SERMON. ECCLESIASTES, 11. 13. I SAW THAT WISDOM EXCELLETH FOLLY, AS FAR AS LIGHT EXCELLETH DARKNESS. AFTER I last addressed you in this place, my friends, it occurred to me to presume upon the patience with which I had been listened to, to ask your attention, when next we should meet, to a subject which naturally connects itself with what was then under our notice.* I trust that on the distant grave-stone of one of those whom then we commemorated, is to be inscribed, among his other titles to honorable remembrance, that he was a worthy son of Harvard College. Over the other no such record can be graven. Not the green turf, -the shrine of the bereft heart's daily pilgrimage,— closed over his form, but the green wave, which in its sullen, desolate sequestration from man and his habitations, his uses, his works, and his fortunes, refuses to bear so much as a trace of human fates or feelings. Yet none the less for this, does the thought *See Appendix: of him too associate itself with the subject I propose, in the minds of those, to whom, whatever they witnessed of worth in him, was revealed in the relation of fellow-students in this place. I invite you to accompany me in some consideration of the obligations, which the wisdom we are all inclined to extol, imposes on those who have recourse to her for guidance, in meeting the claims of that situation. Besides the duties common to men, my hearers, we are all bound to such, as are incident to relations which we severally sustain. The duties of the relation alluded to, are capable of being defined; and though they are, of course, essentially the same, which are incumbent on those who resort to other places of instruction, yet I would ask, for the greater simplicity's sake, and because I am to address none but members of this institution, to be allowed to pursue the subject in the limited form in which it has been stated. I. And, first, guided by the text, which contrasts the wisdom it extols, with folly, I would treat the subject, in a few words, negatively, as was the manner of the old preachers, showing, in a few particulars, what a worthy student of this institution is not. 1. He is not a profligate. Apart from other considerations, to which I may directly have occasion to refer in a different connexion, he deems too highly of the rights of the mind, to be willing to submit his to the odious and despicable slavery of appetite. If any are to drudge in that ignoble, hard, and all unrewarded service, he thinks it should be such as have not had his opportunities to acquire a reverence for the mind which they so profane, - -a fit sense of its dignity, and of the dignity of its proper pursuits. Having had some enjoyment of the vigor of a clear, sound reason, he has no notion of becoming a driveller, quite so soon, as licentious practices might make him. Having seen some charms in the lights which the imagination pours, he has no idea of clouding that purely radiant sun within him, with the fat, foul fumes of intemperate indulgence. Having obtained some relish for the satisfactions of a taste, Feelingly alive To each fine impulse, a discerning sense Of decent and sublime,' he does not mean that the grand and beautiful in nature and art, when they pass before his vision, shall be presented to overplied, and obtuse, and vulgarized perceptions, as incapable of catching their more delicate lineaments, as a leaden surface would be of taking the nicer touches of the graver's art. He has some apprehension of the kind of work, which a calm, cheerful self-reliance was intended to do in the world; and he will not easily be won to adopt prematurely in its place, the timid, resourceless, nervous debility, which, — while, varied with spasms of rashness as little respectable, it is a temper which a libertine youth is making haste to form, is never excusable, but when it is witnessed in a palsied age. In taking such just and manly views, he finds himself here, I am sure, in very well accredited and numerous company. Without, I |