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SCHOLARSHIP THE FINAL COURT.

[Abstract of the Commencement Address delivered before the graduating class of Boston University on Wednesday, June 5.]

Mr. President:

I

Bishop Daniel Ayres Goodsell, S.T.D., LL.D.

COUNT it an honor, as it is a great pleasure, to be permitted to speak here to-day.

For many years before I became a resident of Boston and a Trustee of this University, I held this institution in honor, as having justified itself, though, educationally speaking, it was a late interjection in the collegiate and university life of New England. I recall the fear expressed that another university would fail, and that it could only obtain a clientage by a reduction in the New England scale of scholarship.

Boston University is vigorously alive. Its standards are of the highest. I have met her sons and daughters everywhere in the United States, and in almost every mission-field in the world. Her loving children say the best things of Alma Mater. I congratulate the President, the Deans, the Professors, the students, on the completion of another year's work.

In thinking of the subjects which might be helpful at this hour, the conditions force one on me. Others have hovered near. One has made its nest in my brain, and I can dislodge it only by speech. It is "the High Court of Scholarship."

The American citizen of the next twenty-five years is to have most difficult problems forced on him for solution. There are to be great changes in the unwritten law of custom; vast changes in formal legislation. The masses are in moods which mean attack upon traditions. Some of the oldest bases of social order are marked for undermining. Others are being examined to see if they shall be permitted to remain. Nothing venerable or sacred escapes scrutiny. The sceptical spirit which once attacked religion now undermines the established order of modern civilization. The question of property in land, of the proper basis of taxation, of the scope of government, of limit to personal wealth, of the rights and powers of corporations, of the vanishing-line between state and general legislation; education, communication, commerce,- all are under scrutiny, if not under change. Nothing is now taken for granted. Few say, "That which has been shall be." The test of permanence, the prophecy of enduring, is with most minds the relation of the institution to the greatest good of the greatest number. Committed to the principle of universal suffrage, the free move

ment of American society brings all these questions into speedy, pressing, and contemporaneous importance. Men, by long possession of power and the habit of interest in public questions, will have the larger share in their settlement; but women, as they receive the higher education, are certain of a large place and importance in their determination.

Whether they claim it or not, whether power in all functions of citizenship be conferred on them or not, influence must come to them through the larger education granted through institutions like Boston University; by the enlargement of their powers through successes in the multiplying careers opening to them; by their just insistence that, in the changes looking to the betterment of men, women shall have their interests considered and their share of freedom and help.

You will observe that from this point of view, tradition and prescriptive right will have slight influence.

In a country like England, where social eminence and political power have long been mated, it may easily happen that prejudice may fortify old methods and make progress find her way through the tangle of an ancient and untrimmed forest.

In the coarser elements of character, in directness and love of truth, in a certain contempt for æsthetics and speculation, in blunt assertion of the supremacy of practical questions, in a want of sympathy with and a stupid neglect of the requirements and character of other races, the Romans were the forerunners of the English and the Americans in history.

The English are a people to whom every man of knowledge yields precedence, if not unstinted admiration.

But observe, our problem being different, the trend of educated thought is different. Culture with us has broadened not only intellectual, but political, sympathies. Where State universities exist the people have been lavish of appropriation because they have felt that the State universities have bred men who could perceive, follow, and reach popular aims.

It is this broadening of the idea of scholarship which compels me to believe in it as a final court for the testing of ideas and plans; which compels me to say that the scholar will win. What the college did for me was done at a time when the Ancient Languages were the chief bases of culture; when neither modern languages nor science had anything like the place in education they have now.

My heart is still warm to that old culture. It linked the present with the past and unified the thought of the world by a common medium of expression. It gave to those who acquired it a knowledge of words and a

delicacy and fulness of vocabulary which I believe now to be more laboriously acquired. It made men familiar with those languages from which our modern scientific vocables are taken.

