he students are making good advancement."

It may be thought by casual consideration, as was said by eminent men,
that the name was the largest thing about it, but I prefer to disagree
and to say that the purpose as set forth in the charter is the greatest
thing about it. These are the words:

"We urge all friends of the freedmen to increasing confidence and to
look forward with assured expectation to greater things than these. This
people are to be prepared for what is being prepared for them. They are
to become a 'people which in time past were not a people'; and there is
increasing evidence that 'God hath made of one blood all the nations of
men.' Equal endowments substantially, with equal culture, will produce
that equality common to all mankind."

In them we get the quintescence, we get the crystallization, we get the
high purpose, we get the spiritual foundation, of Howard University.

Conceived in prayer, born of the faith and convictions as embodied in
its original seal which reads, "Equal rights and knowledge for all," an
offspring of Plymouth Rock, Howard University is set before you--a cross
between religious fervor and prophetic educational enthusiasm. She is,
then, the essence filtrating from the declaration of Paul at Athens,
that "of one blood hath God created all men to dwell upon earth."

For forty-five years, Howard has been living her life. She has been more
or less doing her work as circumstances allowed and dictated, but now we
ask of you "Watchman, what of the night?" How far has this work been
progressing along the line of basal principles that we find embodied in
all these authoritative extracts? Unfortunate I think it is that the
discussions in the early meetings of the Board of Trustees were not
preserved in stenographic report, for the time will come when the
spiritual history of Howard University must be written as well as its
material history, and then the historian will be at a loss to find the
true afflatus that gave birth to our alma mater, unless we keep it in
evidence.

The imagination has oft painted Howard University as a temple--a temple
of knowledge,--a temple for the teaching of justice; a temple for the
upbuild of mankind. Let us then hold its form to our imagination, pearly
white as the palaces of the South, straight in its construction as
rectitude, and let us present it to an admiring world, not only for
aesthetic culture but ethical grandeur, religious progress, and polit