Sermon by A. S. Welch given at I.S.C. chapel The passage of scripture suggestive of the line of thought I propose to follow is found in the 38th chapter and 37th verse of the Psalms of David. It is a fact which is evident enough on reflection that no society, state, or government can be better than the individ- ual citizens that compose it. As no stream can rise higher than its source so none of the products of human thought, desire, or effort can surpass in excellence the sources from which they spring. Customs, laws, creeds, arts, industries are the sure outgrowths of human character and under the prin- ciple that "like begets like" they represent that character. All down the stream of history they reflect it as the mirror reflects the human face. What is called an epoch, an era, or more familiarly "the times" are with all their countless phenomena of thought and things only the expression of the inner life in outer forms, forms which in turn mold that life into conformity with their peculiar features. These facts present two interesting problems, namely, given the contemporary race to find the epoch, or given the epoch to find the race. Now the man we want will not only be the product of the times but he will, in great things and small, be an incentive to their better impulses. A rapid glance at their leading features will therefore suggest his leading char- acters and consequently let us note that the entire civilized world is In the very center of a transition period, a period characterized by the vast access of higher values which human life is taking on. The last half-century has ex- tended the boundaries of knowl- edge with such amazing ra- pidity as to defy comparison with the results of any entire epoch preceding it. It is an age which gathers from antiq- uity and learning and art and the whole wide realm of poss- ible achievement all that can stimulate to fruitful endeavor. Other ages have been marked off in history by some simple implement, superstition or dom- inant idea which had gained the ascendancy and stamped its character upon the race. Weapons of stone, bronze, iron and steel divided widely dif- ferent eras, and fetichism, or feudalism or absolutism claiming a heavenly origin threw upon the torpid centuries as they passed its melancholy shadow. But neither stone nor steel nor soli- tary superstition, nor any single despotic dogma whether in government or religion rules the decades of the century in which you live. This year of our Lord witnesses the well nigh u- Niversal sovereignty of indi- vidual thought and opinion. It is a year which occupies so to speak the division line from which we look backward on the retreating columns of a civiliza- tion that dignified dynasties and dwarfed peoples, and forward to a civilization which though still distant is yet distinct when the reign of intellectual and moral free- dom from the orient to the oc- cident shall mold humanity into the forms of a beauty that is transcendant a grandeur that is unspeakable. Even now it is reversing all the old maxims that enforced in religion and government an obedience that was without appeal. It subjects to the severest scrutiny every idea inherited from the past and gives it a place of honor if it be found helpful to hu- man welfare but if harmful buries it in a grave that knows no resurrection. In government it scouts the doctrine of divine rights and transfers authority from the monarch to the multi- tude. In religion it proclaims emancipation from the fetters of dogmatism and hands over all questions of creed or con- duct to the exclusive dominion of individual conscience. In morals it declares but one law the grand antidote to human ills - law uttered by lips at once human and divine "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Such are the offspring that the era of free thought has brought forth, such the results that have regenerated this old planet and made it glow and palpitate and thrill with new life. But we can scarcely get a full front-view of the features the times present un- less we gather under our vision the marvels that science has wrought. For he who surveys with calmness its complete phenomena will inevitably perceive that science has not only turned night to day in our great cities, but that it has illuminated with vivid light our whole mental and moral and social horizons. In revelation after revelation whose intense flashes are blind- ing to the weak it coupels the strong and truth loving think- er to make innumerable read- justments of moral and social creeds that are hoary with years. In social science it divulges the l ong concealed secret that a liberty to man unlimited save by the rights of his neighbor is the final result of a genuine social evolution. That no society can attain the highest condi- tion except under the enlighten- ed freedom of the citizen, a freedom whereby influence may safely supercede compul- sion and that production and commerce, education and industry and every