That is the supreme test of life,--its consecrated serviceableness.
The Master of Balliol was right; the brave men and women who
founded our schools and colleges were not wrong. "For Christ
and the Church" universities were set up in the wilderness of
New England; for the large service of the State they have been
founded and maintained at public cost in every section of the
country where men have settled, from the Alleghanies across the
prairies and Rocky Mountains down to the Golden Gate. Founded
primarily as seats of learning, their techers have been not only
scientists and linguists, philosophers and historians, but men
and women of holy purposes, sound patriotism, courageous convictions,
refined and noble tastes. Set as these teachers have been upon a
hill, their light has at no period of our country's history been
hid. They have formed a large factor in our civilization, and in
their own beautiful characters have continually shown us how
to combine religion and life, the ideal and practical, the human
and the divine.

Such are some of the larger influences to be had from college life.
It is true all the good gifts I have named may be secured without
the aid of the college. We all know young men and women who have
had no college training, who are as cultivated, rational, resourceful,
and happy as any people we know, who excel in every one of these
particulars the college graduates about them. I believe they often
bitterly regret the lack of a college education. And we see young
men and women going through college deaf and blind to their great
chances there, and afterwards curiously careless and wasteful of
the best things in life. While all this is true, it is true too
that to the open-minded and ambitious boy or girl of moderate