reflects upon Jefferson for introducing into our system an element which gives too much to the passions of the multitude, unrestrained and uneducated to obey the law. Macaulay ought to know, for he did all he could to introduce the same element into England. But he saw from a distance what he could not discover at home: he reproached our system as spreading all sail and providing no ballast. We fly before the wind, but we are wholly unprepared for the gale. Happily, we have resources. The colossal character of Washington, the Alfred of the New World, has provided us with maxims and with examples to which our youth may be profitably pointed. He gave our Constitution a religious character when he took the first oath to support it in the office of President. He reverently bowed down and kissed the Bible, and then, with all the retinue of Congress and officials, he went to St. Paul's, and began his own and the national career in offices of worship and prayer. Now, if we study this great example of the true American, we find in it, whatever his faults, a certain harmony and proportion of qualities which are only rarely developed in the narrowness of sectarian education. A class of Christian laymen has been generated in the Anglican communion, through successive ages, possessing a certain family likeness, which is recognized in all their varieties of station and manner of life. Not to go further back, take the poet Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney, - take Raleigh, and Sir Henry Wotton, and Hyde, and Falkland, and John 1 See Note L'".

Evelyn, and Izaak Walton, and Boyle, and Addison, and Burke, and Johnson, and Cowper, and Wilberforce, and others, whose very names are lessons, such are the characters we need in the Republic. Such were our own John Jay, and many of our most eminent countrymen. It has been, over and over again, asserted by critics and orators, that Washington's character was formed by his mother, by the catechism she taught him, the books she read to him on the day of the Lord, and the habits to which she trained him as a young Christian. It is true in a larger sense that he owed this to his mother, to his mother's mother, the Anglican Church. Well has De Maistre said, "She is most precious," most precious to our country, so long as she preserves her salt. If that should "lose its savour," and cease to season our social and civil estate, I doubt not we shall speedily perish.

31. AN APPEAL TO YOUTH.

In such a great and marvellous country, and at a most trying crisis, you, my dear young friends, are about to enter upon life. In former lectures I have invited you to claim for yourselves a noble mission, and to let God mark out for you a career of usefulness and of duty. I reminded you, at the outset,1 that your mark is to be made upon the beginnings of another century. The era is outgrowing its teens; there is solemnity in the very sound of the Twentieth Century, with which you

1 Lecture I., § 4, page 12.

are to be identified. You have yet a few years to prepare for it: avoid American hurry, and give those years to thorough study, that you may enter upon your maturity and your allotted work with the thoroughly furnished mind which is the secret of power and mastery. Beware of shiftless means and irresolute aims. Beware of the sort of life epitomized by Dr. Young:

"At thirty man suspects himself a fool;
Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan;
At fifty chides his infamous delay;
Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve ;

Resolves and re-resolves, then dies the same.”

If, in directing your attention at this stage of your preparation to the ennobling study of history, I have given you any practical hints for that pursuit, I am largely rewarded already; but far greater will be my reward, when, in later days, you know by experience the value of what I have taught, and in those days perchance may recall these evenings of the "Hobart Guild,"

"Remembering me, and these my exhortations."

32. CONCLUSION.

Yours will then be no share in the remorse of those who, having lived liked fools, come to "die as the fool dieth." The sickly whine, "Is life worth living?" will have received its answer in a life well spent. You will find at least some fruits of your toils and efforts recognized by your fellow men as wholesome and refreshing. But, far better, in your own conscience will be your sweet reward,

in the sense of duty done, and a mission fulfilled through the grace of God. "Is life worth living?" No, gentlemen, if by life is meant the torpid existence of the materialist, or the feverish excitement which is called life by the voluptuary; not if life is but groping in the dark, and refusing to walk in the light of day; not if it means drifting to and fro without ballast, without rudder, without chart and compass, and with no certain haven where one would be; not if it be "without God in the world" and without hope in death. But oh! what a gift is life" that answers life's great end"! that adds another to the noble army of the faithful, by whose testimony truth has been maintained, by whom the blessings of the Gospel have been handed down to successive generations, by whose intercessions the world itself has been upheld! The secret of such a life was found by Saul of Tarsus, when he uttered his first Christian prayer, "Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?" He has left the greatest mark upon the ages ever imprinted by a human mind upon humanity, and let us be sure that, in our humble degree, we shall not fail to find a similar work, and to fulfil it, if we begin, in the same spirit of humility and self-devotion, kneeling before Him who is the Light of the World.