Excerpt from Baccalaureate Sermon, and Oration and Poem: Class of 1875

Have we not had experience of this power in our recent his tory? When the news of Fort Sumter flashed through the land, there were in these halls those who seemed to their teachers mere boys, who started at once into vigorous manhood, grew by gradations more rapid than we could trace into high places of command, sought posts of the most perilous service, won ever green laurels, many, alas! Only to deck their graves, - while those who survived achieved for themselves a culture for which twice the term of peaceful civic life would have been inadequate. We had one with us at our last Commencement, the mere muti lated trunk of a man, whose after-dinner speech, with the fervor and fire of youth, which his maimed and suffering life had not chilled or dimmed, had a depth of prescient wisdom which would have found fit utterance from the lips of the elders in the gravest councils of the nation. Indeed, in none of her sons can our University take a more honest pride than in those who gained in war the virtues and endowments that can best adorn and fruc tify the era of restored peace and renewed prosperity.

If we could only view them aright, there are now for our re public emergencies, perils intense though insidious, a present to be spurned, a future to be striven for, which ought to awaken the patriotic feeling of our young men, and to urge them on to early maturity for efficient public service. I avail myself of the pres ent as a fit opportunity to Speak of the claims of our country on her educated men. Our imminent dangers are from popular ignorance, financial folly, political corruption, and religious lati tudinarianism and indifference. If I can only arouse in those of whom we to-day take leave a sense of the responsibility whichrests upon them as to these sources of evil, I am sure that I shall not have spoken in vain as regards the public and even the national well-being; for, though a hundred and fifty right minded youth seem of no account or weight among the millions of our people, there may be among them single minds and voices that shall make themselves felt and heard through the whole length and breadth of the land, as there were, a hundred years ago, individual young men fresh from our halls, but for whom certain most momentous passages of our history would have remained unwritten.

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