ECONDLY, I enjoin and require that no ecclesiastic, missionary, or minister of any sect whatsoever, shall ever hold or exercise any station or duty whatsoever in the said College; nor shall any such person ever be admitted for any purpose, or as a visitor, within the premises appropriated to the purposes of the said College: In making this restriction, I do not mean to cast any reflection upon any sect or person whatsoever; but as there is such a multitude of sects, and such a diversity of opinion amongst them, I desire to keep the tender minds of the orphans, who are to derive advantage from this bequest, free from the excitement which clashing doctrines and sectarian controversy are so apt to produce; my desire is, that all the instructors and teachers in the college, shall take pains to instil into the minds of the scholars, the purest principles of morality, so that, on their entrance into active life, they may, from inclination and habit, evince benevolence toward their fellow creatures, and a love of truth, sobriety and industry, adopting at the same time, such religious tenets as their matured reason may enable them to prefer. From the Will of Stephen Girard. RIENDS: I know how vain it is to gild a grief with words, and yet I wish to take from every grave its fear. Here in this world, where life and death are equal kings, all should be brave enough to meet with all the dead have met. The future has been filled with fear, stained and polluted by the heartless past. From the wondrous tree of life the buds and blossoms fall with ripened fruit, and in the common bed of earth, the patriarchs and babes sleep side by side. Why should we fear that which will come to all that is? We can not tell, we do not know, which is the greater blessing-life or death. We do not know whether the grave is the end of this life, or the door of another, or whether the night here is not somewhere else a dawn. Neither can we tell which is the more fortunate-the child dying in its mother's arms, before its lips have learned to form a word, or he who journeys all the length of life's uneven road, painfully taking the last slow steps with staff and crutch. Every cradle asks us, "Whence?" and every coffin," Whither?" The poor barbarian, weeping above his dead, can answer these questions as intelligently as the robed priest of the most authentic creed. The tearful ignorance of the one is just as consoling as the learned and unmeaning words of the other. No man, standing where the horizon of a life has touched a grave, has any right to prophesy a future filled with pain and tears. It may be that death gives all there is of worth to life. If those we press and strain against our hearts could never die, perhaps that love would wither from the earth. Maybe this common fate treads from out the paths between our hearts the weeds of selfishness and hate, and I had rather live and love where death is king, than have eternal life where love is not. Another life is naught, unless we know and love again the ones who love us here. They who stand with aching hearts around this little grave need have no fear. The larger and the nobler faith in all that is and is to be, tells us, that death, even at its worst, is only perfect rest. We know that through the common We, too, have our re- under heavy penalties. They became a nation of law-breakers. Nine-tenths of the colonial merchants were smugglers. Nearly half of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were bred to commerce, to the command of ships and to contraband trade. John Hancock was the prince of contraband traders; and with John Adams as his counsel, was on Out of the dusk a shadow, Then a spark; Out of the cloud a silence, Then, a lark; Out of the heart a rapture, Then, a pain, trial before the admiralty court in Boston, at the exact hour of the shedding of the first blood at Lexington, to answer for a $500,000 penalty alleged to have been incurred as a smuggler. Half the tonnage of the world was engaged Out of the dead, cold ashes, in smuggling or piracy. Life again. "Evolution," by John Banister Tabb tend the area of liberty and civilization. Colonies were planted for the purpose of raising up customers for home trade. It was a matter of business and speculation, carried on by joint stock companies for the benefit of corporations. While our Revolution was in progress Adam Smith, when discussing and condemning the colonial system, declared that "England had founded an empire in the New World for the sole purpose of raising customers for her trade." When the colonies had increased in numbers and wealth, the purpose of the mother country was disclosed in the legislation and regulations by which the colonies were governed. Whatever did not enhance the trade and commerce of England was deemed unfit to be a part of the colonial policy. Worse even than its effects on the industry of the colonies was the influence of this policy on political and commercial morality. The innumerable arbitrary laws enacted to enforce it created a thousand new crimes. Transactions which the colonists thought necessary to the welfare, and in no way repugnant to the moral sense of good men, were forbidden The war of independence was a war against commercial despotism; against an industrial policy which oppressed and tortured the industry of our fathers, and would have reduced them to perpetual vassalage for the gain of England.-James A. Garfield. HE life of a people is a tissue of crimes, miseries, and follies. That is no less true of Penguinia than of other nations de Gratian, the sage, toured Penguinia in the time of the last of the Draconide dynasty. Travelling one day through a lovely valley where cow bells tinkled in the pure air, he sat down on a bench at the foot of an oak tree, near a thatched cottage. On the doorstep a woman was suckling an infant; a youngster was playing with a big dog; a blind old man, seated in the sun, was drinking in the light of day through half-opened lips. The master of the house, a robust young man, offered Gratian bread and milk and, the Marsouin philosopher after partaking of this repast, exclaimed, "Kindly inhabitants of a gentle land, I thank you. Everything here breathes joy, concord and peace." Even as he spoke, however, a shepherd passed, playing a martial air upon his bagpipes s "What is that lively tune?" demanded Gratian de "That's our war hymn against the Marsouins," replied the peasant." Everybody here sings it. Little children know it before they can talk. We are all good Penguin patriots." "You don't like the Marsouins?" "We hate them." "For what reason do you hate them?" "How can you ask? They are our neighbors, are n't they?" "Undoubtedly." "Well, that's the reason the Penguins hate the Marsouins." "Is that a reason? "Certainly. Who says neighbors' says enemies Look at the field which touches mine. It belongs to the man I hate most in the world. After him my worst enemies are the people of the village on the other slope of the valley at the foot of that birch wood. In this narrow valley, closed in on all sides, there is only that village and my village. Of course they are enemies. Every time our chaps meet