transact- ion which supplies human ne- cessity can reach its final development only under the minimum of individual re- straint. But science itself the new revelation of God's meth- ods in nature addressed to man's intellect, throws its be- nignant light on the older Revelation of duty addressed to his heart. It adjourns sine die the discussion of all the metaphysical questions that for twenty centuries have borne no fruit, and incites even the- ology to take the first steps in a wholesome advancement. It opens new fountains of truth, coupels revision of spiritual levels, liberalizes and har- monizes religious thought and adds new emphasis to the declaration that the creator of the universe is the same yes- terday, today, and forever. With evidence that is without a flaw it proves that the be- ginning in which God creat- ed the heavens and the earth was a beginning whose remote- ness can be spanned only by billions on billions of years. From evidence that is equally clear it finds in England and Europe two races of men that were companions of the mam- moth, the musk-ox, the cave lion, and the great bear, dur- ing the glacial period, a pe- riod that stretches behind us more than a hundred thous- and years. And this vast an- tiquity of man it yet main- tains accords with the most genuine translation of the original Hebraic account, and that the creative act was no sudden fiat or impulse but a method of gradual up- building of organized life which extended over inconceiv- able ages during which that man or generation rose to the likeness and image of the creator who best obeyed his laws. Add to all these the startling fact that the physicist is now storing up electricity to make it super- cede the power of the old pro- pelling forces and thus rev- olutionize mechanics and that he has furthermore proven and proclaimed that in all the changes and motions of the universe the forces that drive them are never lost, that forces now acting have acted and will act forever without diminution, resting back, I verily believe, on God as their source and center and constituting simply the divine volitions. (And chemistry too no whit behind her sister sci- ence besides giving new impuls- es to all the arts of life has by the application of spectrum analysis to celestial physics determined the elementary structure of the sun and stars) In all the multi- tudinous branches of human research we are on the brink of discoveries still more thrill- ing. The battery is disclosing New forces in the subtle agent it evokes that will ultimately give to mo- tion, travel, and manufact- ure, a speed that will make water and wind and steam mere clumsy laggards. The microscope revealing the wonders of a world hither- to invisible has brought un- der vision the initial cell, ex- posed the processes of its re- production and growth, traced vitality back to the protoplasm from which it e- merges and is pressing hard upon that ultimate mystery the origin of life itself. How the heart expands and throbs under a strange phase of existence when a diminutive instrument of mere glass and metal becomes man's ministering angel and prophet of good. For de- tecting the constituents of all the poisons that destroy life it provides the sure specifics that prolong it. Bringing to light and announcing the por- tentous fact that the whole dire brood of infectious diseases are due to countless minute germs that infest air and water and reaching the blood through lungs or stomach burrow there- in and multiply without stint it suggests the utter destruction of these agents of death by sure disinfectants, and thus points to the time when man "Shall not be afraid of the terror by night, nor the arrow that flieth by day, nor the pestilence that walk- eth in darkness, nor the de- struction that wasteth at noonday". Now if turning from these triumphs of science we glance at this complete utilization in the arts how as- tonishing the vast array of facilities that have resulted to mitigate hu- man toil and multiply human conveniences and comforts. The locomotive, the telegraph, the electric light, the telephone, are so many means for bringing the great nations and great cities into contact, thus awakening and strengthening universal fra- ternity. These and the innu- merable machines that super- sede the human hand and quicken production through- out the globe have stimulated man to restless activity and transferred effort from mus- cle to mind. The whole social world glows with the heat of intense desires. On every side thought meets thought in rapid concussion, the light- nings of imagination play athwart the skies and opin- ion thunders in quick re- verberations all around the heavens, "Clamorque virum, clan- gorque turbarum." Now in this wide turmoil and fury of social and intellectual strife we want the man that shall preserve his balance, the man that shall not lose his head, the man who like Neptune of old can rise above the moral tumult and look down with a calm and