be in that laboratory of learning, its library. Unless a university is
producing these, it is teaching only its matriculates when it ought to
be teaching the public.

Much may be done, much accomplished, in the university without the
library. Professional schools may multiply and grow, for in these men of
professional learning supply the lack of books. It is even possible to
carry on much research and produce valuable results along any narrow
rising line of discovery in some science, which, like the coral, has but
its growing edge alive, and for the rest is dead and under water. But if
a university is to fill the whole round and play part in society, it
must enjoy, employ, and extend the organized memory of man as
represented in a great library. As the chief value of this lies, not in
any view of its mere bulk and size, but in its relation to the
recollection of the race, so the work of the university pivots on its
ability to make vital the study of books of power, without which all
learning and letters and science are but a vain show. Better, a thousand
times better, the solitary study which brings men face to face with the
spirit of man in these great movements than any university study which
dwarfs to routine or degrades to mere rote these great works. For the
object of all our study is not knowledge, but wisdom, and we move to
dwindling ends if we search out all the secrets of matter and forget the
secrets of the spirit. The great round of studies which make up the
university, its libraries and laboratories, the accumulation of the past
and the discovery of the future, these are each and all but the
scaffolding by which the race rises to those conceptions of the Divine
and the spiritual uttered and summed in its books of power. Listening to
their teaching we may even learn that the ascent of man is more
important than his descent, his future of more consequence than his
origin--that it is his birth, and not his death, which is a sleep and a
forgetting.

But books of use and books of power--the indiscriminate eulogy of books
and reading has ceased to be possible even at the opening of a building
dedicated to both. Their criticism has begun. Books are no longer the
unique property of the scholar. We all buy books. Most of us read them.
Many of you write them. The use of books is the one side of learning on
which we all claim an opinion. Yet owned, read, written, or wholly laid
aside in a busy life, the use of books