ration is

"_Self-Culture_."

Man, though fallen, is in his ruins grand. His powers of development
are little less than infinite. They begin with the cradle, but do not
end with the grave. No other being begins so low and ascends so high.
In his beginning, he is "crushed before the moth;" in the fullness of
his power he shall "judge angels." In this world he scarcely begins to
live. This life is too short and this world too small for the
development of his God-given faculties. Here he scarcely learns the
alphabet preparatory to God's grand university from which he is never
to graduate. He simply begins the study of an unending book. He but
gathers a few pebbles on the shores of the river of time, then sinks
beneath its wave.

But while in this world we scarcely make a beginning, yet everything
depends on the character of that beginning. As is the beginning, so
will be the conclusion. In the direction taken in time will we progress
in eternity. We may repent of our mistakes here and correct them, but
there is no repentance beyond the grave. There are no mistakes
corrected in eternity. Hence the necessity of a proper use of time.

I have selected the word culture to express the idea which I wish to
convey, and yet I must confess that it does not express it as happily
as I should desire. Where the Greeks had their _paideia_, the Romans
their _humanitas_, we have the more elastic and accommodating word
culture. I use it in this address in the sense of drawing out and
developing the nobler powers that are potentially in fallen humanity.
It is not so much the development of all the faculties in man to their
highest extent, as the directing and training of the better ones to
their true end. We are dealing here with beginnings, not endings. The
perfection of man in all his capacities is not a thing of time. In
time, the character must receive its mold; in eternity, its highest
polish.

By self-culture I mean, of course, the power that one has, and ought to
use, of cultivating himself. "To cultivate anything," says Dr.
Channing, "be it a plant, an animal, a mind, is to make grow. Growth,
expansion is the end. Nothing admits culture but that which has a
principle of life, capable of being expanded. He, therefore, who does
what he can to unfold all his powers and capacities, especially his
nobler ones, so as to become a well proportioned, vigorous, happy
being, practices self-culture." This may apply to those who have no