placid face upon its surging billows. The clos- ing decades of the nineteenth century demand that kind of typical manhood that will not rock upon the waves like a rudderless bark carried hither and thither by the shifting winds, a manhood that though storms may howl and seas may roar holds its course steadily and in- trepidly towards the beacon of truth. We want the man who will not demolish or com- mit to devouring flames the whole structure of his faith be- cause science has revealed radical defects in some of its upper timbers. We want the man who scouts the wretched and shallow iconoclasm that would destroy religion by reason of outlying supersti- tions, fling away the bible because of old fallacious in- terpretations, invoke the horrors of anarchy by the assassins bullet on the plea that govern- ments are oppressive, annul marriage because a few u- nions are infelicitous, deny the right of private property and scatter it among the greedy multitude because some men are improvident and thriftless and therefore needy. We want the man who while he holds fast to those ultimate convictions bas- ed upon the very nature and needs of humanity, possesses nevertheless the calm, cool, liberal judgment that sep- arates the genuine from the spurious in human institu- tions and helps on their advancement instead of their destruction. But the man who finding by the light of social or natural science a few flaws in his social or spiritual creeds abandons the helm and floats helpless- ly from the Scylla of doubt over to the Charybdis of utter scepticism, who sees nowhere aught of good and so flounders in the slough of pessimism, does not in fact believe anything in the heav- ens above, or the earth be- neath or the waters under the earth, is precisely the man that in this junction of affairs we do not want. "Procul, oh procul este Profane." Far off, oh far off be the idle scoffer whose faith reach- es no farther than his eyesight, to whom there is nothing spir- itual in the universe, nothing beautiful on earth, and noth- ing sacred in heaven, for this world if committed to his guidance would surely go to wreck. But now depart- ing from generalities let us note specifically the traits of a character, which represent- ing the better tendencies of the times shall help them on to final fruition. The man whom the emergencies of the day demand must have sound and superabund- ant bodily health. In the days of old the dominating force was physical prowess, and the heroes that loomed up as the giants of history were men who with invincible dar- ing had muscles of iron and sinews of steel. Hercules who killed the Nemean lion and cleaned the Angaean stables was their typical deity, and the modern prize-fighter, bruiser and bully is his feeble and brutal renaissance. Now the ascendancy of mor- al and intellectual forces over the might that once made right has relieved the muscles and removed the strain to the nervous centers. The great law of use and disuse which modifies human and animal forms throughout the globe has diminished the broad chest and brawny arms and de- veloped the organ of thought. The head, once a mere or- namental knob, full of "bloody instructions" and surmount- ing a powerful frame to carry them out now rules sovereign of the ascendant over the low- er carnalities. The finest spec- imens of modern manhood are distinguished by the pres- ence of a massive brain, and the absence of the herculean brawn and all contrary instances that still exist are the mere surviv- als of an age whose spirit shall soon disappear and plague the earth no more. It is more than clear that a symmetrical though subor- dinate development of all the bodily organs under the dom- ination of a superior brain is the highest physical con- dition that man can reach. But this incessant over-draft on the nervous system which springs from the intense stimulation to which the modern thinker is subjected is working grad- ually remarkable changes in the sanitary state of the race. Under the principle that the part of a machine which takes the greatest strain is liable to break it has pro- duced a host of fearful mal- adies which are filling the cemeteries and peopling the madhouse. Neuralgia, par- alysis, dyspepsia, heart-dis- ease, insanity, are a few leading names in the spect- ral multitude. Visiting the United States Senate in 73 I counted in that body of dis- tinguished men four hopeless paralytics. How many were afflicted with atomic dyspep- sia, that disease which turns day into night, and work into torture, who can tell? "From one instance learn all." These illustrious workers fairly exemplified the fact that protracted mental toil un- relieved by salutary inter- vals of rest tells with fearful effect on all but iron consti- tutions. It invigorates the strong indeed, but it breaks down the weak, and the states- man, the scientist, the jurist, the philosopher, the inventor, the master workman who stand the strain and so de- rect and shape the tenden- cies