l arts. In this so-called practical
age Amherst has chosen for her province the most practical of all,--the
culture and the classics of all time.

Civilization depends not only upon the knowledge of the people, but upon
the use they make of it. If knowledge be wrongfully used, civilization
commits suicide. Broadly speaking, the college is not to educate the
individual, but to educate society. The individual may be ignorant and
vicious. If society have learning and virtue, that will sustain him. If
society lacks learning and virtue, it perishes. Education must give not
only power but direction. It must minister to the whole man or it fails.

Such an education considered from the position of society does not come
from science. That provides power alone, but not direction. Give a
savage tribe firearms and a distillery, and their members will
exterminate each other. They have science all right, but misuse it.
They lack ideals. These young men that we welcome back with so much
pride did not go forth to demonstrate their faith in science. They did
not offer their lives because of their belief in any rule of mathematics
or any principle of physics or chemistry. The laws of the natural world
would be unaffected by their defeat or victory. No; they were defending
their ideals, and those ideals came from the classics.

This is preeminently true of the culture of Greece and Rome. Patriotism
with them was predominant. Their heroes were those who sacrificed
themselves for their country, from the three hundred at Thermopylae to
Horatius at the bridge. Their poets sang of the glory of dying for one's
native land. The orations of Demosthenes and Cicero are pitched in the
same high strain. The philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and the Greek
and Latin classics were the foundation of the Renaissance. The revival
of learning was the revival of Athens and Sparta and of the Imperial
City. Modern science is their product. To be included with the classics
are modern history and literature, the philosophers, the orators, the
statesmen, and poets,--Milton and Shakespeare, Lowell and Whittier,--the
Farewell Address, the Reply to Hayne, the Speech at Gettysburg,--it is
all these and more that I mean by the classics. They give not only power
to the intellect, but direct its course of action.

The classic of all classics is the Bible.

I do not underestimate schools of science and technical arts. They have
a high and noble calling in ministering