friends of Oberlin College, most hearty congratulations on the completion by the college of seventy-five years of most honorable and most useful work alike for education, for patriotism, for humanity, and for religion. Oberlin College was established on no narrow foundation of religious bigotry, or state godlessness, or class distinction, or race prejudice It recognizes all mankind, women as well as men, the poor as well as the rich, the black as well as the white, as the children of a common Father in Heaven, and all alike as entitled to the blessings of education and to a share in the favor of God. In its early years without great endowments, it gave of its poverty to many a poor boy and girl, black and white, the opportunity for gaining an education, which for most of them could not have been obtained anywhere else. The spirit of the institution was from the first preeminently Christian; not Christian in the every day meaningless sense of the word, but Christian because Christ-like. If the coming of the Kingdom of God for which Jesus taught his followers to pray is to be brought about by the preaching of the Gospel and the establishment of Christianity throughout the world, no institution of learning will have a brighter crown upon its brow than will Oberlin in that joyous day when the vision of the revelator shall become real and there shall be great voices in heaven saying, "The Kingdoms of this world are become the Kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ"; for Oberlin has been the mother of missionaries, and her sons and daughters are scattered all over the world teaching and preaching the gospel; while many, very many of them, have sealed their devotion with their lives, some of them meeting a martyr's death. And if

there be any spot in this land on which we may stand and seem to realize somewhat the vision that the first martyr, Stephen, saw just before he died, it would seem that that spot must be here, at the early home of so many missionaries now living or dead, whose consecrated lives come to us as a rebuke of selfishness and an inspiration to holy living and holy dying. It would seem that that spot must be here where the voice of President Finney for so many years with intense eloquence pressed upon the attention of his pupils the Gospel as a really divine revelation and Jesus Christ as a divine Savior and his call, "Follow thou me," as a divine command. O the power of eloquence born of intense conviction! What a man really believes he can fight for if it is worth fighting for, and he can speak eloquently for if it is something that needs to be commended to men's hearts and consciences. And such President Finney and his hardly less mighty successor, President Fairchild, thought personal devotion to Christ to be. And we are all glad, I am sure, that Oberlin has to-day at its head a man who, if with less flaming eloquence and less passionate emotion, yet with no less fidelity and with greater breadth of vision and larger philosophical wisdom, stands for the faith once delivered, the revelation of God to men through Jesus Christ. Aided by a really distinguished faculty, you have fitted men and women here for the work of life; you have trained them in scholarship; you have cultivated music and made it a delight as a fine art and an inspiration as a means of worship. You have made the most of character and have felt that what your students were to be was even more important than what they were to know. Having fitted your students

for work, you have so inspired them with longing for the best things that they have generally sought the best work; and the stamp of Oberlin everywhere is on the metal that is worth stamping, on things worth doing.

Sir, for the glories of the past of Oberlin, for the greatness of its present, and for the brightness of its future, we, the representatives of visiting universities and colleges, tender you our most hearty congratulations.

MEMORIAL DAY ADDRESS*

Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen:

The policy of our country has generally been a peaceful one and I hope it may continue to be such to the end of time But we have been compelled to fight on several occasions, and once or twice we have engaged in war that was not necessary. Our independence was secured only by an exhausting war of nearly eight years, at the end of which the country was without credit, its resources utterly exhausted, the people so poor that they could with difficulty get the necessaries of life, and the currency in which the soldiers had been paid so worthless that it had ceased to be even paper money and had become once more simply paper. Under such conditions, it is not surprising that many people doubted whether independence even had not been too dearly purchased, and that in the general misery no adequate provision was for a long time made for the relief of those who had fought and bled that the nation might be free. But in time the country rallied from its despondency. Prosperity of a humble sort became general. The merits of the soldiers of the Revolution came to be appreciated, and no man in the community had a truer patent of nobility, when I was a boy, than the

*Delivered in the Auditorium, St. Paul, Minnesota, in commemoration of Memorial day, May 31st, 1909.