These scholars of fifty years ago lived in a more genial, an easier, a more poetical atmosphere than the scholar of to-day, who has founded his culture on one modern tongue and ten modern sciences. We cannot imagine one of those old-time scholars blowing to eager ears a trumpet-blast on all great questions, as does the President of Harvard; suggesting himself, by political and historical knowledge, as a candidate for President, as does Woodrow Wilson of Princeton; becoming an authoritative source of economic knowledge, like Hadley of Yale; cheerfully cudgelling vigorous and commanding prejudices, like Day of Syracuse. I doubt whether any graduate of the older school would not have been stripped by that older education of that joy in hitting well-selected heads which exhilarates Theodore Roosevelt.

The distinct gain of modern knowledge is that it is believed to be under one law and that no department of knowledge can be wholly set off as independent. The prospector for metallic wealth wastes his time unless the geologist confirms his hope that a true matrix may be found where he seeks it, or a mineralogist turn the rusty dust of a chloride into the red gold. Have not I read within a week that it was Agassiz who was again and again the final court for mining values?

Nor does the scholar have always to take the second place in the national counsels, or work in secret to give fame to another. Was Charles Sumner less of a force because he was an almost pedantic scholar? Was Wendell Phillips less of a reformer because he could lecture as a scholar on the lost arts? While it is true that high scholarship and practical statesmanship are not often mated, yet they are so with sufficient frequency to prove that the highest statesmanship sits at the feet of scholarship; as when a Gladstone explained one day a subtle problem in national taxation, and the next presented in faultless English a translation of that Homeric marvel, the Shield of Achilles.

I am not claiming that scholarship is a full substitute for natural ability, for natural strength of mind or character. But I wish to uphold in an age when some clamor for practical education,― meaning by that a training which they can soonest utilize in money-making,- to uphold, I say, the place of culture as the chief reinforcement to natural strength; as the chief justice in the court of secular truth; as the chief adjutant to all who seek knowledge of what man has been and will be outside of those spiritual qualities whose culture God has reserved to His own Spirit and whose text

book is Revelation. Outside of this divine school, the agreements of scholars are final. Within this divine school, scholarship has its place in determining, weighing, and fixing texts; in rectifying translations; in determining the age of manuscripts; in correcting the errors of copyists and fixing the bounds of interpolations. But the message of God to man must be received and verified by meeting the conditions of the citizenship of the Divine Kingdom. Within its limitations Scholarship speaks the final word. Taking the decades together, the scholar wins.

The American is and must be an eclectic. He must be widely elective and absorbent. He cannot be insular. He must be continental. He must give out the broad glow of humor rather than the sparkle of wit. He must be by the forces which make him, by the inheritances which beget him, alert, rapid, executive.

Left without the direction and broadening of culture his life is intensely practical, materially victorious, rapidly empiric, slowly philosophical. His love of art is likely to be that of the complacent owner of costly pictures selected by a well-paid agent. By himself he would prefer the massive, the gorgeous, the multitudinous and anachronistic immensities of the Venetian school, rather than the calm-faced Sistine Madonna. He is regal in his taste for splendor and barbaric in his love for magnificence.

But, mark you, the American genius for the practical; the acuteness grown in the soil of competition is not that which can meet the future with confidence. Ideas are here our fathers never dreamed of. They are taking shape and injecting themselves into practical politics. From the nature of our government, from the complex origin of our population, from the newness of our country, it is inevitable that social and political experiments shall be tried here. Each year brings some new one to the front.

My faith will not permit me to believe other than this: that moral assimilation must come from character trained by Christian teachers. But it is the scholar who will say whether the problem is old or new; who will show, if old, what men did under other conditions for its solution, or how dynasties and governments were swept aside as men forced its solution. The scholar will in this, as in all exigencies, come to the front as historian and prophet.

Earliest of all, Massachusetts said it was dangerous for the masses not to know. The States of greatest advance and social order are ruled by that idea. You in your time are to confirm this truth in your world and by your work. The problem of assimilation, yea, all those which are now upon us, are to be settled, if settled rightly, by the men who know. We cannot afford the leadership of the ignorant blunderer.

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