al life passes into the sphere of
religion. We no longer pursue ideals which forever elude us, but we
become partakers of the divine life; for in giving ourselves to the
Eternal and Infinite we find God in our souls. The ideal is made real;
God is with us, and through faith, hope, and love we are one with him,
and all is well. Henceforth in seeking to know more, to become more, we
are animated by a divine spirit. Now we may grow old, still learning
many things, still smitten with the love of beauty, still finding
delight in fresh thoughts and innocent pleasures, and it may be that we
shall be found to be teachers of wisdom and of holiness. Then, indeed,
shall we be happy, for it is better to teach truth than to win battles.
A war-hero supposes a barbarous condition of the race, and when all
shall be civilized, they who know and love the most shall be held to be
the greatest and the best.

CHAPTER VIII.

UNIVERSITY EDUCATION.

As they who look on the ocean think of its vastness; of the many shores
in many climes visited by its waves to ply "their priest-like task of
clean ablution;" of cities and empires that rose beside its waters,
flourished, decayed, and became a memory; of others that shall rise and
also pass away, while the moving element remains,--so we to-day
beholding ancient Faith, laying, in the New World, the cornerstone of an
institution which better than anything else symbolizes the aim and
tendency of modern life, find ourselves dwelling in thought upon what
has been and what will be.

On the one hand rises the venerable form of that religion whose voice
re-echoed in the hearts of Abraham, Moses, David, and Isaiah; whose
lips, when the Saviour spoke, uttered diviner truth and thrilled the
hearts of men with purer love, living with them in deserts and
catacombs, leading them along bloodstained ways to victory and peace,
until at length the Church gleamed forth from amid the parting
storm-clouds and shone like a mountain-built city bathed in sunlight. On
the other stands the Genius of the Republic, the embodied spirit of the
sovereign people, who, accepting as literal truth the Christian
principles that God is a Father, and men brothers and therefore equal,
strive to take from political society the blindness and fatality of
natural law, and to endow it with the divine and human attributes of
justice, mercy, and intelligence. From the very beginning our American
history is full of religious zeal,