theirs, they exchange insults and blows. And you don't see why the Penguins should be the enemies of the Marsouins! Don't you know what patriotism means? For me there are only two possible battlecries: 'Long live the Penguins! Death to the Marsouins!" " -Anatole France. HIS Mahomet, son of Abdallah, was a sublime charlatan. He says in his tenth chapter, "Who but God can have composed the Koran? Do you think Mahomet has forged this book? Well, try and write one chapter resembling it, and call to your aid whomsoever you please." In the seventeenth chapter, he exclaims, "Praise be to him who in a single night transported his servant from the sacred temple of Mecca to that of Jerusalem!" This was a fine journey, but nothing compared to the one he took that same night from planet to planet. He pretended that it was five hundred years' journey from one to the other, and that he had cleft the moon in twain. His disciples who, after his death, collected in a solemn manner the verses of his Koran, suppressed this celestial journey, for they dreaded raillery and rationalization. After all, they had more delicacy than was needed. They might have trusted to the commentators, who would have found no difficulty in explaining the itinerary Mahomet's friends should have known by experience that the marvelous is the reason of the multitude. The wise contradict in a silence, which the multitude prevents their breaking. But while the itinerary of the planets was suppressed, a few words were retained about the adventure of the moon; one can not forever be on one's guard The Koran is a rhapsody, without connection, without order, and without art.... It is a poem or a sort of rhymed prose, consisting of about three thousand verses No poem ever advanced the fortunes of its author so much as the Koran Ꮽe ᏭS He has the humility to confess that he himself will not enter Paradise because of his own merits, but purely by the will of God. Through this same pure Divine will, he orders that a fifth part of the spoil shall always be reserved for the Prophet s April, April, served and morality to flourish. Later, disgraced and poor, he teaches them s He practices them, alike in greatness and in humility. He renders virtue amiable, and has for his disciples the most ancient and wisest people upon the earth s Laugh thy girlish laughter; Mahomet is admired for having raised himself from being a camel driver, to be a pontiff, a legislator, and a monarch, for having subdued Arabia, which had never before been subjugated; for having given the first shock to the Roman Empire in the East, and to that of the Persians But I admire him still more for having kept peace in his house amongst his wives. Then, the moment after, It is not true that he excludes women April, that mine ears If I tell thee, sweetest, All my hopes and fears, Laugh thy golden laughter, But, the moment after, Weep thy golden tears! He changed the face of part of Europe, one half of Asia, and nearly all of Africa. Nor was his religion unlikely at one time, to subjugate the whole earth. On how trivial a circumstance will revolutions sometimes depend! A blow from a stone, a little harder than that which he received in his first battle, might have changed the destinies of the world.-Voltaire. 'Song," by William Watson this point to the immemorial usage of the He is excused by some on the first of He who loveth a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counsellor, a cheerful companion, or an effectual comforter.-Isaac Barrow. VERY man will have his own criterion in forming his judgment of others. I depend very much on the effect of affliction. I consider how a man comes out of the furnace; gold will lie for a month in the furnace without losing a grain.-Richard Cecil. If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written upon the heart. The spirit should not grow old. -James A. Garfield. HERE is nothing to make one indignant in the mere fact that life is hard, that men should toil and suffer pain. The planetary conditions once for all are such, and we can stand it. But that so many men, by mere accidents of birth and opportunity, should have a life of nothing else but toil and pain and hardness and inferiority imposed upon them, should have no vacation, while others natively no more deserving never get any taste of this campaigning life at all-this is capable of arousing indignation in reflective minds. It may end by seeming shameful to all of us that some of us have nothing but campaigning, and others nothing but unmanly ease. If now-and this is my idea-there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous other goods to the commonwealth would follow. The military ideals of hardihood and discipline would be wrought into the growing fiber of the people; no one would remain blind, as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man's real relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing, clotheswashing, and window-washing, to roadbuilding and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas. They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the immemorial human warfare against nature, they should tread the earth more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be better fathers and teachers of the following generation. Such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would have required it, and the many moral fruits it would bear, would preserve in the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the military party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace. We should get toughness without callousness, authority with as little criminal cruelty as possible, and painful work done cheerily because the duty is temporary, and threatens not as now, to degrade the whole remainder of one's life.-William James. ORD, let me never tag a moral to a tale, nor tell a story without a meaning. Make me respect my material so much that I dare not slight my work. Help me to deal very honestly with words and with people, for they are both alive. Show me that as in a river, so in a writing, clearness is the best quality, and a little that is pure is worth more than much that is mixed. Teach me to see the local color without being blind to the inner light. Give me an ideal that will stand the strain of weaving into human stuff on the loom of the real. Keep me from caring more for books than for folks, for art than for life. Steady me to do the full stint of work as well as I can; and when that is done, stop me; pay what wages Thou wilt, and help me to say, from a quiet heart, a grateful Amen.-Henry van Dyke. HE new church will be founded on moral science. Poets, artists, musicians, philosophers, will be its prophetteachers. The noblest literature of the world will be its Bible-love and labor its holy sacraments-and instead of worshiping one savior, we will gladly build an altar in the heart for every one who has suffered for humanity.-Emerson. You can not believe in honor until you have achieved it. Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world. -George Bernard Shaw. Men, even when alone, lighten their labor by song, however rude it may be. -Quintilian. |