, honour for themselves. Such public and united spirit was once the true nurse of magnificence and of art, and led to some great works, instead of many 30 feeble attempts at small : nor, we may hope, has the feeling been lost among us, that out- ward magnificence in that which is enduring, which our predecessors made for us, or we make for our successors, is as befitting a public and historical body, as it is often in other places, the tasteless waste of ill-lodged and igno- rantly-squandered affluence. With us, it is well there should be signs visible to all men of our long existence till now, and signs too given by us, that we have confidence in ourselves, our successors, and our country, that this our Foun- dation shall still again last as long: that God shall continue to it His hand of blessing, and preserve it for work He has for it to do. Then while preparing thus for future years, and the time when we each shall be no more, we have our safeguard against meaningless and tasteless display, in the works which the times past have left to us : in the remembrance that we are con- tinuers and keepers alive of what has been and is begun, not left without type or rule to do with our own what we will. We have a public duty to our brotherhood, even to its outward face and appearance, before we withdraw into our own selves, to look after our individual best advan- tage : and we have a duty to each other to re- member that here we are as one, and that our rivalries, if we have them, should be abroad ; 31 rivalries for advancement of honour, if it be so, not to ourselves only, but to us all. Still there is one view of our position and place here, which we cannot but take, perhaps the chief; we must look on ourselves as we are a large and influential body, in action and in example, in our relation both to those who depend upon us without and within our walls, and to those who, unconcerned with us, look upon us from abroad, with friendly or hostile gaze. And here there is one point of our history which may for a moment fitly be resumed, and that is, that we are a Charitable foundation : and that so far as any special purposes of charity this our foun- dation may have been intended, by the side of greater purposes, to serve, shall have become im- practicable or trifling by the change of time, they must yet leave behind them upon our conscience inherited obligations to doing good, more than come upon other men, who have not, to look back on, a history like ours. We cannot but take such a foundation as that of our depen- dent bedesmen, not merely as a thing in itself to be observed, a perfunctory acquittal of our debt of charity, but as a hint to us that our revenues are subject to a wide if vague charge of watchfulness, to spend them so as to do with them the most good to those who need : and that because we are supposed by the idea of our 32 Foundation to be men of thought and reason, men whose conscience makes them as a duty beneficent, and whose reason guides the good they do. Reasonable beneficence is not a throw- ing away in careless charity of a part, to purchase thereby liberty in conscience to do with the rest what we will : rather is it the endeavour so to distribute and lay forth the whole, as that this shall do good to others as well as to the pos- sessor, and shall carry with it the gift of the thought which makes it really useful as well as of the enjoyment it can procure. And besides, as all should bear it in mind, so should we more than others, because our position here pre- supposes in us thought and conscience, that the abundance and ease we see around us, smoothly as it moves, is the result of hard-handed la- bour, urged by poverty, in others; and that it would be dishonourable as well as unkind if we were to surround ourselves with unneeded pro- fusion and luxury almost unobserved, regardless of toiling men in their wretched abodes so near and everywhere around, perhaps labouring for us. We too, more than others, may with ad- vantage think of them, if perhaps wider range of knowledge and steadier habits of thought may enable us more in calmness to think also what we can do, and what can be done, to better their lot : alike without unpractical pity, 33 or irritating exaggeration, or undeserved blame of ourselves and others. Never have we wished to think that our secluding walls and isolated security from e very-day anxieties are meant to shut us out, either in indolent self-indulgence or theoretic dream, from interest in the toiling and suffering world around us. Our wide-spread possessions, our individual birth, give to us all and each the interests of proprietors and of spe- cial lovers of our own neighbour-land through- out the length and breadth of England : our studies are not intended to end in ourselves, or to end in thought ; they are about men, and forms of social life, and subjugation of nature to the use of understanding man, and all that lies at the root of intelligent practical action in this as in any day, and without such practical view has itself, even in our own minds, no power or meaning : we step back to a distance from the passing interests of the day, not in order to lose sight of man, but to get a more com- prehensive and true view of him and of society, and of what needs to be done, and what we can do, and how we can make our own infinitesimal action tell best on the mighty mass, and multi- ply its force through others, impelled or guided by us. And yet, though it is our duty thus to look around, there are interests of beneficence for us 3 34 more at home. Our special province is religion, joined with