of the age are shining examples of the survival of the fittest. Among these higher and hardier natures will the typical man we earnest- ly seek be found. Studying with deliberate coolness the dangers that threaten him, tranquil amid excitement, calm amid storms, know- ing full well the limits of his own strength and realizing that a sound mind in a sound body is the only basis of successful endeavor he maintains by a regularity of method in work which is free from excesses that full and har- monious play of all the vital forces within him that makes life a pleasure and labor a constant exhiliration. Alive to the fact that a complete life time of enlightened labor brings far larger results than shorter periods of fitful immod- erate effort he avoids the occa- sions which crowd many days work into one, and thus his clear brain gathers and pre- serves a surplus of vitality that can meet an emergency without the exhaustion of strength which craves perni- cious stimulants instead of the day's food and the nights repose. His genius lies in a capacity for rapid effective work. It is a genius which has its roots in a healthy digestion, a quick circulation, and a powerful nervous system. Now multiply this typical man by the million and put him into all the places of trust and influence, into the pulpit, the recitation room, the editor's chair. Let him act as legislator, pub- lic teacher, engineer, leading farmer, or master mechanic, and this world's enterprises would throb with an im- pulse unfelt before. Further the model man the times demand is not an idler. He is the farthest possible from kinship with the wandering tramp whose life business is to prospect for the day's food. While he dodges the day's work. He believes thor- oughly in the doctrine of equivalents in sale and pur- chase. Paying as he goes he stands aloof from all dead- headism whether in business or politics and views with in- stinctive loathing the swarm of human leeches that gorge them- selves on the contents of other mens veins. He feels to the very center, the whole vast impulse that science has giv- en to industry and is wholly alive to the fact that it has changed the entire aspect of life and labor. He knows that all life's values lie in the line of healthy activity and that the dawdling and put- tering born of intellectual tor- por are akin to death. Out of the countless departments of effort he selects a pursuit that will chime with his per- sonal endowments and stimulate his mental growth, and then bends all his energies, his education, study, time, zeal, and unwearied earn- estness to achieve success. Perhaps he avoids those profess- ions which are so overcrowded that the growing enthusiast must feed for half a life time on the crumbs of business that fall from the table of the master workers, and wherein by reas- on of strong competition suc- cess crowns only the few who are instances of a survival of the fittest. Be that as it may our pattern man, emerg- ing from boyhood and try- ing his early wings in a flight from the paternal nest, will enter upon no special life work without having con- quered broadly and mi- nutely the sciences on which it rests, and then giving to its business such exclusive devotion as to gain and hold therein the rank of a master. Why should I cite the innumerable instances of failure in a chosen voca- tion from perpetual dabbling with outside matters. I knew a citizen, not a thous- and miles distance, nor a century back who held at once the offices of a grocer, a preacher, and a veterinary physician without the diplo- ma. The consequence was his customers fled, his pa- tients died and his flock suffered the extremes of spir- itual starvation, (and an- other consequence is that the places that once knew him will know him no more for- ever.) Just here comes forcibly in the ancient saw that "what- ever is worth doing at all is worth doing well." It happens not seldom that the faithful- ness with which some simple task is done becomes the sol- id stepping stone by which youth mounts upward to higher trusts. (That American history is rife with kindred examples I call to witness the early life of that great man over whose new made grave old party hostilities vanish and North and South clasp hands in amity.) But this personal absorption in a chosen pur- suit should never beget that narrowness which ignores the duties of the citizen and the man. Man is everywhere greater than his work, and he suffers degredation whenever he permits that work to dwarf his intellect or petri- fy his heart. Be you farmer, physician, engineer, or jur- ist, fail not to master those wider truths that underlie society and ensure its prog- ress (and waste no time in bewailing the possible fact that the class to which you belong is neglected in the pub lic councils, for your tears will be shed in vain if there be no men in it who are fitted to represent publicly its interests) and remem- ber that if a superior dignity attaches to any calling, it