But we like the game none the worse and multiply our anniversaries with honest zeal, as if we increased. our centuries by the number of events we could congratulate ourselves on having happened a hundred years ago. There is something of instinct in this, and it is a wholesome instinct if it serve to quicken our consciousness of the forces that are gathered by duration and continuity; if it teach us that, ride fast and far as we may, we carry the past on our crupper, as immovably seated there as the black care of the Roman poet. The generations of men are braided inextricably together, and the very trick of our gait may be countless generations older than we.

Are we to suppose that these memories were less dear and gracious to the Puritan scholars at whose instigation this college was founded than to that other Puritan who sang in the dim religious light, the longdrawn aisles and fretted vaults, which these memories recalled? Doubtless all these things were present to their minds, but they were ready to forego them all for the sake of that truth whereof, as Milton says of himself, they were members incorporate.

The pitiful contrast which they must have felt between the carven sanctuaries of learning they had left behind and the wattled fold they were rearing here on the edge of the wilderness is to me more than tenderly it is almost sublimely-pathetic. When [ think of their unpliable strength of purpose, their fidelity to their ideal, their faith in God and in themselves, I am inclined to say, with Donne, that

"We are scarce our father's shadows cast at noon."

Our past is well-nigh desolate of aesthetic stimulus. We have none, or next to none, of these aids to the imagination, of these coigns of vantage for the tendrils of memory or affection. Not one of our older buildings is venerable or will ever become so. Time refuses to console them. They all look as though they meant business and nothing more. And it is precisely because this college meant business-business of the gravest import-and did that business as thoroughly as it might with no means that were not niggardly, except an abundant purpose to do its best, it is precisely for this that we have gathered to-day. We come back hither from the experiences of a richer life as the son who has prospered returns to the household of his youth, to find in its very homeliness a pulse, if not of deeper, certainly of fonder emotion than any splendor could stir. "Dear old mother," we say, "How charming you are in your plain cap and the drab silk that has been turned again since we saw you! You were constantly forced to remind us that you could not afford to give us this and that which some other boys had, but your discipline and diet were wholesome, and you sent us forth into the world with the sound constitutions and healthy appetites that are bred of simple fare."

It is good for us to commemorate this homespun past of ours; good in these days of reckless and swaggering prosperity, to remind ourselves how poor our fathers were, and that we celebrate them because for themselves and their children they chose wisdom and understanding and the things that are of God rather than any other riches. This is our Founder's Day,

and we are come together to do honor to them all. First, to the Commonwealth, which laid our cornerstone; next, to the gentle and godly youth from whom we took our name-himself scarce more than a name— and with them to the countless throng of benefactors, rich and poor, who have built us up to what we are. We cannot do it better than in the familiar words:

"Let us now praise famous men and our fathers that begat us. The Lord hath wrought great glory by them through his great power from the beginning. Leaders of the people by their counsels, and, by their knowledge of learning, meet for the people; wise and eloquent in their instructions. There be of them that have left a name behind them that their praises might be reported. And some there be which have no memorial, who are perished as though they had never been. But these were merciful men whose righteousness hath not been forgotten. With their seed shall continually remain a good inheritance. Their seed standeth fast

and their children for their sakes."

This 250th anniversary of our college is not remarkable as commemorating any venerable length of days. There is hardly a country in Europe that cannot show us universities that were older than ours now is when ours was but a grammar school with Eaton as master. Bologna, Paris, Oxford were already famous schools when Dante visited them six hundred years ago. We are ancient, it is true, on our own continent, ancient even as compared with several German universities more renowned than we. It is not, then, pri

marily the longevity of our alma mater upon which we are gathered here to congratulate her and each other.

Kant says, somewhere, that as the record of human transactions accumulate, the memory of man will have room only for those of supreme cosmopolitical importance. Can we claim for the birthday we are keeping significance of so wide a bearing and so long a reach? If we may not do that, we may at least affirm, confidently, that the event it records and emphasizes is second in real import to none that has happened in this western hemisphere. The material growth of the colonies would have brought about their political separation from the mother country in the fulness of time, without that stain of blood which unhappily keeps its own memory green so long.

But the founding of the first English college here was what saved New England from becoming a mere geographical expression. It did more, for it ensured, and I believe was meant to ensure, our intellectual independence of the Old World. That independence has been long in coming, but it will come at last; and are not the names of the chiefest of those who have hastened its coming written on the roll of Harvard College?

I think this foundation of ours a quite unexampled thing. Surely never were the bases of such a structure as this has become, and was meant to be, laid by a community of men so poor, in circumstances so unprecedented, and under what seemed such sullen and averted stars. The colony was in danger of an Indian war, was in the throes of that Antinomian controversy which threatened its very existence, yet the lead

ers of opinion on both sides were united in the resolve that sound learning and an educated clergy should never cease from among them or their descendants in the Commonwealth they were building up.

In the midst of such fears and such tumults Harvard College was born; and not Marina herself had a more blusterous birth or a more chiding nativity. The provision of those men must have been as clear as their faith was steadfast. Well they knew and had laid to heart the wise man's precept, "Take fast hold of instruction; let her not go, for she is thy life."

There can be little question that the action of the general court received its impulse and direction from the clergy, men of eminent qualities and of well-deserved authority. Among the Massachusetts Bay colonists the proportion of ministers trained at Oxford and Cambridge was surprisingly large, and if we may trust the evidence of contemporary secular literature, such men as Higginson, Cotton, Wilson, Norton, Shephard, Bulkley, Davenport, to mention no more. were in learning, intelligence, and general accomplishment far above the average parson of the country and the church from which their conscience had driven them out.

The presence and influence of such men were of inestimable consequence to the fortunes of the colony. If they were narrow, it was as the sword of righteousness was narrow. If they had but one idea it was as the leader of a forlorn hope had but one and can have no other—namely, to do the duty that is laid on him and ask no questions.

Our Puritan ancestors have been misrepresented and