learning : our most inward obli- gation, to aid in the raising up of intelligent servants to God in His Church, and religious furtherers of knowledge. If there be one sort of poverty we are specially called on to pity, it is where a mind with native power to discover and to teach, is cramped and weighed down by necessity and penury : and were there no hints in the form and history of our Foundation that it was meant to help those struggling to rise, yet thankfulness for our own position here, and for the mental developement our course in this place has brought forth in us, cannot but urge upon us to help others. In the wish and attempt to do this we trust we have not been wanting : nor in pride that here is no distinction but of power of mind and goodness of life ; that here those who can rise are aided and encouraged and supported to do it, without unwise dragging up, through charity, of others whose place were fitter below: and chief of all, that such tone reigns throughout, as to make each feel that his place in scholarship and character is here his real place; without his being incited to unfit display, or galled by conscious poverty, through the sight around him of luxury and extrava- gance. In the general advance of prosperity, it is well for us that we are called to keep our 35 eyes on the simpler past, to live as it were partly in that, and as in thought to head the age, so in the appliances and luxuries of outward life, not to be ashamed of slower motion : so do we do, without effort, the truest charity to many a one whose coming hither is the result of labour and toil and saving in himself and his, and the beginning of another course of the same; and whose youthful resolution it is cruel to expose to the contagion of surrounding luxury, the example of neighbouring profusion, and the fashion and custom of costly life. Yet these are they we count our pride, because to them we can do good, and be paid for it afterwards with real honour to ourselves from them : and not those who bring fancied honour to us at first from nobler abodes and higher names, unless the nobility be not only of the name without but of the mind within, and the duties be felt no less than the pleasures, of wealth and of loftier station. For them too, simplicity of life is the best lesson we can teach them, and the best action we can have on the future course of society in our country ; we fail in our duty when we do not keep up the tone of ancient discipline to rule all who come hither, if we take instead the tone from them, and follow, forsak- ing what is our real honour even in the world's eyes, that world without us and around. 36 For, and this shall be our last considera- tion, there is a world abroad with eyes upon us : whose looking on us and on bodies such as ours is not in regard of our being important or un- important, but because we stand prominently and almost singly in this age with but little in us like to it, and as belonging to another. We are a city set on a hill of the past, from which the ceaseless current of change has washed away what was once level and uniform around us: we have many enemies, the longsighted who understand and hate us; the shortsighted, who not understanding, deem wrongly of us. And as it is absurd and dishonourable so to act as in the sight of men, as that each design we form and each thing we do shall have-, besides our own impulse and reason, a bye regard to what others unconcerned with us will think ; as by this we abdicate our due place, make our lives a show, and our action reasonless and incon- sistent, subjecting ourselves to the worst and vilest of slaveries: so yet the teaching of ene- mies, who watch for our failings, has been ever not only lawful but the best of teaching, not to modify with compromise our conduct, but to dis- cipline and chasten our opinions. What is good in us, it is enough to go over once a year as on this day, for encouragement and thankful- ness ; this calls for no immediate action : what 37 is faulty needs present mending, and it is well we should have, whence ever they may come, continual remindings of it. Only let us not follow our enemies' interpretation of faults, and take them for judges ; rather let us see in some of their accusations our highest praise, and look for the deepest cut and the most real shame in some of the praise which misunderstanding admirers would heap upon us. For our real enemies, and their charges of bigotry, or idle- ness, or whatever their fancy may invent against us, we are not careful to answer them : we have to commend ourselves to God and to our own conscience, to posterity, and to such of our own time who understand or care to understand how the thought of quietness sets going the world of action, and how the due regard and preservation of what has been, is the true starting-point for usefulness for the future. For others, whom misunderstanding has indisposed to us, let us think how such misunderstanding has arisen ; and let us think more especially whether it may not have arisen from our own want of sin- gleness of action towards our proper purpose, and our mistaken attempts to impress and to please them. The praise of one moment often becomes the blame of another : what, for in- stance, in the moment of gratification and com- panionship was hospitality and generosity, libe- rality and freedom of thought and utterance, may sometimes, in chill of feeling and advance of time, when far off we have for some serious purpose to be estimated, grow sour in the re- membrance, and turn to wastefulness and world- liness, ill befitting carelessness and unrestraint. The