physical and moral, political and religious, in a revolution
destined to make the last first and the first last, in a revolution
destined to invert the relative positions of Glasgow and Bologna. We
cannot, I think, better employ a few minutes than in reviewing the
stages of this great change in human affairs.

The review shall be short. Indeed I cannot do better than pass rapidly
from century to century. Look at the world, then, a hundred years after
the seal of Nicholas had been affixed to the instrument which
called your College into existence. We find Europe, we find Scotland
especially, in the agonies of that great revolution which we
emphatically call the Reformation. The liberal patronage which
Nicholas, and men like Nicholas, had given to learning, and of which
the establishment of this seat of learning is not the least remarkable
instance, had produced an effect which they had never contemplated.
Ignorance was the talisman on which their power depended; and that
talisman they had themselves broken. They had called in Knowledge as a
handmaid to decorate Superstition, and their error produced its natural
effect. I need not tell you what a part the votaries of classical
learning, and especially the votaries of Greek learning, the Humanists,
as they were then called, bore in the great movement against spiritual
tyranny. They formed, in fact, the vanguard of that movement. Every
one of the chief Reformers--I do not at this moment remember a single
exception--was a Humanist. Almost every eminent Humanist in the north of
Europe was, according to the measure of his uprightness and courage, a
Reformer. In a Scottish University I need hardly mention the names of
Knox, of Buchanan, of Melville, of Secretary Maitland. In truth, minds
daily nourished with the best literature of Greece and Rome necessarily
grew too strong to be trammelled by the cobwebs of the scholastic
divinity; and the influence of such minds was now rapidly felt by the
whole community; for the invention of printing had brought books within
the reach even of yeomen and of artisans. From the Mediterranean to the
Frozen Sea, therefore, the public mind was everywhere in a ferment; and
nowhere was the ferment greater than in Scotland. It was in the midst
of martyrdoms and proscriptions, in the midst of a war between power
and truth, that the first century of the existence of your University
closed.

Pass another hundred years; and we are in the midst of anoth