note 5: _Paradise Lost_, IV, 1. 552.]

In them the dead past lives. They represent the college. They are the
college. It is not in the campus with its imposing halls and temples, nor
in the silent lore of the vast library or the scientific instruments of
well-equipped laboratories, but in the men who are the incarnation of all
these, that your college lives. It is not enough that there be knowledge,
history and poetry, eloquence and art, science and mathematics, philosophy
and ethics, ideas and ideals. They must be vitalized. They must be
fashioned into life. To send forth men who live all these is to be a
college. This temple of learning must be translated into human form if it
is to exercise any influence over the affairs of mankind, or if its alumni
are to wield the power of education.

A great thinker and master of the expression of thought has told us:--

It was before Deity, embodied in a human form, walking among men,
partaking of their infirmities, leaning on their bosoms, weeping over
their graves, slumbering in the manger, bleeding on the cross, that
the prejudices of the Synagogue, and the doubts of the Academy, and
the pride of the Portico, and the fasces of the Lictor, and the swords
of thirty Legions, were humbled in the dust.[6]

[Footnote 6: Macaulay's _Essay on Milton_.]

If college-bred men are to exercise the influence over the progress of the
world which ought to be their portion, they must exhibit in their lives a
knowledge and a learning which is marked with candor, humility, and the
honest mind.

The present is ever influenced mightily by the past. Patrick Henry spoke
with great wisdom when he declared to the Continental Congress, "I have but
one lamp by which my feet are guided and that is the lamp of experience."
Mankind is finite. It has the limits of all things finite. The processes of
government are subject to the same limitations, and, lacking imperfections,
would be something more than human. It is always easy to discover flaws,
and, pointing them out, to criticize. It is not so easy to suggest
substantial remedies or propose constructive policies. It is characteristic
of the unlearned that they are forever proposing something which is old,
and, because it has recently come to their own attention, supposing it to
be new. Into this error men of liberal education ought not to fall. The
forms and processes of government are not new. They have been known,
disc