fulfill his office than by showing how peace and good-will may be introduced among men, and by exposing, in all the terror of truth, those whose policy fosters war and hatred among men? Why does the pulpit command so little comparative respect, but because it does not apply truth to life? When the American people has great sins to account for, the smooth preacher touches with the dull edge of his reproof the sins of the Jewish people. Therefore, with us, the lecture-room is more thronged than the church, because the lecturer addresses the moral sense of the people upon their moral interests, and the most popular lecturers are the preachers who are most faithful in their pulpits to God and man-for their cause is one.

What is true of the preacher is true of the orator. I should insult your manhood, I should forget my own, if, in addressing you to-day, and here, I did not say what I conceive to be the duty of the scholar to-day, and here.

I. Of the scholar. The popular idea of the scholar makes him a pale student of books, a recluse, a valetudinarian, an unpractical and impracticable man. He is a being with an endless capacity of literary and scientific acquisition. He is only a consumer, not a producer; or, if so, only a producer of useless results. Learning is supposed to be put into him, not as vegetables into the

ground, whence, as they spring again, covering the earth with beauty, and feeding the race, so learning is to flower into heroic deeds, and consoling thoughts; but it is absorbed by him, as vegetables are thrown into a cellar, where they lie buried, not planted, producing only some poor, pallid, useless shoot, as his learning only germinates into some treatise upon the ablative absolute.

In the old plays and romances we have the same picture of an absent pedant, the easy prey of every knave, the docile husband of a termagant; who, because he could read a tragedy of Eschylus, could not tie his shoes. He belonged to great establishments as an encyclopedia, in the same way that the fool belonged to them as a jestbook. Scholars were popularly ranked with women, having all their weakness, and none of their charms.

This estimate grew naturally out of their exceptional character as monks; for, at the beginning of modern history, learning came out of the monasteries with the ecclesiastics. By religious vows the monks were separated from all secular interests, including the family relation. The reputation of the scholar arose from the character of the monk. The monk was a man who dealt professionally with ideas rather than men. He was therefore held to know nothing of men. Dreamer,

mous names.

poet, vagabond, and scholar, grew to be synonyBut while the mass of monks undoubtedly justified this judgment, it is in the few and not in the mass that their characteristics are to be sought; they were accused of not knowing men, but Gregory was a monk, and they belonged to the most sagacious organization in human history. They were called pedants and moles, but Abelard and Martin Luther were churchmen and scholars. To call grammarians, formalists, and swollen sponges of learning, scholars, is to call a parish clerk a statesman. To call Bentley and Parr scholars, is to insult Johnson and Milton. Sydney Smith tells of Dr. George—who, hearing the great king of Prussia highly praised, said that he had his doubts whether the king, with all his victories, knew how to conjugate a Greek verb in mi. If you call Dr. George, and Wolff, and Heyne scholars, what name have you for Goethe and Schiller?

In any just classification of human powers and pursuits, the scholar is the representative of thought. Devoted to the contemplation of truth, he is, in the state, a public conscience by which public measures may be tested; the scholarly class, therefore, to which, now, as of old, the clergy belong, is the upper house in the politics of the world.

Now, there is a constant tendency in material prosperity, when it is the prosperity of a class and not of the mass, to relax the severity of principle. Therefore, we find that the era of noble thought in national history is not usually coincident with the greatest national prosperity. Greece was not greatest when rumors of war had ceased. Rome was not most imperial in the voluptuous calm of Constantinopolitan decay. The magnificent monotony of Bourbon tyranny in France, and the reign of its shop-keeping king, were not the grand eras of French history. Holland began as generously as America, and Holland has sunk into the imbecile apathy of commercial prosperity, without art, without literature, without a noble influence in the world, and with no promise of the future.

When Napoleon reviled England as a nation of shopkeepers, it was not an idle phrase. Napoleon knew, that, both historically and in the nature of the case, it was the tendency of a long peace to foster trade, and that it is the inevitable tendency of trade, which is based upon self-interest, to destroy moral courage, because trade demands peace at any price, and peace is often to be purchased only by principle. When he said a nation of shopkeepers, he meant a nation whose ruling principle was private gain, rather than public good; and the

sagacious ruler knew that corruption and cowardice are twins.

The tendency of selfish trade is demoralizing, because its eagerness for peace constantly lowers the moral ideal. The private pocket inevitably becomes the arbiter of public policy. Plausibility supplants honesty; sophistication takes the place of simplicity, and the certain evils of the existing condition are resolutely preferred to the splendid possibilities of progress.

Thus it arises that the very material success for which nations, like individuals, strive, is full of the gravest danger to the best life of the state, as of the individual. But as in human nature itself are found the qualities which best resist the proclivity of an individual to meanness and moral cowardice. —as each man has a conscience, a moral mentor which assures him what is truly best for him to doso has every state a class, which, by its very character, is dedicated to eternal and not to temporary interests; whose members are priests of the mind, not of the body, and who are necessarily the conservative party of intellectual and moral freedom.

This is the class of scholars. This elevation and correction of public sentiment is the scholar's office in the state.

To the right discharge of this duty all his learning is merely subsidiary; and if he fail to devote