springs only from the superior value of its products to the world, and he who does not know that the modern industries are now the foremost incentives to civili- zation knows little of the plan- et he lives on. "Honor and fame from no condition rise, act well thy part. There all the honor lies." The man we want will moreover possess broad re- sponsive sympathies for all his fellows and especially for the rising generation. First because the genuineness of his own character is measured by the degree in which benevolence ha- bitually triumphs over the promptings of selfish desires. Second, because it is by the predominance of sympathy that, other things being equal, the world gets on towards the at- tainment of a higher condition, and third, because the young especially need by reason of the craving of passion and the lack of maturer judgment the influence of a judicious unfailing kindness to mold them into specimens of the men we want. It requires indeed no prophets vision to perceive that not only the innumerable minor ills but the great moral catas- trophes to which this earth is liable would find their anti- dote in the universal prevalence of that love which Jesus Christ announced eighteen centuries ago as the only salvation of the world. We need the man who will help quicken the wide current of sympathy which now sets strongly tow- ards the higher life, the man who whether as parent, teacher, cit- izen or philanthropist feels per- petually the throbbings of a heart that glows with a love which encircles the race. We call for him who is capable of forgiving personal and public wrongs, capable of pitying the frailties which even in the best human pedi- grees are rooted in barbarism, capable of considering in miti- gation of human errors that the remote progenitor of the best man on earth was a bloodthirsty savage, that every child passes through the same phases of character from in- fancy to manhood, which the human race has traversed in rising from primitive ferocity to civilization, and that the son's perversities which the father corrects are too often derived by inheritance from the father himself. The man who knows and feels to the heart's core all the promptings of love and all the extenuations of wrong is the man we want. The times demand him. The future beckons him, and soci- ety invokes his presence with uplifted hands. But from him whose frozen heart knows no thrill of affection, from him who lacking the softer instincts relies on the rod alone to up- hold inflexible laws in the house or school, from the men who finds no reformatory a- gencies but the jail and the whipping post, no safeguard to society but the halter, from him whose life is given over to implacable resentments, who broods over a host of bit- ter hatreds until they hatch into venomous reptiles, from all these who are the clogs to moral progress and the dis- pair of civilization, Good Lord deliver us. For every such pat- tern of antique savagery is a perpetual anachronism. He was dug up from the gloom of feudalism, galvanized into life, and hurled forward through the intervening centu- ries to light upon our times and foil their brighter hopes. Let him back to sleep in his kindred darkness and trouble the earth no more. But the man we seek is deeply interested and thor- oughly active in political af- fairs. He is an earnest politic- ian but he utterly loathes in every fibre the baser meanings which the term, originally pure has in later years been made to express. For not another word can be found between the lids of Webster which has been so perverted to disrep- utable uses, so dragged in the slough of calumny, so strain- ed and befouled by tricks and treachery as that unfortunate word. Once designating those higher principles by which a nation is governed, its safety guarded, its growth quicken- ed, its rights secured, the word politics stood the peer of the loftiest noun in the English tongue. Now dragged from its pedestal it is forced to cov- er with its servile meaning all the bad scheming and a- bominable tactics used in the strife which springs from an insatiable greed for office. ("But yesterday this word of lofty uses might have stood against the world. Now lies it low, and none so poor to do it reverence.") Now the well rounded, large souled citizen the political emergency demands is a poli- tician in the earlier and no- bler sense. He has rescued this bruised and battered word from the mire in which it wallowed, cleansed its stains with moral dis- infectants and adopted it as his own. Under its old significance he comes to resuscitate the in- stinct of patriotism throughout the land. He comes to restore to the caucus its honesty of pur- pose, to the canvas its free and manly utterance, to the polls their spotless purity. He comes with a resistless following to purify our civil service and con- sume to ashes the machines of faction. He comes to proclaim in thunder tones the gospel of individual supremacy, guid- ed by intelligence