SERMON II.

*THE ENDS AND OBJECTS OF BURLINGTON COLLEGE.

KIND NEIGHBOURS, AND DEAR FRIENDS,

I bid you welcome to our College. I count your presence here, as an omen of all good. I read in it, the strong assurance of your sympathy with us, in our great work. I feel, that we may count on your co-operation. I venture to rely upon your prayers.

It is a special pleasure to us, that our modest JUNIOR HALL has been the starting point of THE BURLINGTON ACADEMY OF NATURAL SCIENCES. I regard it as a gracious earnest of the years to come, that, in our second, we have won this mark of gratifying confidence. We shall endeavour not to disappoint it. Letters and Science are the pillars, which we look to, to sustain the arch, to be erected here. Its blessing and its crown, we look for, in that pure and undefiled Religion; to be whose ministering servants, is the highest glory, as it is the only worthy aim, of Science and of Letters.

The present undertaking proposes no contribution

* An address introductory to a Course of Lectures in Burlington College; A. D. 1848.

to Science, technically regarded. The course of Lectures, to follow it, our first fruits in the golden harvest of the mind, will fully meet that expectation of the case. My purpose will be answered, and my estimate of this occasion carried out, by a brief outline of THE ENDS AND OBJECTS OF BURLINGTON COLLEGE. It is due to the kindly interest on your part, which has brought you here; and due to the great enterprize, which has been undertaken, and, I trust, will be forever prosecuted, in the most holy fear of God. What I say, will be informal, rapid and familiar; suggestive, rather than didactic; from the heart, more than from the head: as "a man talketh with his friends; " as I well feel, that I may talk with you. In what I say, I shall be understood as instituting no comparisons, as casting no reflections, as proposing no discoveries, as claiming nothing as individual or original. If there be any virtue in our plans, it is in their adaptedness to our whole nature, in its moral and its social aspects: if any confidence in their success, it is in the commendation to the hearts of men, which is to come to them from God. The single word, which best expresses all our ways and all our wishes, is the sacred monosyllable, HOME. TO be domestic, first, and, then, religious; blending the two ideas-which God never meant should be disjoined, since He first knit the family bond, in Eden-in that expressive apostolic phrase, "a household of the faith," comprises all we count on, for good influence, and hope for, as good result, from Burlington College. The Poet of our times has made the sky-lark the best emblem of

our aims and prayers; and said, in two lines, all that we can ever say.

"Leave to the nightingale her shady wood;

A privacy of glorious light is thine;

Whence thou dost pour upon the world a flood

Of harmony, with instinct more divine;

Type of the wise, who soar, but never roam,

True to the kindred points of Heaven and Home!"*

แ

The

i. It is our design, at Burlington College, to bring up MEN. I use the phrase, bring up, advisedly. mere accident of a man-child, I speak it not irrever ently, gives no assurance of a man." The manhood, which the Maker planned, and takes delight in, fails, in a thousand ways, to fill its glorious destiny. If, from the thousand, one be taken, as the most extensive and most influential, in this failure, it must be self-indulgence. He cannot be a man, who has not self-control. As well expect the chalk to yield the spark, in its collision with the steel, as well expect the coal to give the lustre of the diamond, as manhood, where no hardness is endured. When the Apostle wrote to Timothy, "thou therefore, endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ," he addressed him, not as a Bishop, so much as a Christian. As Christians, we are soldiers all; pledged to fight manfully the battle, with the flesh, and with the world. And delicate women will as soon endure the rigours of the siege, and turn the current of the heady fight, as those be men, who are not masters

*Wordsworth.

of themselves. Now, nature shrinks from hardness. They that "train up a child," therefore, his parents, or his teachers, must inure him to it. But parents fail, in this essential part of duty, with but few exceptions; and indulge their children, even beyond the bias of their self-indulgence. And so, sad to say, but true as it is sad, with few exceptions, children are not training to be men. It is not alogether wonderful that this is so. The tenderness of parents for their offspring, wisely and mercifully ordained of God, for good and gracious purposes, runs easily into excess, or swerves unconsciously from the straight line of duty. Nothing but firm religious principle, nor this, without a constant watchfulness upon themselves, will strengthen and sustain the parent, in this foremost trial of his calling. Hence, the advantage, if we must not say, the absolute necessity, of substitutes. As, in the treatment of those unhappy persons, who have lost the balance of their minds, the next of kin become the least adapted to their discipline and care; so from the want of firmness in religious principle, parents too often lose their fitness for the training of their children; and parental instincts and parental impulses conspire to be their ruin. The prob lem, for a case like this, is to supply parental interest, as near as may be, without parental weakness. The solution must be found, if any where, in a well ordered Christian School: a home, for safety and for happiness; but not a home, for weakness and indulgence. In such a house, there must be order, that never varies; there must be vigilance, that never slumbers; there

must be patience, that never yields; there must be love, that never tires. An atmosphere must be created, that shall minister to wholesomeness, and health, and strength. A moral mechanism must be constructed and directed, that shall frame the heart, by shaping and controlling all its ways: a heart-machinery, that holds, but never hurts; that moulds, but does not mar. To this end, Christian men and Christian women must conspire. They must give themselves to it, as heart-work, and as life-work. They must be moved to it, of God. They must be governed in it, by His Word. They must be guided for it, by His Church. They must be carried through it, by His Spirit. The fear of God must be the rule, the love of God must be the motive, to their purposes and plans, their devotions and their duties. They must be willing to take upon themselves, that most difficult and most delicate of all responsiblities, to be the parents of other people's children. They must count the cost, before they undertake it. They must be faithful to it, "in season, and out of season." They must give themselves up to it, and be altogether in it, and of it. They must count nothing done while any thing can yet be done.* They must live, and breathe, and be, that love, which "suffereth long, and is kind,” which “ vaunteth not itself," which " is not easily provoked," which "beareth all things, hopeth all things," and "endureth all things;" and which "never faileth." They must know and feel that this is not their rest. They must live daily in the sense, that their reward is,

* "Nil reputans actum, dum quid superesset agendum."