During a long and somewhat eventful history, the First Presbyterian Church has been frequently thrown open for gatherings of great local interest and importance. Many will recall the varied objects for which these gatherings were held, and the crowds which attended them. In all its history the old, yet new edifice, never contained an audience more remarkable than that which assembled on this occasion. The middle portion of the Church was occupied by the trustees, faculty, students and alumni, and the remainder was filled to overflowing by friends of the Institute.

A large number of chairs were placed in the aisles, but still many went away unable to procure seats.

The pulpit and immediate vicinity were profusely decorated with flowers.

The services began at 8 o'clock, with a short voluntary upon the organ by the organist, S. B. Saxton, Esq. The Anthem Cantate Domino in C," by Dudley Buck, was rendered by the Choir, and the congregation joined in singing the hymn "All hail the power of Jesus' name."

Before commencing his discourse, the speaker congratulated all connected with the Institute upon their celebration of its fiftieth anniversary, and then alluded to the Rev. Dr. Beman, who for forty years filled the pulpit of this Church and was also during some of those years President of the Institute, and lecturer in one of its departments, and who, were he living, would have entered most heartily into the exercises and festivities of the occasion, and gladly welcomed them to this place. Although a stranger to most, the speaker added, so large a portion of his public life has been spent in institutions of learning that he could thoroughly sympathize with those present in their pursuits.

THE MORAL INFLUENCE OF TRUE SCIENCE.

'Knowledge puffeth up, but Charity edifieth. And if any man think he knoweth anything he knoweth nothing yet as he ought to know."— I Cor. viii, 1, 2.

Too profound a thinker was the Apostle Paul to accept, save for convenience of naming, the distinction so often made of knowledge, secular and divine. All knowledge is of God, as all being is of Him, and through Him, and for Him. Nature is the manifestation of the unseen thought and will which originated it, and acts in it all. He who learns the structure and organization of a plant or animal; the elements of bodies, and their modes of combination; the laws of force and motion; the features of the earth's crust, and where is the place of gold and the vein of silver; the conditions that regulate the currents of air and vapor; the balancing of the clouds, the fall of the dew, the track of the storm, and "the way of the lightning of the thunder"; the place of the sea and the courses of the rivers; the laws that "bind the sweet influences of Pleiades and "guide Arcturus with his sons," the order of human history and the opera

tions of the heart and mind of man; he who learns any of these truths that belong to the several sciences, reads in every one of them a thought and volition of God!

The nineteenth Psalm, beginning with a rapturous description of the glory of God which "the Heaven's declare," passes abruptly to mention "the law of the Lord that is perfect, converting the soul," binding thus the two books Nature and Revelation into one volume, showing the writer's insight of the oneness of natural and spiritual truth. The Bible expresses the direct relation of man to God, as science does the indirect, through the media of Nature. Let us not forget it. We live in an awful divine world, blazing everywhere with the forth-beamings of a spiritual presence and power. Search for truth, no matter where, is search for God, who is not far from every one of us. The only real distinction in knowledge is not what, but what manner of spirit.

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To this the text fastens attention. If any man think he knoweth anything he knoweth nothing as he ought to know." The last words are the point of the sentence. There is an ethics of science; a right and a wrong way to know anything, be it Bible or nature, arithmetic or the catechism. There is a knowledge that puffeth up, and there is a knowledge that edifieth, and the difference is not in the department, but in the spirit and purpose which the student carries into his pursuit. Here is the distinction between true science and science "falsely so called." And this brings me the topic whereof I have a mind to speak at this time.

THE MORAL USES OF TRUE SCIENCE.

By moral, I mean the influence on the character of the student. Here is found the highest use and worth of knowledge. As a means of enriching the material conditions of man, science has a value. I do not mean to underrate this fruit of the tree of knowledge. Mind, through the body, feeds on the juices of the plant as does the tree, converting them into its own substance. Diogenes of Apolonia was not all astray when he accounted for the superior intelligence of man, to that of the prone and earth-bowed beasts, from the

purer air he breathed and the drier nature of his food. Whatever helps production and multiplies wealth, aids the growth of mind. Here is the worth of science in the economic point of view. It may unearth the hid treasures in nature's field, harness her obedient forces to our service, span the Continent with railways and telegraphs, fertilize soils, set the streams to work, till the land hums with factories, and rivers groan under the burdens of commerce, and the graneries are bursting with the finest of wheat; but unless this material product can be coined into characterthis material force transmuted in mental force, and men and women grew big and fair on this augmented nutriment, it is all as cheap as the dirt out of which it grew.

I say these things "in limine" because so many in our times think chiefly of the material gain that experimental science has given to man. Once men said knowledge is power—that was selfishness. Now men say of knowledge, there is money in it, that is meaner still; as if nature were a pocket to be rifled and not a spectacle to be studied and adored! I say to you, gentlemen, knowledge is character. Its fruit is manhood. By this alone, its real worth is to be estimated. We will omit then from our thought "the bread and butter view" of science and ask ourselves what qualities of soul knowledge must beget in the student; what purpose must inspire him who knows anything “as he ought to know."

I. The first fruit of true knowledge is humility. Sound science is modest. Men deepest in the secret of nature, mind, God, have usually been humble. Socrates was pronounced by the Delphian oracle to be the wisest of men, because he did not seem to himself to be wise: did not think he knew anything. There was truth as well as wit in that repartee of one, who, when an angry disputant said to him, You are a fool and you know it," replied: "In that case I am wiser than you, for you are a fool and don't know it." The sciolist is puffed up. A little learning is a dangerous thing, for it makes a man swell.

"The sciences," says Pascal, "have two extremities that touch each other. The one is that native ignorance in which

we are born; the other the point to which the greatest minds attain, who, having gone the whole round of possible knowledge, find that they know nothing, and that they end in the same ignorance in which they began. But then this last is an intelligent ignorance which knows itself. Out of the many, however, who come forth from their native ignorance there are some who never reach this other extreme. These are strongly tinged with scientific conceit and set up the claim to be learned." In the same strain Hamilton : There are two ignorances. We start from one, we repose in the other, and the pursuit of knowledge is but a course between the two, as human life is a traveling from grave to grave. The highest reach of human science is a scientific recognition of ignorance and its first fruit is humility."

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Authorities aside, I appeal to experience. Somewhat of the middle of things we know, but the beginning and the end of anything who can understand either? Astronomy, pushing her research into trackless voids, never plants her foot on the outposts of space; nor has the chemist in his subtlest analysis caught the simple atom. The smallest thing is a universe

"Where suns and systems inconspicuous float."

A cloud hangs over either end of the narrow span along which the toiling intellect travels back and forth, weaving its web of thought. We are like men climbing up winding stairs to the summit of some high tower; below are stairs along which we have come, above are more that go out of sight; the bottom and the top are alike invisible. "We know in part," never the whole; even the part, we never know, but in part. We cognize nothing as it is in itself; not even the commonest thing of the senses. Our knowledge is relative: of things as they appear, in the shaping coloring lenses of our kaleidoscope faculty of representation. "Instead of

receiving the ideas of things as they are, we tinge, with the qualities of our compound being, all the simple things that we perceive." Our own minds we know, not as they are in themselves in their essence-but only as they seem in the deflecting, refracting mirror of consciousness. Both body