unbiased by passion as the only secure basis of a free ballot and a free government. He comes to pro- claim as with the blast of the trumpet that whenever ignorance whether from in- digenous growth or foreign influx shall control the polls that moment the days of this republic are numbered. Let him come with a throng of kindred souls that shall hide the horizon for his advent will bring relief in the hour of our sorest need. For though our institutions are founded on the solid rock of equal rights the evils that loom up all around the political skies to threaten their perpetuity are putting on colossal propor- tions. The immigration from Europe and China that crowds in countless numbers on the Atlantic and Pacific shores overtaxes our power of politi- cal assimilation. Stupendous strikes organized at intervals and rising in rapid success- ion on the great thorough- fares wherein enfuriated mobs destroy life and property with- out restraint attest the weak- ness of our military system. Local raids for private pillage and mur- der on the railways of Missou- ri, and vast schemes for pub- lic plunder as in the star route villainy organized with con- summate skill and daring, are alike successful. Crime stalks forth and bares its brazen front in the light of noonday, and justice tram- meled by judicial delays follows its atrocities so tar- dily that Judge Lynch, gather- ing his tumultuous legions administers a quick retri- bution and defies the law. Gigantic monopoly which would gather into its insa- tiate maw all the values that spring from human toil, and a many headed com- munism that would scatter them to the winds of heaven are grappling in mortal combat not only in America but throughout the world, and since the triumph of either would be death to national prosperity let us pray that the battle may be equal and long maintained. Nor does the work- ing of our political system itself exhibit to the vigilant patriot less signs of peril. Our constitution is by a sin- gular oversight lacking in the remedy for a possible crisis which if it comes upon us will explode the central government with volcanic force. Our territorial extent is so vast as to embrace sect- ions which having conflict- ing interests are consequent- ly wanting in the common sympathy that constitutes national strength and the shot-gun policy with its at- tending outrages, which has given to the minority the per- manent rule is one of the a- Bominable fruits. Every gener- al election agitates society to its very center, stirs up ex- citements so intense as to cloud individual judgment, and party strife engenders antag- onisms so bitter as to end only with life. That pernicious practice, now almost univer- sal in which the man seeks the office instead of the office the man, and the odious sys- tem of spoils by which indi- vidual help to place is pur- chased and paid for by pub- lic patronage subsequently bestowed is driving men of eminent fitness and modest merit from the public service and delivering the honors that are rightfully theirs over to the highest bidders. And if one outside the struggle of faction has attained the highest exaltation by force of genius alone a swarm of hungry mendicants for place settle upon him like vultures upon the carcass. And when the great social caldron seethes and boils from the heat of national passion it throws up to the surface that scum of humanity out of which spring calumny and assassination. Calumny by which every conspicu- ous statesman has been ass- ailed, assassination by which two of the noblest have perished. But young gentlemen and ladies these outbursts all then aspects of evil in the present are when we reach their full sig- nificance only the characteristics of a transition period which shall surely end in the phases of a higher social evolution. Phases wherein a selfish and unscrupulous greed will yield to the ascendancy of a purer living patriotism. In the very nature of things and in the councils of heaven it is settled that error is evanescent, that hatred and wrong shall perish while through the eternal years of God truth and love shall survive. In the stability of that divine government that un- derlies the endless mutations of earthly things it is the final order that out of the vague and indefinite shall evolve the concrete and perfect, that light shall spring out of dark- ness, fact out of fiction, law out of anarchy, life out of death and that the innumerable forces of the uni- verse shall at last work together for the final good of God's creatures. Join we those benign agen- cies that strive without ceasing to compass such lofty results. Let us hate error, deceit, falsehood, treachery, oppression, and all the aspects of wrong. Let us love truth, justice, integri- ty and right, and practice these in all our dealings with such rigid exactness that they shall finally mold our characters into forms that shall furnish to the world the grandest examples of the man we want. In Mary B. Welch handwriting