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Excerpt from Baccalaureate Sermon, and Oration and Poem: Class of 1875 Have we not had experience of this power in our recent his tory? When the news of Fort Sumter ashed through the land, there were in these halls those who seemed to their teachers mere boys, who started at once into vigorous manhood, grew by gradations more rapid than we could trace into high places of command, sought posts of the most perilous service, won ever green laurels, many, alas! Only to deck their graves, - while those who survived achieved for themselves a culture for which twice the term of peaceful civic life would have been inadequate. We had one with us at our last Commencement, the mere muti lated trunk of a man, whose after-dinner speech, with the fervor and fire of youth, which his maimed and suffering life had not chilled or dimmed, had a depth of prescient wisdom which would have found fit utterance from the lips of the elders in the gravest councils of the nation. Indeed, in none of her sons can our University take a more honest pride than in those who gained in war the virtues and endowments that can best adorn and fruc tify the era of restored peace and renewed prosperity. If we could only view them aright, there are now for our re public emergencies, perils intense though insidious, a present to be spurned, a future to be striven for, which ought to awaken the patriotic feeling of our young men, and to urge them on to early maturity for efficient public service. I avail myself of the pres ent as a fit opportunity to speak of the claims of our country on her educated men. Our imminent dangers are from popular ignorance, financial folly, political corruption, and religious lati tudinarianism and indifference. If I can only arouse in those of whom we to-day take leave a sense of the responsibility whichrests upon them as to these sources of evil, I am sure that I shall not have spoken in vain as regards the public and even the national well-being; for, though a hundred and fifty right minded youth seem of no account or weight among the millions of our people, there may be among them single minds and voices that shall make themselves felt and heard through the whole length and breadth of the land, as there were, a hundred years ago, individual young men fresh from our halls, but for whom certain most momentous passages of our history would have remained unwritten. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."
Excerpt from Baccalaureate Sermon: And Oration and Poem, Class of 1867 My prime object, as in accordance with the sacredness of the place and occasion, is to present some of the character istics and the claims of that moral and spiritual manhood, which, while it breaks up the delicate lines and indents the rounded proportions that mark a lower type of beauty, yet combines, with its strength, beauty of a far higher order in the knotted sinews of strenuous purpose, in the scars not wound-marks, but glory-marks of successful conflict with evil, in the furrows ploughed by the continuous, anxious endeavor to comprehend the true, to embody the right, and to realize the good. In the first place the true man regards as a sacred trust his own individuality; by which I mean those traits wherein God intended that he should differ from those around him, as he does in form and feature, those traits which make him, to use a grammatical distinction, a proper and not a common noun, - an individual, and not a member of such or such classes or bodies of men. Our age has won the distinction of breaking down the barriers that used to divide nation from nation, and inaugurating the intercourse by steam and tele graph, which tends to fuse the civilized world into one vast and almost homogeneous nationality. It is entitled to the less enviable distinction of doing more than all preceding ages toward breaking down the barriers between man and man, the fences of individual character, the sacredness of private Opinion, judgment, and habit. The press and the caucus tyrannize over one's life as a citizen, and confine hispolitical action within limits as narrow, though not always as straight, as those which bound a railway track; while a vote or act not pre-arranged by his party, even though the dictate of honesty, brands him with very much the same kind of stigma that used to attach to dishonesty. In social life, fashion usurps a similar control; and her dicta, ema nating no one knows whence, yet with a sovereignty which no one dares to resist, are suffered to override all considera tions of health, comfort, propriety, integrity, and religion while the dissenter, though his dissent be e11forced%y neces sity, or by conscience, which ought to be the most cogent of necessities, is treated as a person excommunicate. As to moral habits, the customs of every community and of every circle' seem a constraining law within its own precincts and fewer than ever before have the courage and energy to mark out and pursue their own higher path. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.