worst of enemies are those who praise us for what to us is no praise : general praises of doing like others and keeping up to the spirit of the age, which tend to commend our present body or our individual selves, by disparaging our position and our duties, we should look upon as the worst of dishonours to us, an insult at once to our understanding and our conscience. The spirit of the age is nothing to us, who have motives to go on and principles of our own, belonging as well to other ages; whose pecu- liar place it is to gain ever fresh knowledge for ourselves, and to watch for every means and every occasion of imparting it to others, not because the spirit of the age calls upon us, other- wise gladly stationary, to go forward, but be- cause we ever have gone forward, and we hope, as long as we last, ever shall : from science to science, as new discoveries have made new sciences or remoulded the old ; from one form to another of learning or criticism, as each has in succession first shown itself to teachers, to be followed out and systematized, and then 39 been taught, as soon as fit to be a true course of training and discipline, to those who come to learn. This year we trust, and it is well worth our commemoration to-day, our College has done much to aid the recognition, in the larger body of which we form a part, of many rising sciences as now in that state, and fit to be general subjects of instruction here : it be- longs to the course of proceeding which has ever been ours, and which our history urges upon us, to do our College's part in making this recognition effective, and welcoming and push- ing forward the accurate study of nature, the systematic investigation of the laws of morals, of social being, and of history, as we have hailed and furthered so many changes and advances before. It remains only, in closing this hurried and imperfect survey of the wide field of feeling and obligation suggested to us by our history and our position, that we should draw in our thoughts to our own individual selves, and end, as we began, with thankfulness and reli- gion. Those thoughts have travelled over past generations of predecessors who have done their work here, over the wide earth we live in, and onward to future ages : let them return for a moment home, not with hopeless collapse, with the dreary feeling of our own momentary and 40 almost inappreciable existence in the vastness of the past and present, but with a truer feel- ing of what we are. We are of yesterday, a fresh generation of leaves to grow and drop from our college stem, and our own corporate history, so fractional a part of that of the world and our country, is enough for us, scarcely ex- cepting even those among us whose names we hope shall really live, to be lost and vanish in. Such, and such alone, must be the sad view of him who with unreligious mind can only find his own eternity in vain, if not false, abstrac- tions, and to whom the progress of man, the growth of learning, the communion of know- ledge, the mental association with future ages, figure forth and point to nothing beyond them- selves. But with us, glorious as these ideas are which extend in imagination our being to wider spheres and to enduring ages, they are glorious most of all, because, shadowy them- selves, they are figures and reflections of what is real and true. For in truth the mind within is nobler than the senses which serve it without, and it is not the things seen on earth which are the enduring stem and we the fleet- ing leaves, but as they are but the worked-out idea of man's spirit, so that spirit shall out- last them, and see their fall. That collective society and each unit man, are but the same in 41 large and in small, philosophers have often seen ; but only religion, bringing life and im- mortality to light, can make us see how the gradual revelation of knowledge, and the com- munion and sympathy thereby generated among men, can have anything to answer to them in the individual man, anything exhilarating to his heart, and full to his own self of hope. Reli- gion and knowledge are not of earth alone, or rather they belong not rightly to earth at all, but are there only as in banishment and in nonage, having their home in other worlds, and nearer God ; and our society in this place, with these for its substance and its object, has little hold upon us, if it does not lead us to feel that God has fitted our minds and His creation to each other, and has made us our own selves eternal, as He has made His universe boundless for us to see and hold converse with. Nor need we then lose ourselves, either in the un- told generations of time, or the measureless creation around us. Each spirit of man which can grow and learn, reflects that boundlessness, and shall live for ever to reflect it more: ex- panding still in life and knowledge, as drawing nearer to God, the fulness of both, if only on earth the work of earth have been done, and we have learnt to see and know, in history and in nature, the traces of a Creator and a Redeemer. 4 Small things indeed become us now, to lead on to great, which as yet, except perhaps for one moment's thought and look, are not for us; now only befits us to remember the time past, that we may give to God for it thanks, and to those too who have done us good, and done good more especially to our united life in this our College : to muse and exercise ourselves more and more in all the works of the hands of God, the true idea and description of know- ledge which shall never perish, but ever grow, of its boundlessness, its nobleness, and its truth. THE END.